How to use Slack – Slack Beginner Tutorial!

Are you a new employee in your organization? Do you want to know to learn how to use Slack to catch up with your organization? Let’s make it easy for you. We are here to provide you full-fledged tutorial about how to use Slack.

Slack is a collaboration hub that connects your organization — all the pieces and the people — so you can get things done in a more easier and faster way. Slack brings the right information and people of your organization together in one place. It’s one of the best platform to communicate efficiently, stay connected and get things done faster. Using Slack, you can collaborate with others online just like you would do in person.

First let us understand the basics of Slack, it’s components and all:

Your workspace

A workspace is a shared hub where members can communicate and collaborate.Typically, smaller to medium sized companies will share one workspace. Within your workspace, you’ll have access to all the other pieces that make your work hum along. Larger enterprises will have an Enterprise Grid organization made up of multiple interconnected workspaces. Enterprise Grid organization was built to make it possible for all the business units of larger company/organization to have different workspaces but all those workspaces are interconnected with each other in order to provide access to each part of work of one business unit to another business unit within the organization.

The pieces

To understand how Slack really works, you should know how all the pieces fit together. We’ll cover channels, messages, search, and notifications.

Given below is a snapshot of what a typical Slack workspace looks like:

The plans

For small companies or teams that prefer to use a single workspace, there are three pricing plans that they can choose from which are : Free, Standard, or Plus.

For larger companies, the Enterprise Grid plan brings multiple workspaces into a single, connected organization.

Channels

There are different channels which make up the Slack which is typically a single place for messaging, tools, and files. Members of Slack communicate with other members through these channels. Channels can be organized around anything such as departments, projects, or even office locations. You can create as many channels as you need in Slack. By default, every workspace starts with two channels : a #general channel and a #random channel.

Channel types

There are generally three types of Channels in Slack:

Public Channels

Public channels are open to your entire workspace, this is, messages are searchable by all members of the workspace.
A public channel has a # hashtag icon in its name.

Private Channels

Private channels as the name suggest, are not open to your entire workspace which means you have to get invitation from the channel to see the messages and get involved in the channel’s discussion..
A private channel has a lock icon in its name.

Shared Channels (beta)

Two unique workspaces are connected by Shared channels and they are great place where you can communicate with external contacts.
A shared channel has a double diamond icon in its name.

Messages

In order to communicate in Slack, you can share a message in a channel, or send someone a direct message (DM) as in Instagram. Generally Slack works best when the communication takes place in public channels then via Direct Message. Direct Message are best for quick and ad-hoc conversation when you need to quickly chat and check-in with your teammates.

Search

Search in Slack provide you the way to narrow down and find what you need without having to scroll down and up continuously. There is a search field in the upper-right corner of Slack. Simply type a word or phrase about the thing you want to search in the search box to start looking.

Notifications

Notifications in Slack is the way to make it’s user see the items that needs their attention.You can choose to receive notifications on your desktop, your mobile device, or by email. Notifications can even be customized by channel, so you can prioritize where your attention goes or the manner you get the notification.

Installing Slack

You can download Slack’s desktop and mobile apps so you can stay signed in to multiple workspaces, have more control over notifications, and stay in sync even when you’re on the move. You can download Slack apps from slack.com/downloads. It is available for both Android and iOS versions. It requires iOS 10 or later and Android 4.4 or later.

Sign In to Slack

You can sign in to your Slack account in two ways:

Sign in from your Slack URL, using your email address and password.
Find your workspace, then sign in automatically, using only your email address.

Note: Your workspace’s Slack URL is usually the name of your workspace followed by .slack.com — it will look something like yourcompany.slack.com. It is provided by your organization/company. When you are the employee, you are given your workspace’s Slack URL. You just need to sign in to Slack using that URL or your email address is made associated with the workspaces by your company.

To sign in from your Slack URL in iOS:

Open the Slack app.
First enter your Slack URL, then click Continue. If you’re already signed in to another Slack workspace, click the plus icon in the far left sidebar to add another workspace.
Enter your sign-in email address, then click Continue.
Enter your password and tick the box next to Keep me signed in, if you’d like to. Then, click Sign in.Or, you can click Email Me a Magic Link and check your email! When the email arrives, click the Sign in to Slack button. The link expires in 24 hours and can only be used to sign in once.

To sign in from your Slack URL in Android:

Firstly, open the Slack app.
Tap on Sign in.
Tap on “Email me a magic link”.
Then, enter your email address.
Tap on “Open an email app”
On your mail lists, locate and open your confirmation email from Slack. Tap Confirm Email Address to open the app.
Tap Add next to the workspaces that you want to sign into.If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll see the workspaces you’re eligible to join. Click Join workspace to create an account.If no existing workspaces and no pending invitations are associated with this email, you can tap either Create a new Slack workspace or Try another email address.

To sign in by finding your Workspace:

Go to the page : slack.com/get-started.
Click on “Find your Slack worspace”. Next up you will get the following page in your screen:
Enter your email address in the space shown above. Your email address should be associated with the worskspace you are trying to search for.
You will get the mail from Slack, providing you with the link to access your workspace. Click on the link and you are automatically signed in to your Slack account.

How to Create a New Slack Workspace:

In Desktop:

Visit the workspace creation page: slack.com/create.
Enter your email address. Make sure it is the email you can access.
Slack will send a confirmation code to the email address you entered. Keep an eye on your inbox and get the code.
When the email arrives and you find out the confirmation code, enter your confirmation code to continue.
You’ll have a chance to select a display name, password, and workspace name. Follow the directions given on each page that is displayed on your screen.

In iOS:

Tap to open the Slack app on your phone.
Tap on Get started.
Next is to enter your email address.
On the same mobile device, you should check your email, find the email from Slack on your inbox and tap Confirm Email Address to return to the Slack app.
Click Create a new workspace.
Enter the name of your Slack workspace.
Create the workspace’s Slack URL. Try something like company-name.slack.com.
Create a display name and password.

In Android: The process is same as that of iOS. Follow the steps mentioned above.

How to Invite New Members to Your Workspace

Workspace Owners and Admins can invite new people to their workspace, and they can also allow their members (excluding guests) to send invitations. On the Free plan, members are able to send invitations by default whereas on paid plans, this permission must be enabled by a Workspace Owner or Admin.

There are a few ways to give invitation to other people to join your workspace as mentioned below:

You can email an invitation to join your Slack workspace to one person or several people at once.
You can share a custom invite link of your workspace to others.
You can allow people to sign up using their email address to join your workspace.

Hence, we have discussed how to create a workspace if you are the admin of your company as well as how to sign in to the workspace of your organization or company by using the Slack URL provided by your company or your email address.