Left & right arrow keys don't move the cursor (in teams)

At work we have pinpointed the problem. You must it the ESCAPE key to get out of the preview screen.

When someone sends something in Teams chat that opens in a preview screen, hit the EXCAPE key to get out of the preview screen. Do not use the back arrow button (<) in the upper left corner or to get out of the preview screen (any other method) .

When you click on the picture/document sent to you in TEAMS chat , it opens in a preview screen. When done viewing the attachment, some people hit the back arrow (<) in the upper left corner of the preview screen. For whatever reason, using the back button (<) in the preview screen does not return the focus to back the chat session when the preview screen closes. However, if you open a picture in the preview screen then hit the ESCAPE key to close the preview screen, that will release the focus and put the focus back in the chat window and your keyboard arrows will continue to work.

Kudos to my coworker. The coworker's arrow keys would stop working in TEAMS chat, he noticed that he opened a screenshot (picture) right before the arrow keys stopped working. I also tested opening the screenshot, that is when we noticed the difference in our methods of closing the preview screen. He uses the back button, I use the escape key. I have not had the problem - until I also tried the back button of the preview screen.

Need to submit this to Microsoft so they can reproduce the problem this time and fix it.

I just had it on Mac again. And the workaround works. But, not all menus with "..." work, e.g. the settings next to the avatar icon does not work. So for me, the following worked:

• Click on "..." (Messaging extensions) below the text field
• When the popup opens, press "ESC"

It's really bad that this doesn't get fixed, but at least something.

I managed to fix this for myself by going to my colleague's message, hovering over as if i was going to react to it, reacting to it, going to the three dots on the react bar above their message and then pressing esc. Clicked back in the message box and suddenly my left-right functionality worked for me. I don't know if reacting to it is a necessary step in that but it worked first time for me so I didn't have a chance to test not reacting to my colleague's message. Hope this helps.

This really should not be the solution, but it works! 😲

Thank you for sharing.

I managed to fix this for myself by going to my colleague's message, hovering over as if i was going to react to it, reacting to it, going to the three dots on the react bar above their message and then pressing esc. Clicked back in the message box and suddenly my left-right functionality worked for me. I don't know if reacting to it is a necessary step in that but it worked first time for me so I didn't have a chance to test not reacting to my colleague's message. Hope this helps.

lmao
Ok this is where you know you're in a "new" MS Product ....

Not a solution but a workaround, posted several times in this thread:

Open menu with three dots [ . . . ] at the bottom of chat panel (below editor), then close the menu by pressing Escape on keyboard.

Since this is just the answers forum I suspect almost no Teams/Microsoft engineers look in this thread (even if Google has it near the top of search results). Can't tell where this problem should be reported to get to the right people.