How to Pop-Out Chat and Video Window in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft continues to regularly add new functionality to the Teams application and often listens to user requests. One of those much-demanded features is the chat and video pop-up, which made its way through an update. I bet you would like to know everything about it. Right now Microsoft is phasing out, so be patient if you haven’t received it already.

I will guide you through the process on different platforms and steps on how to use it. You can also use it in certain use cases.

Let’s start.

Chat window in the Teams Desktop app

It will work on desktop applications for Windows and macOS. Sorry, Linux users. The interface is largely consistent across all platforms. Launch the Teams app, start a conversation with any member of the team as you always do, and there are several ways to bring up a chat window.

Click on the newly added universal “square with outward arrow” icon in the upper right corner of the chat window. It should say “Pop out chat” when you hover your mouse over it. You can also double-click the avatar of the user or group chat for this. Do you like to give orders? Try /pop to bring up a chat window.

You will not see any confirmation dialog for this action and it saves you time. The chat should open in a new window and allow you to explore or use other tabs in Microsoft Teams.

The contextual function works on both simple and group chat windows. You can drag the window where you want and resize it to your liking. Do you chat with several people in separate chats? Now you can bring up all the chat windows at the same time.

Chat window in Teams web and mobile apps

I don’t need to share the steps of mobile and web apps. Indeed, the contextual function is not available on smartphone applications. The reason could be that smartphones have small screens. There is not enough screen space for windows to appear.

Benefits of the Instant Chat Window

The Microsoft Teams application contains several features. It is a communication and collaboration application with parameters that help the same thing. As such, users and team members use it to chat, call and work on various other things. Some examples may work on a file from the Office 365 application suite, a third-party application, a PDF file that you have just downloaded, etc.

A chat or video / audio call window occupies the entire screen, making it difficult for participants to see or access anything else. How can you discuss a presentation or work / edit a file during the call?

Deleting a chat or call window allows you to continue communicating in a separate window while continuing to work on this Word document. It’s a feature Microsoft should have released long before, but I’m glad they listened to the comments.

Can you bring up other tabs

As noted above, there are many other tabs we can create in Microsoft Teams. Can we also bring up these tabs? Unfortunately, the answer is no. You can only bring up chat windows. Video and audio calls are treated differently, which I will discuss in the next point.

Some of you may also want to bring up tabs. For example, you are working on two separate documents in two tabs. Instead of clicking on the tabs to go back and forth, you can bring up a tab and use the keyboard shortcut Alt + Tab to switch between open windows. This would save a lot of time and make it practical.

Whichever tab you select, clicking the button in the popup chat window will only exit that chat window. It doesn’t work with tabs