A carousel is message part that allows you to add a mix of images, titles and buttons to a card and include it in a sequence of up to 10 cards. You will have probably seen the carousel layout in ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Carousels create media rich sections of content which allow the user to scroll through a selection of options or content, and then use buttons to select what they want to find out more about.
For example, here is a carousel taken from our Group Guide template which guides users around the important groups on their Workplace instance.
And here is an example of a carousel in a Teams bot. This carousel is part of the Teams Assistant which allows users to navigate through a range of training modules:
Carousel specifications
For Workplace bots
A carousel can have a maximum of 10 cards. Each card must include title and buttons, or a title or image. The title and the subtitle can have a maximum of 80 characters each. Each card can have a maximum of 3 buttons. A carousel image should have an aspect ratio of 16:9, not be more than 420px wide/125KB in size.
For Teams bots
A carousel can have a maximum of 10 cards. Each card must include title and buttons, or a title or image. The title and the subtitle can have a maximum of 80 characters each. Each card can have a maximum of 6 buttons. A carousel image should have an aspect ratio of 16:9, not be more than 420px wide/125KB in size.
Where to use carousels
General navigation
Carousels are often used to contain the main topics and top strands of your conversation which we refer to as the Main Menu. For general navigation buttons and calls to action, we recommend using buttons. If the button text is over the 20 character limit, you can add the text into the title and/or subtitle then add and label the button i.e."Choose" or "Select":
Carousels work equally as well, especially for larger menus. You can incorporate longer titles and images also, which are great for menus and submenus. For example:
Longer button text
Buttons have a character limit of 20 characters. If this is a limitation in your bot design, we then recommend using a carousel to fully contain all the information you need. Title and subtitles allow you to add 80 characters respectively (so 160 characters in total).
Get from Spreadsheet
Carousels are also a major part of the get from spreadsheet feature. Get from spreadsheet allows you to pull content from a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet into a bot. This particular functionality takes the content from your spreadsheet and presents it back to the user in the form of a carousel, when the user types in certain topics or search terms.
You can read more about this feature in this help doc.