May 2026 – techbloggingfool.com

After you have used Microsoft Teams for a while, your navigation bar is likely to become a befuddled mess. Chats, meetings, people, and channels end up all over the place. Some folks thrive in that environment. I get it, using search for everything is a successful strategy for today’s deluge of data and messages.

Searching works, but sometimes it can be a lot slower than I would like. The new Teams client has added the ability to insert sections into the Teams nav bar. At first, it might not seem like that change would be very helpful in taming the mess. However, they have also added the ability to drag nearly any Teams object into those sections.

Create a new section from the compose drop-down menu.

I like to create a section for each department that I work and meet with on a regular basis. Then I drag the respective people chats, meeting chats, group chats, and channels into their corresponding departmental sections. I also pick an icon for each section for faster recognition.

For me, the result of doing the work up-front, is less friction during day-to-day communications. I spend less time trying to locate the right Tom Smith from HR and not the one from finance, in the company directory. I also have the chat from the meeting we were in last week right there next to his name in HR section.

An organized navigation bar is easier and faster to use.

I was happy to discover that I only needed to do the work of organizing the sections once. The changes sync to my other computers automatically. They also replicate to my mobile phone and tablet. It isn’t entirely obvious how use sections in the Mobile client. There’s a “Sections” button at the top of the Teams mobile menu bar, tap it and the view will change to your neatly organized groups.

Mobile synchronization makes the feature even more useful.

When you receive a new message, the entire section that the sender was in will light up. I find that I can collapse the sections by rolling up the chevrons. Then, I am able to shrink the Team’s window to just large enough to show the collapsed section list, like the screen shot above. I move the smaller window into the lower right corner of my screen. Then I use the handy Power Toys always on top feature (CTRL + Win + T) to pin it there. This setup lets me see and respond to pings quickly without consuming a lot of screen real estate.

If you have a difficult time using Teams efficiently, sections might be helpful. I’ve found the time that it took to be more than worthwhile. Friends and co-workers that have adopted them report an improved experience over the standard UI. I know that I prefer the organization over chaos.

I was experiencing a minor annoyance between Microsoft Word on my PCs and mobile devices in some files. Dark mode was reversed on Word mobile. Switching to light mode on a tablet displayed the file as white text on a black background. Because of this, I had to flip back to dark mode on my desktop or have my giant monitor fry my retinas.

I’ve been using Word more frequently as of late, which motivated me to fix it. I decided to see if I could find a pattern or some scenario that caused the problem. First, I started opening lots of files from OneDrive and from backup. I discovered that dark and light modes functioned normally if the file hadn’t been used cross platform.

I kept at it and eventually stumbled onto the cause. The page color was set to black in my default desktop template. I presume this was something I did and then forgot about. Talk about set it and forget it. If you have weird formatting repeatedly happening to your documents, take a look at the normal.dotm template. It controls Word’s default document settings like fonts, colors, margins, and the like.

It’s a good idea to make a backup copy of the file before trying to change anything. Open Explorer and copy the normal.dotm file in the folder @ C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates to another directory. Then follow the steps below to open and edit the template.

Open Word.
On the File tab, click Open.
Go to C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates.
Open the Normal template (Normal.dotm).
Make the changes that you want to the fonts, margins, spacing, and other settings as you would in any other Word file. Remember any changes will be applied to all future documents.
When you have finished, click the File tab, and then click Save.

Besides potentially solving document format issues, the normal.dotm file can be used to fully customize Word. It’s also relatively easy to push those customizations to computers in an organization. Common deployment methods include GPOs and scripts.