Slack Pro Tips

Make your daily work life more enjoyable and productive with these quick “I didn’t know you could do that” Slack Pro Tips.

Original photo by Donnie Rosie on Unsplash

If you’re anything like me, when you’re at the office, you live, breathe, and die by Slack. It’s become such a part of many of our work lives, that on the rare occasion when it does go down, we panic and the world seems to come to a screeching halt.

But don’t fret. Slack is alive an well, and we’re here to discuss happier times.

In this article, I’d like to share a few Pro Tips that I’ve picked up along the way — many of which I’ve tweeted, or dropped in the #random channel for my colleagues at work to use — but I’ve collected them and presented them here for you to use.

Declutter your sidebar

We have a large organization. And as such, I am subscribed to a lot of channels. So many, in fact, that I have to scroll through them on my sidebar. Slack has a setting that will only show channels in your sidebar if there is an unread message, or if you have it starred.

Go to Preferences, Sidebar and select “unreads and starred conversations” like this.

Now your sidebar will only show you what’s important.

You can now post image in threads!

Not so much of a Pro Tip, but more of a “Hey. Did you know that you can now post images in threads!” It’s something that’s been missing from Slack for some time and it finally appeared sometime last week and I couldn’t be happier.

Post /giphy in threads

Even though you can post images directly in a thread, unfortunately, you can’t post /giphy images yet. However, there is a workaround.

1. Go to your “me” channel.
2. Find your /giphy as you normally would.
3. Hover over the giphy and click on the ... menu.
4. Select “Copy link”
5. Paste the link in the thread.

Giphy text

And speaking of /giphy, you do know about /giphy #echo, right? It’s a quick way to post text that will be sure to get noticed. It creates a large animated image with whatever text you wish to convey.

For example, you could use /giphy #echo slack pro tips to produce something like this. The font and animation are chosen at random, but you can cycle through until you find one that you like.

Add misspellings of your name

A nice feature of Slack is that you can be notified when someone simply types your name, even if they don’t specifically @ you. For commonly spelled names, this isn’t a problem.

“I’m going to lunch with Bob. Would anyone else like to join me?”

If you were Bob, you would get a notification.

But what if your name were, I don’t know, Donavon. People misspell my name all the time in all sorts of ways.

Fortunately, Slack has a way to notify you whenever certain keywords are used. I’ve used this to add various misspellings of my name, and even my initials.

Now if someone says:

I learned a cool Slack Pro Tip from donovan

I’m sent a notification. (I like to know when people are talking about me)

Search within a channel

If you enter a search term on the search bar, it will search all of Slack. But did you know that you can search within a specific channel? And that there is a cool shortcut to do so?

When you are in a channel or direct message, instead of clicking in the search bar, press Cmd-F instead. Slack will pre-populate the search box with the name of the channel to search.

Dealing with @here and @channel abusers

This is my favorite Pro Tip of all. Many of you already know what I’m referring to, but let me explain.

Slack has two built-in groups that will notify everyone who is here (i.e. online) or all members of a channel, but it should be used almost as a 911 type of I NEED HELP NOW, not for casual questions.

@here Check out this article on the many uses for yeast flakes

This sends EVERYONE who is online a notification. This interrupts their workflow for something trivial.

It’s essentially the equivalent of going up to each person in the company, no matter what they are doing at the time, tapping them on the shoulder and saying “Check out this article on the many uses for yeast flakes”. You would never do such a thing, so what gives you the right in Slack?

I’ve devised a clever way to gently remind them that this is a no-no and it uses a slackbot response to do so.

1. First, create a message in a public channel (maybe in #random) that says the following (click on “view raw”, select text, then paste into Slack).

2. Then get a link to the message (click the ... on the message and then Copy Link).

3. Click on the little down chevron next to your workspace name and select Customize Slack.

4. Once your browser opens, Click on the second tab labeled Slackbot.

5. Add a new Slackbot response

6. In the “when someone says..” field, enter !here, !channel

7. Paste the URL from step 2 above in the “slackbot responds” field.

Now, whenever you or anyone in the organization, witnesses @here or @channel abuse, all you have to do is type !here or !channel and Slackbot will politely provide them with a lesson on Slack Etiquette.

Conclusion

So there you go. Now you can use Slack like a pro.

I also write for the American Express Technology Blog. Check out my other works and the works of my talented co-workers at americanexpress.io. You can also follow me on Twitter.