Teams Meeting Features: Live Captions, Polls, and Attendance Report

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We’ve looked at some Teams meeting features before when we talked about screen sharing, breakout rooms, and background options. Today we’ll look at three more features inside a Teams meeting — live captions, polls, and attendance reports.  

Live Captions 

Microsoft Teams can detect what you say during a Teams meeting and present it as real-time captions at the bottom of the screen. The captions are the most accurate when one person at a time speaks slowly and clearly and is in a place with little background noise.  

To turn on captions, click the three dots menu in the meeting settings bar and select “Turn on live captions.” Teams will now display captions at the bottom of the window. If you wish to turn this setting off, go back to that menu and select “Turn off live captions.”  

Polls 

While you’re running a meeting through Microsoft Teams, you may want to ask a question and quickly get responses from all the participants. With a neat little extension, you can easily build a poll inside the meeting to gather those responses.  

1. Inside the meeting, open up the chat by clicking the “show conversation” button (it looks like a speech bubble).  
2. At the bottom of the chat panel, click the three dots to show additional options, then click “Messaging extensions.”  
3. We’ll be adding in the “Forms” app. If this is your first time using it, use the “find an app” search bar to bring it up. Click the app icon.  
4. You’ll now have a pop-up where you can build a multiple-choice poll.
   1. Fill out the question and each option, adding additional option slots by clicking the “add option” link.  
   2. Choose whether you want participants to be able to submit a single answer (the default) or multiple answers (select this by toggling the switch).  
   3. If you want results to be instantly viewable after voting (numbers tick up as more participants answer), you don’t have to change that setting. If you do not want the results to be instantly viewable, uncheck that box.  
   4. If you want responses to be tied to usernames, you don’t have to do anything. If you want responses to be anonymous, check that box.  
5. Click “save.” Teams will show you a preview of the poll and give you a chance to tweak something by using the “edit” button or just publishing it with the “send” button.  

The poll will now appear both as a pop-up in the middle of the screen for all meeting participants and in the chat. The poll can be answered in either location, and the pop-up can be closed either by clicking the “x” or by clicking “done” after the question is answered.  

Attendance Reports 

Teams allows you to download an attendance report listing everyone who was present in the meeting as well as what time they joined and what time they left.  

To download this report while in a Teams meeting, click “show participants” in the settings bar. Click the down arrow next to “people.” This will download a CSV file that includes everyone currently in the meeting. You could do this at the beginning of the meeting to capture who was present at the start of class, or you could wait until the end to get a full log including people who may have been late.  

If you don’t download the attendance report during the meeting, you can still access it later in Canvas and download the CSV file. To access the report there, click the “Microsoft Teams meetings” link in your course navigation. Click the name of the meeting you want to get the attendance report from. Under the “details” tab, click the “Attendance” button to download the CSV file.  

If you have questions, drop a comment below or email us at ctl@cedarville.edu. We’d love to help! 

Editor’s note: This post was originally published December 9, 2021, and was updated to add how to download the attendance report from Canvas after a meeting has ended.

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