Microsoft Teams Changing my Status while Actively running a process in Excel

Question

Microsoft Teams Changing my Status while Actively running a process in Excel

Anonymous

Hello, I have been dealing with Teams status issues for a long time now but I am posting about this one in particular because it seems like a major flaw/bug.

Part of my daily work requires running complex VBA macros with excel to generate various documents. The issues arises when running these processes my PC is basically non-usable outside of sending a teams message or checking my email. So often I am forced to wait. I am still at my PC, I am running a process that will take 15-20 minutes. I am typing in another window but I am not touching my mouse.

Thus Microsoft teams after 5 minutes of no-mouse touching marks me as away. I have tried manually setting my status as available. I've tried logging in to the mobile app and setting my status there. Nothing sticks. I don't want to be marked as away because I AM AVAILABLE! I am at my PC waiting for my jobs process to complete.

Before the ever annoying reply of "managers shouldn't be using teams presence to tell if you are doing your job" please no. I have a new manager every 2 months. Their managers have no idea what I do. My jobs process is mission critical yet Microsoft seems to find the need to "rat me out" that I am away when I am actively doing something.

Can microsoft not tell when its own programs are running a process? Why is teams like this? It is beyond infuriating. THERE NEEDS to be a way to set my status and actually have it stick. Has anyone found a "fix" for this?

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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1 answer

Answer 1

(PII removed)

Good day!

Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are glad to assist!

Based on your description, I understand you concern with Microsoft Teams changing your status while actively running a process in Excel.

I do apologize for inconvenience, Microsoft Teams marks you as "Available" until it detects inactivity or your device enters sleep mode. At that point, it switches your status to "Away." Additionally, if you haven't used Teams for five minutes, or it's running in the background, your status will also turn to "Away." Unfortunately, there's no direct way to maintain your status as "Available" when your computer enters idle mode, or you are away from the PC for more than five minutes.

As a workaround, there are some suggestions you may have a try to stop Microsoft Teams from showing you as Away after 5 minutes.

Set Your Team Status to Available: Manually set your status to "Available, to modify your Team status, click on your profile picture within the Team's interface. Then, select your current status and select "Available" from the drop-down menu.

Note: Even if you've manually set your status to "Available," it doesn't guarantee that it won't automatically switch to "Away." For example, if you lock your system or your PC goes into sleep mode, your status will again change to "Away" mode.

Set a custom status message: You can set a custom status message to indicate that you are "Working" or "Focusing" even if the status shows as "Away"

Use a Status Duration: You can set a duration for your status in Teams. This might help keep your status as “Available” for a longer period.

In the meanwhile, we do understand your concern about this feature that how it helps you to improve your efficiency in such daily busy work schedule but as it is related with Teams product design, so it is suggested to submit your valuable feedback directly to Microsoft product development team by either go to Help from your dedicated App > submit Feedback or by posting on Ideas · Community (microsoft.com) . This is require because as we are from community team, we can only assist you to troubleshoot the query/share work around (if we have for any by design query) and providing you required information for feature’s availability status.

This community team and Microsoft product development team are separate. So for feature’s suggestion or by design query, user need to submit feedback from their side to Microsoft product team. Once user send feedback via above mentioned way, it’s sent to Microsoft directly and it's routed to the relevant product teams who can review it.

To check more details about how to submit feedback, kindly refer this article Learn about how to provide feedback to Microsoft - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

Thanks for your precious time and your understanding would be highly appreciated. Have a nice day!

Best regards,

Allen | Community Moderator