What is Slack app? How to download Slack for Windows?
Slack is a popular messaging app similar to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) that’s oriented toward small-team collaboration. It’s free to use and available for Windows, MacOS, and mobile. Subscribe to Slack Plus for features like guest access, unlimited message archiving, guaranteed uptime, and increased cloud storage (20GB, versus 5GB in the free version).
What is Slack app?
Slack brings team communication and collaboration into one place so you can get more work done, whether you belong to a large enterprise or a small business. Check off your to-do list and move your projects forward by bringing the right people, conversations, tools, and information you need together. Slack is available on any device, so you can find and access your team and your work, whether you’re at your desk or on the go.
Use Slack to:
- Communicate with your team and organize your conversations by topics, projects, or anything else that matters to your work
- Message or call any person or group within your team
- Share and edit documents and collaborate with the right people all in Slack
- Integrate into your workflow, the tools and services you already use including Google Drive, Salesforce, Dropbox, Asana, Twitter, Zendesk, and more
- Easily search a central knowledge base that automatically indexes and archives your team’s past conversations and files
- Customize your notifications so you stay focused on what matters
Scientifically proven (or at least rumored) to make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. We hope you’ll give Slack a try.
Features:
While no longer using an IRC backend, Slack offers many IRC-like features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups and direct messaging. All content inside Slack is searchable, including files, conversations, and people. On the free plan, only the 10,000 most recent messages can be viewed and searched. Users can add emoji buttons to their messages, which other users can then click on to express their reactions to messages.
Teams:
Slack teams allow communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. Although Slack was meant for organizational communication, it has been slowly turning into a community platform, a function for which users had previously used message boards or social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Many of these communities are categorized by topics which a group of people may be interested in discussing.
Messaging:
Public channels allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). They are open to everyone in the chat, provided they have first been invited to join the client. Private channels allow for private conversation between smaller sects of the overall group. These can be used to break up large teams into their own respective projects. Direct messages allow users to send private messages to a specific user rather than a group of people. Direct messages can include up to nine people (the originator plus eight people). Once started this direct message group can be converted to a private channel.
Integrations:
Slack integrates with a large number of third-party services and supports community-built integrations. Major integrations include services such as Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier. In December 2015, Slack announced their app directory, consisting of over 150 integrations that users can install. In March 2018, Slack announced its partnership with the financial and human capital management firm Workday; Adding to Slack’s list of plugins. This integration allows Workday customers to access features from directly within the Slack interface.
Platforms:
Slack provides mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone (beta), in addition to their web browser client and electron desktop clients for macOS, Windows, and Linux (beta). Slack is also available for the Apple Watch, allowing users to send direct messages, see mentions, and make simple replies. It was featured on the home screen of the Apple Watch in a 2015 promotional video.
Business model:
Slack is a freemium product, whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 10,000 archived messages and add unlimited apps and integrations. They claim support for an unlimited number of users. When freeCodeCamp attempted to switch its community of over 8,000 users to Slack in 2015, however, they experienced many technical issues and were advised by Slack support to limit their channels to “no more than 1,000 users (ideally more like 500)”.That specific limit no longer applied by January 2017.
How to download Slack for Windows?
The Slack for Windows app is compatible with Windows 7 and later. Here’s how to download the app to your desktop.
Download in Slack:
😻 Visit the Slack apps page at
👉 slack.com/downloads. (click here)😻 Click Download under the Windows icon and wait for the file to download.
😻Double-click the downloaded file (called SlackSetup) to install Slack. Slack will launch automatically once installed.
Download in Windows Store:
To download the app from the Windows Store, you’ll need to be running Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update installed.
😻 Find Slack in the Windows Store.
😻 Click Get the app.
Once you’ve installed the app, you can double-click the Slack icon the next time you need to launch it.
🥁NOTE:
To launch Slack whenever you start Windows, click your workspace name in the top left to open the menu, select Preferences, click the Windows App tab, and check Launch app on login.
How to Uninstall Slack app?
Here’s how to uninstall the Slack for Windows app
- Open Control Panel.
- Select Uninstall a program.
- Find and select Slack.
- With Slack highlighted, click Uninstall.
Tips and tricks
- Sign in to multiple workspaces
The Slack for Windows app lets you stay signed in to more than one workspace at once. Click your workspace name in the top left to open the menu, then click Sign in to another workspace… to get started. - Use the Workspace Switcher
If you’re signed in to more than one workspace, navigate between them by clicking the icons on the left. Or, use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl 1, Ctrl 2, and so on, to switch quickly between the workspaces you’re signed in to. - Add a shortcut to your desktop
For Windows 7 and 8, click the Start menu, find Slack, right-click on the file and click Create Shortcut. For Windows 10, find Slack in your Start menu and drag it to your desktop. - App menu
Windows 7 and Windows 8:
By default, Slack for Windows has a visible menu bar with File, Edit, View, Window, and Help menus. If you’d prefer, you can hide the menu bar by selecting the Window menu and deselecting Always show Menu Bar. After that you can hit Alt to temporarily reveal it, or show it again by re-selecting the same option from the Window menu.
Windows 10:
Click the Menu icon in the top left to open the menu.
Tip: In Windows 10, the button to manually open the keyboard is hidden by default. To automatically open the keyboard for Slack, click the Start menu, then Settings. Click Devices and select Typing, then choose to Show the touch keyboard when not in tablet mode and there’s no keyboard attached.
