How to mute all participants in a Teams meeting

Users who host Microsoft Teams meetings with large groups of people may want to mute the rest of the participants in the meeting if you or a few others need to present without everyone else talking over you. Microsoft Teams has a few options to change when it comes to Teams meetings that you can use.

You can mute all participants in a Teams meeting by creating the meeting and adding whoever you want to add to it, then going to the meeting settings and changing who can present. Changing these options will turn people into attendees, allowing you to mute them in the meeting.

How to mute all participants in a Microsoft Teams meeting

  • To start, open Microsoft Teams
  • Go to the calendar to create a new meeting
  • Click “+New meeting” or click on the date that you want to make one for
  • Input the details you want the meeting to have, including the name of the meeting, the date and time, and the participants
  • You can then change the settings to mute users either before or during a meeting
  • Find the meeting in the calendar or Outlook
  • Click on “Meeting Options”
  • Change the “Who can present?” option to “Only Me” or “Specific People.”
  • Toggle “Allow Mic for attendees,” which will stop users from communicating with their mics.

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How to mute all participants in a Teams meeting

If you want to host a meeting in Microsoft Teams and mute the participants, you must create the meeting. I have created a step-by-step guide for how to do this, as well as going through some of the options available on the Meetings options page.

  • Open Microsoft Teams by searching on the search bar, clicking on the app icon, or going onto office.com and using Teams there.
  • After loading Microsoft Teams, go to the calendar page; this is where you can create a new meeting, then click “+ New meeting.”
  • When you create the meeting, enter all the details that you need to, this includes things like the name of the meeting, the names of all participants you want to join and take part in it, the date and time, and any other details.
  • After creating the meeting, before you and everyone else joins it, you can edit the options by clicking on either the meeting in the calendar in Teams, the calendar in Outlook, or your email. You can use any of these as these are all places that will show an invite for Microsoft Teams as they’re all connected by the cloud by Microsoft.
  • After pressing “Edit” on the meeting, it will bring up the meeting options, and at the bottom of the page, you can find the option called “Meeting Options.”

After clicking “Meeting options,” it will show a new window containing all the available options.

On this page, you can choose from a few options related to Microsoft Teams meetings, and these can all be changed to enable or disable the things you want.

  • This list includes who can get past the lobby from a list of options, including “Everyone,” “People in my organization, trusted organizations and guests,” “People in my organization and guests,” “People in my organization,” “People I invite (Turn off Allow Forwarding in the meeting invite”) or “Only me.”
  • The next option to select is the “Who can present?” This option will affect who can present during it, which excludes them from the other options you will choose after this. If you want to mute all participants other than you, change the option to have the only one who can present be “Only me.”

You must choose who can present carefully; if you want everyone else to be muted, you will need to make it so that everyone but you has the “attendee” role. This will prevent them from unmuting and allowing them to be manipulated by some of the other options like allowing them to use their camera or allowing reactions.

If you want to present with a few other people, you can choose specific users to exclude from these choices; you can do this by selecting “Specific people” and searching for the participants you want to be presenters.

If you choose the “Only me” option, this is where you can choose the option to mute everyone else who isn’t presenting and is an attendee. Underneath that is the “All mic for attendees?” toggle; turn this to say no and press “Save,” this makes it so people will be muted and unable to turn their mics back on unless you allow it.

Then when you start the meeting and allow the other users to join, it will ask you to admit them into the room, and they will be muted.

Clicking on the “People” tab shows the participants, and if you press “…,” it will show some options that you can use for the session; these include things like “Allow mic for attendees” or “Allow camera for attendees.”

If you click “Allow mic for attendees,” it will act in the same way as the meeting settings from earlier, allowing you to mute or unmute the mics of participants.

Like the above option, this allows you to mute the mics of every attendee.

This is how your screen and options will look without changing meeting settings, allowing you to mute or unmute and turn your camera on and off.

This will show when you get made an attendee and the camera and mic privileges are changed.

Conclusion

Muting users in a Microsoft Teams meeting is straightforward, and there are two ways to do this— this includes creating the meeting and going to where the meeting has been sent on a calendar and clicking “Meeting options.” This is where you can edit some of the available options to change how the meeting works for some users. It can also be done by starting the meeting and going to “People” and clicking “…” next to participants, and this will change the settings in the same way, although you still need to change who can “present” beforehand.

If you want to add other users to the meeting, they will join as attendees unless you change the meeting options to allow the specific user to “present.” This will allow them to avoid the options chosen for everyone else and give them the option to speak and present— this would typically be used in meetings for groups of people who need a few people to speak to them. For example, a school would allow a couple of teachers to present to the students while also keeping the students muted.

Siddra Afzal

Siddra Afzal has been a researcher and content writer at Business Tech Planet since 2021. Siddra formerly wrote newsletters for the NHS and was a PR and Communications Officer. She now combines her passion for photography and video editing with her knowledge of communications, writing, and research to the art of crafting the perfect tech guides for BTP. You can connect with Siddra on LinkedIn.

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