How to share a Teams file in an Outlook email?

Here’s a question from Stephie:

I was recently tasked to takeover the maintenance of several Microsoft Teams from a colleague who left the company. One challenge i encountered lately is how to share Word, PDF and Excel files stored in Microsoft Teams with internal and external users using Outlook 365. Any pointers / best practices that you can recommend?

Thanks for your question. In our answer we would like to provide a simple step-by-step process that you can use in order to facilitate file sharing via Outlook. If you are interested to share more than one file, you might want to look into our sharing Teams folders tutorial.

Sharing files from Teams in Outlook

Copy Teams file link

The easiest way to share access to a file stored in Teams with internal and external parties is to simply embed the link to it in your Outlook email.

In your Windows or MacOS computer, open Microsoft Teams and navigate to your channel.
Go to the Files Tab and navigate to the file you are interested to allow access to.
Hit the check mark at the left hand side of your file name (step 1).
Now hit the Show Actions menu (…) at the right hand side to your file name. (step 2)
Select the Copy Link menu (step 3).

You’ll now see a dialog showing the path to your file. The file is located in a SharePoint library that hosts your Teams channel files.
Now, go ahead and set the access permissions to your Teams file. At the bottom of the dialog you’ll see the default access permissions to the file (marked below).

Set Teams file permissions

If interested you can modify the access permission as per you needs using the Link Settings dialog.
Teams allows to choose between different sharing permission options. Note that the sharing settings are governed by your Teams administration policy and hence might not available to you.
1. Allow anyone with the link to access / edit the file.
2. People in your organization
3. People that have access to your channel (those can be internal or external to your organization).
4. Specific people. You’ll need to provide email addresses of those individuals.

Check the Allow editing option as needed.
Once done – hit Apply.
Teams will now generate a link to your Teams file according to the access permissions you just set.
Now hit Copy.

Important Note: default sharing permission are typically set by your IT team. You might want to discuss with them if those are not fitting your business needs.

Add your link to an Outlook email or meeting

The last step is to open your Microsoft Outlook desktop or Office 365 Outlook.
Create a new email or meeting request.
Define your email recipients and email/meeting text.
Paste the link to your Teams file that you have generated in the previous step.
Send your email or meeting.

Note: you can apply the same process with any 3rd party email client – such as GMail.

Sharing link to Teams files with channel members

An alternative way to Share files from Teams with your channel members (internal or external parties) is via the Posts tab.

Open Teams and navigate to your channel.
Open the Posts tab to initiate a new conversation.
Hit the attach file and select Browse from Teams and Channels.
Browse your channel files and select the one you are interested to share.
Hit Share a Link.
The link will be posted in you Channel Posts tab.
Hover the top right area of your post and hit the Show Actions button (…).
Hit Share to Outlook. This will share the conversation as an email from Outlook 365.

File Sharing to Outlook not working

File sharing in Teams is pretty straightforward. As mentioned above, file permission sharing options are governed by your IT departments or Teams administrators. In case that external parties are not able to open or edit your files, you might want to find out if your Teams org / channel settings allow external parties to interact with files you share.