Hi Dave. I’m running Windows 11 and am a bit confused: I used to have a convenient quick launch shortcut for Teams in my Taskbar, but it’s vanished! How can I bring it back, I attend a lot of meetings via Teams in my company!
The first and most obvious question is: Did you uninstall Microsoft Teams from your computer? If you didn’t then it’s a bit inexplicable that your Taskbar shortcut – formally known as the “System Tray icon”, if you’re curious – has vanished, but fortunately, it’s easy to restore. Part of the solution depends on how much you want it front and center because you can also “pin” the app itself to the Taskbar so it’s a big button in the center (or left side, depending on your icon alignment), ready to fire up with a click. Prefer something smaller? You can not only restore the System Tray icon shortcut, you can even semi-hide it on a secondary menu!
Let’s dig through the various alternatives so you can see how they compare. To start with, launch the program by searching for “teams” and firing up the app!
PIN TEAMS ICON TO THE TASKBAR
The first and easiest solution, the one that’ll make subsequent invocations of Microsoft Teams a lot easier, is to pin the app to your Taskbar. That’s easily done; while it’s running, right-click on its icon on the Taskbar itself. A menu pops up:
Choose “Pin to taskbar” and the Teams icon will stick to the center of your Taskbar, just as I have a couple of other apps also pinned for quick access. How can you tell they’re not running? They’d have a tiny dash or dot underneath the icon to denote it’s an active program.
Decided you don’t want your pinned app icon on the Taskbar anymore? Right-click then choose “Unpin from taskbar” and it’s gone.
MAKING MICROSOFT TEAMS SYSTEM TRAY ICON VISIBLE
You asked about the tiny shortcut icons on the right side of the Taskbar, however, the “system tray icons”, so let’s get that to show up instead.
These settings are all part of the Taskbar personalization options in Settings. Go to Settings, then choose Personalization > Taskbar. You’ll see these options:
Lots of ways to customize things, actually. Notice the lower options especially; you’ll want to click on “Other system tray icons”.
We’re going to solve this two different ways. The easiest is to simply click on the “Microsoft Teams” entry and its System Tray Icon will show up instantly on your Taskbar:
Done, right? Well, there’s another way you might want to try instead. Go back to the Settings window and turn Microsoft Teams “off” again, but enable “Hidden icon menu” instead. Now any shortcuts (uh, system tray icons) that aren’t otherwise allocated space will be in a handy submenu. The Taskbar ends up trim and uncluttered:
See that “^” shortcut? Click on it and all the otherwise hidden shortcuts appear in their own neat little menu:
This is my personal preference because I keep my Taskbar clean of rarely used icons – notice I “hid” the Windows Security Notifications icon so it shows up in this menu instead – but they’re all just a single click away.
Between these three options, I think you should be able to get Microsoft Teams just where you want it on your Taskbar.
Power Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows for many years and have an extensive Windows 11 help area. Please check it out to find lots of additional tutorials and guides while you’re here. Thanks!
