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Chapter 6 of “Take Control of Slack Basics” Available

Messages were the focus of the last two chapters of Glenn Fleishman’s serialized “Take Control of Slack Basics” book, and now it’s time to examine the main place those messages go: channels. (We’ll get to the other spot, direct message conversations, next week.)

Chapter 6, “Work with Channels,” focuses on how to find and join channels, both public and private, and explains the different ways they can show up in your sidebar. You’re not limited to joining channels that others create — following Slack’s “power to the people” philosophy, all team members can create public and private channels by default (team administrators can prevent this, if it’s not appropriate for the organization). Once you’ve created a channel, you can give it a name, purpose, and topic, and invite others to join in. Finally, Glenn explains how you can pin important messages, make channel-wide announcements, leave a channel, and archive a channel that’s no
longer needed.

Want to play with some of these capabilities? Try them out in our public SlackBITS group, which has over 150 members and has hosted some interesting discussions of Slack, the Mac, iOS, and Apple TV (and Josh Centers is fielding questions about the fourth-generation Apple TV there now that his “Take Control of Apple TV, Second Edition” is out). I’ve made sure that the channel-creation capabilities are open to all users now, so feel free to go nuts — you can’t break anything. Instructions on how to join are in Chapter 1, “Introducing Slack.” Also available to everyone is Chapter 2, “Get Started with Slack.”

If you’re just getting started with “Take Control of Slack Basics,” note that Chapter 3 and the rest are limited to TidBITS members, so if you’re not currently one, we hope that early access is incentive to join!. Those generous folks receive other benefits too (like a full-text version of our RSS feed!), but what’s most important is that TidBITS members are the reason you’re reading TidBITS today — we wouldn’t still be publishing without their support. If you’re already a TidBITS member, log in to the TidBITS site using the email address from which you joined to read and comment on these chapters.

The full ebook of “Take Control of Slack Basics” will be available for purchase by everyone in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle) formats once it’s complete, along with the administrator-focused “Take Control of Slack Admin.” We’re also planning to make the final books available as heavily discounted bulk buys for entire Slack teams, so if you’re interested in that, let us know.

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