Starting a chat is easy. Pick someone you want to chat with (someone who is online), and follow these steps:
- Select a Skype contact from your Contacts list.
- Click the blue Chat button in the toolbar. If you don’t see the button, open the View menu to verify that a check mark appears next to the View Toolbar option. After you click the Chat button, you’re ready to chat! When your chat opens, it’s ready for you to chat with the Skype contact you selected. A confident chat organizer can invite more than one contact simultaneously. To do so, select several (or all) of your contacts in the main Skype window by pressing and holding the Shift key and clicking their names; then, click the Chat button.
- To chat with your contact, enter your text in the text box at the bottom of the chat window and press Enter to post the message in the chat room. A shaded separator bar that contains your name as well as the date and the time of your message appears in the chat window. The separator bars are color-coded so that you can easily spot your messages in the chat, which makes finding your text in the message window easier. Given the sometimes chaotic, free-for-all nature of chat rooms, you can easily forget your own conversational thread — especially when you’re chatting with more than one person at a time. Picking through the messages quickly to find your notes helps you remember the point you are making.
To invite others to join your chat, simply drag and drop a contact from your main window into your message window).
Buddies in a chat room are free to invite their own friends into the chat by dragging and dropping contacts from their own lists. When a new person is added, an alert appears in each chat participant’s window. This alert also identifies the user who invited the new participant as well as the time he or she was added. No secrets here!
Choosing a slew of contacts for a group chat can be useful. Maybe you want to be sneaky. Maybe you are planning a surprise party for your best friend, and you want to use Skype to make sure that all the people you plan to invite are in on the chat from the beginning so that you don’t spoil the surprise. In one chat, you can pick a time, place, gift, entertainment, and any other tidbits crucial to a good surprise while avoiding telephone and email tag. Then you can add your best friend to the chat, pretend that everyone is planning a group run in the park, and have the group enter the date in their calendars. Because your soon-to-be-surprised friend was added midway through the chat, he or she can’t see the prior conversation. The surprise is intact and your friend none the wiser. Isn’t that what best friends are for?
Buddies in a chat room are free to invite their own friends into the chat by dragging and dropping contacts from their own lists. When a new person is added, an alert appears in each chat participant’s window. This alert also identifies the user who invited the new participant as well as the time he or she was added. No secrets here!
Choosing a slew of contacts for a group chat can be useful. Maybe you want to be sneaky. Maybe you are planning a surprise party for your best friend, and you want to use Skype to make sure that all the people you plan to invite are in on the chat from the beginning so that you don’t spoil the surprise. In one chat, you can pick a time, place, gift, entertainment, and any other tidbits crucial to a good surprise while avoiding telephone and email tag. Then you can add your best friend to the chat, pretend that everyone is planning a group run in the park, and have the group enter the date in their calendars. Because your soon-to-be-surprised friend was added midway through the chat, he or she can’t see the prior conversation. The surprise is intact and your friend none the wiser. Isn’t that what best friends are for?
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