How to mute Microsoft Teams meetings audio?

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Here’s a question from Cynthia:

Just started to work with a customer that uses Microsoft Teams for their meetings. Unfortunately, the meetings held during the afternoon typically start late, so if possible i would be happy to enter the meeting as a participant with my audio muted, so i can continue to discuss with my colleagues until my customer management joins the meeting. Is it possible to mute my Teams meeting on entry, or muting my meeting sound is only possible during the meeting itself?

Muting Teams meetings and calls sound

You can easily turn off your computer audio before joining your call so you are not audible to the other call participants. Please proceed as following to ensure Teams is muted once you get into a call:

  • Join your Microsoft Teams meeting from your calendar invite or Channel or Chat.
  • The Audio and Video settings dialog will come up.
  • By default, your Microphone will be enabled. Go ahead and hit the slider next to the Microphone icon to mute your mic .
  • Next hit the Join now button to go into your meeting.
  • Once everyone joins, you can easily unmute yourself by hitting Unmute in your Teams meetings controls, or using the keyboard as described in the next section.

Muting your meeting using the keyboard

You are able to use a handy shortcut in order to mute (or unmute) your meeting sounds. Just go ahead and hit CTRL+Shift+M – that will do the trick.

Can you mute a Teams chat?

Sometimes you might want to turn off notifications from a chat conversation, specially if presenting or attending an important call. You can easily stop chat notifications right from the Chat application in Teams. Just hit the More Options button (…) and hit Mute. You can easily restore your notifications by hitting the Unmute button once you avail again.

Turning off Teams notifications

Readers have asked how to completely turn off desktop Teams notifications popping in the right hand side of your task bar. We have a detailed resource on muting Teams desktop alerts that goes in details into the required settings to reduce noise from Teams.