How to switch to the gallery grid in Microsoft Teams?

Here’s a question from Dana:

I work as a finance controller for a multinational corporation with many offices in overseas countries. With the freeze on business travel, we now often participate on Microsoft Teams meetings on a periodic basis and are definitely encouraged to turn on our video cameras during the meeting, which is good in my opinion . But here’s the problem i have: whenever the meeting hosts a handful of participants is easy to see everyone’s incoming video. However, when we meet the entire group, roundabout 25 people, i can’ get to see everyone’s camera and basically can view just the speaker and 8 additional people. I am pretty sure that there is a way to see all the meeting participants in Teams, but can’t figure out how. Any help is very appreciated.

Enabling the Microsoft Team large gallery grid mode

Thanks for the question. Kindly proceed as following:

  • Open your Microsoft Teams desktop app.
  • From your calendar, access your meeting by clicking the link provided by the meeting host. You can obviously access the meeting from Outlook desktop, Outlook web, GMail or a link sent to you using the Teams chat.
  • Once in your meeting, hit the More actions button to open your Meeting actions dialog (step 1 below).
  • Now, kindly go ahead and select the large gallery view or the pretty nice together mode to display the incoming video image from all the meeting participants (step 2 below).
  • At this point you might as well consider changing your Teams background picture (step 3 above – optional)
  • Once you are done, go ahead and hit the More actions button (…) to close the dialog.

Why the Large Gallery button is greyed out?

You might have noticed that in the screenshot above the Large Gallery button is not greyed out and not working. Reason being that the meeting had less than 9 participants. If that’s the case you can use only the default gallery mode.

Turn off the gallery grid

You can obviously turn off the large gallery view using the More actions dialog. Simply open the Dialog and then move the the default grid and / or pick your preferred content view mode : Focus on content, Gallery on top etc’.

Additional Learning