How to create a shortcut to/ start an office 365 Standalone Web Application?

Introduction

Most of the office 365 applications can be accessed via the browser. You can browse to them via the waffle = open office.com.

Now for each application if you use Chrome as browser you can also create a shortcut to the web apps a bit less cluttered by the default browser menus and toolbar.

I explain here step-by-step how to do this.
 

Open your o365 app in the Chrome browser

In Chrome

Go to office.com

Choose the app you want to open.

If you want to open Teams you can also type directly the url is teams.microsoft.com

Create a desktop shortcut

In Chrome 

1. click on the 3 dots menu on the top right of the window.
2. Select More tools
3. Select Create shortcut

It will create an app shortcut to your desktop with a nice icon.

Edit Shortcut Property

Now - this is the tricky/ not obvious part of it - edit the shortcut properties =

right-click on the shortcut and select the last entry in the context menu ->Properties

In the Target field edit the text by replacing --app* 

(* means and all the following characters) 

by --app="app url" where you enter the url to access the office web app.

For Teams it will be --app="https://teams.microsoft.com"

For example the target for Teams shall look something like this

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome_proxy.exe" --profile-directory="Profile 1" --app="https://teams.microsoft.com"

Result

That's it. If you click on this shortcut it will open the Web application in a much leaner window.

You can then pin it to the Taskbar.

Or add it to your App Launcher.