How to attach a document to a Microsoft Teams meeting invitation?

by

Here’s a question from Rosa:

I often use the Microsoft Teams calendar to schedule our recurrent meetings. Typically i send our all required information in the invitation body text, but today i wanted to attach a file. To my surprise i haven’t found any button that will allow me to insert and attach an Excel file spreadsheet and a Microsoft Word document to my Teams meeting invite, so that the invitees can review the meeting material and be better prepared for the meeting. Any ideas on how to proceed?

Insert File attachment to Teams Calendar appointments

Thanks for your question. You are able to proceed in three different ways.

  • Storing your files in a Microsoft Teams channel and manually posting a link into your meeting invites.
  • Storing your files in OneDrive or other file sharing service like Dropbox, Google Drive etc’ and posting a link.
  • Use Microsoft Outlook to send your meeting invitation and attach files from your local or network drive as required.

In today’s tutorial we’ll focus in depth on the first option.

Sending files from your channel as attachments

Create links to file attachments

  • Open Microsoft Teams.
  • Hit the Teams icon on your left hand side App bar.
  • Use your Filter to search for your relevant Team and navigate to your Channel.
  • Hit the Files tab in your header.
  • Find the file/s you would like to attach.
  • Hit the ellipsis (…) icon in the right hand side and hit Copy link.
  • If you would like to attach multiple files, you’ll need to go through the last couple steps as needed, just paste the link text into a text file so you can later on paste the links into your Teams invite.

Insert your Attachment link into your Teams meeting

  • Once done, from the App bar, open your Calendar app.
  • Navigate to the relevant day and time for your meeting.
  • Double click to open your Meeting dialog
  • Add your meeting details as needed.
  • In the meeting body toolbar, hit the link icon
  • Provide a name to your Attachment and paste the file link that you have obtained in the previous section.
  • Note: Make sure to repeat this step as needed.
  • Hit Insert.
  • You’ll notice the new attachment in your meeting text section
  • In the upper right hand side hit Send; to send your meeting request.

View Teams meeting attachments

If you have proceeded as noted in the previous sections, you will see links to your file attachments in your meeting invite. You can access the meeting attachments by hitting those hyperlinks. In case that you don’t have permissions to view the attachments, contact the meeting organizer.

Attaching Teams files to email messages

If you would like to attach files into outgoing emails sent in Gmail, Outlook or other email client, you should simply obtain the link to the file and then simply copy it into your email body text.

  • In the previous section of this tutorial, we learnt how to create a link to your Teams files in your Microsoft Teams file folders. Once you have the link, copy it into your clipboard (Ctrl+C).
  • Open Outlook desktop/ web, GMail or other email client.
  • Paste the link to your Teams file into the email.
  • Send your email.

Note: you might need to adjust file sharing permissions in Teams to authorize the email recipient to access the files you are sharing.

Sharing Excel files in a Teams meeting

Readers asked specifically on how to share Excel files on Teams. There are multiple ways to accomplish that:

  1. Upload your Excel file to Teams and share the link to the file in your meeting invite. This also applies to the case that your file is stored in OneDrive (Personal or Business).
  2. You can share your Excel as a new Conversation in your Teams Posts tab.
  3. While in the meeting, you can easily upload a file (Excel or other) via the meeting chat.

Unable to share files on Teams

If the recipients of your file can’t access them, probably you need to look into the file permission settings that you are using. Make sure that your file size doesn’t exceed 250 MB. If that is the case, you can give access to the file via OneDrive or Google Drive.

FAQ

Which documents can be shared in Microsoft Teams chat and meetings?

You can attach most documents types: Office documents, image files, PDFs. Your organization IT security settings may disallow sharing of specific file extensions, such as executable files or scripts.

How can i replace a Teams meeting attachment?

In case that you would like to attach a newer revision of your attachment to your Microsoft Teams meeting, proceed as following:

  • Open your Outlook Calendar.
  • Find your meeting.
  • Remove the current attachment, and replace it with the updated version.
  • Hit the Send Update button.

In case of additional questions, kindly leave us a comment.

Leave a Comment