SOLVED

Microsoft Teams - search my own chat history

Copper Contributor

How could I search my own team's chat history in almost 10,000 line of chat log in these 3 months? 

Thanks!

 

12 Replies
best response confirmed by LongNX null (Copper Contributor)

@Simen Ødegård I can't access to that search function, below is my version (1.2.00.22) update on 9/6/19 

What is wrong? My IT administrator has no idea :( 

 

 

 

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@LongNX null 

If you type a search term in the search bar (on top in the middle), the search results and filter options should show up on the left side.

 

If for some reason the search does not work... I suggest you bug your IT admin again!

Check out this Euro Teams users group from this month. First speaker covers how you can do some good filtering using multiple terms and results. https://youtu.be/G-t3tkHyuwc
i can find the old message i searched that matches my criteria: in the result list appears only the single message posted, but i can't eventually find/understand the context! (that is the very previous-next messages) in a hundreds posts chat!
The new msteams help find many thing, but the problem is it almost useless.
you must remember what you've chatted, and typing in the exact keyword.

@Long Nguyễn Xuân apart from this, even if you have a match, it's also rather difficult to scroll back months to get the context for your search result.

Chat search only gives you the single matching message instead of scrolling back to the point in time of the chat.
If you're dealing with folks 

who

type

separate messages

in staccato

fashion

 

the search feature becomes useless for chat.

as this is pretty much on point with regards to my own Teams problem... has there been a solution to this?
is there a way around scrolling back months in the chat timeline for half an hour to get to an old message? thanks for any hints.

If you still have issues, taking the date of the single message you've found + the other participant in the chat, theres this workaround that gives you the entire days worth of results

But my search in the desktop client now has a button that scrolls me back to the location in the chat. This is an update from the last few months.

@Stefan Hanrath Searching UI is very broken.  Took me a while to figure out a solution that would scroll the chat window up to get the context.  Figured I'd post my workaround for 1.5.00.8070 (64-bit), as I do remember being able to do this directly.

Type in top bar or ctrl-F, get a list of results. 

Click on Go to Message (which very unhelpfully gives you no context).  

Hover over message to get reaction popup, and dots menu -> choose Pin.

Click on Conversation with <person/group> at the top, which brings you to present day chats (again, not helpful).

Now you have a top banner with your pinned message, and clicking that scrolls you up.

Yay, context.

It is a little maddening how painful search is in Teams and that we have to go through such insane hoops to find the context of a message. Or in my case (that lead me to this thread), I asked a user a question which they answered. I knew the question, didn't know the answer. So I searched my question, pinned that message and did the scroll up to find their answer.

Remember when S4B saved convo history in Outlook and you could search both chat and email? Although search wasn't great, it gave a one-stop search spot for all comms... kind of missing that these days.

@sbaitz100 MS has finally been improving in this area thou. The search bar works fairly well, and if not or single search, you can hit office.com and search there for everything in one search, it's fairly slick. Not sure if you are still on old search UI/UX or not in Teams, should be the new one at this point, but it was pretty quick in Outlook, not a bunch of back and forth. The office.com search is next closest thing IMO since it stays up etc. while you nav teams via the links. 

 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by LongNX null (Copper Contributor)