Improve chat history search
It looks like those designing the Chat are not really using it. Searching the chat history is still an awful experience:
1. When you are in a conversation with a person and want to search for something, you want BY DEFAULT the results from the conversation with THAT person. But no, the smart designer of Chat was thinking to flood you first with a lot of results and then to ask you for few additional clicks to filter what you need...
Please change the default to show the results for the current conversation or add another quick find or provide an option to setup the default.
2. After you spend time filtering the results, someone had the "great idea" to limit the number of the results displayed. Really? So I know that the discussion is there but I'm not allowed to reach it other than scrolling manually few months back?
Please remove the limit of the number of the displayed results.
3. When you click on a found result, the conversation window it is showing only that sentence and the brilliant message: "Go to the channel to see the rest" :)))) And you click that only to discover that you need to scroll manually few months back :))))
Please jump directly to the day/hour of a found result and display the surrounding text.
4. It is not enough that you are limited regarding the number of the displayed results, but the Date range filter does not let you to select a custom time interval, for example: 1/1/2017 - 1/15/2017. You can select only "This year" and then it doesn't show you all the results :)))
5. Scrolling back through chat history it is terrible. You cannot jump easily to a previous week or month and you have to wait patiently until all the intermediary text is loading. Page Up stops working after a slower load of text and you need to click in window to make it work again.
Sorry for the angry tone, but I have a very hard time finding a lot of info I need. It is a pain to find fast and easy
Anonymous
shared this idea
This feature request has now moved to “working on it”. The team is actively working on this request and I will share more details as they become available.
-Warren
60 comments
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Chris Becker
commented
Jumping to a date in a chat would be a very useful function. I needed to see discussion from around 10/2 today, but it is with a person that I chat with daily.
Another option would be a historical scrollbar like in Google Photos -- where grabbing the scroll shows you what date you will end up at.
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Mariusz Bidelski commented
Come on guys, it's been two years since the post - I can't reach chat from a month ago, don't force me to switch to facebooks messenger
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Fred
commented
It would be great to specify the date or range for any item including just all chats without a keyword.
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Alex H
commented
Agreed, Search needs some serious work. Glad to see it's WIP, but I wish we'd get more milestone updates on these projects. Over a year without an update is not exactly reassuring.
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Anonymous
commented
Basic feature but so useful. Not having this make me miss the aweful history of Skype conversations in Outlook, and god know I didn't like this history, not convenient to use but at least was there.
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Nazir
commented
Its quite difficulties to find old and older chat history and there is no search option or we can't use any key word to search in teams.
Hope we will get improve in this area. -
Sreenath Santhanam
commented
Provide the ability to lookup the messages by date / Month / Year. Similar to what we see as Archive in Blog sites, so we can easily navigate to that one conversation in a date / month / year
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Ralph Burleson
commented
This deficiency is seriously bad. It should be a severity 1 bug. It ruins the value of using teams as a communication archive tool. If this doesn't get fixed soon we will have no choice but to look to other alternatives aka slack or migrate communication back to email.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes, being able to jump to a particular date in the chat history would be extremely helpful!!
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Jason Roth
commented
I have the September 20th update and no dice. Still showing only just the single message as per #3 on the list.
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Daniel Coppa
commented
It appears that as of the Sept 13th update, search will now show you the conversation and not just the single message. (#3 on this list)
At least in the desktop app. The web version appears to still just show single messages.
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Berney
commented
The scrolling speed is a deterrent driving my users out of teams. This needs to be updated.
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Virakti Jain
commented
@Warren, it is still being worked on?
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Bryn Ellis
commented
Where are we with Teams search please? It is REALLY bad!! And I "ditto" all of the op's points. I'm surprised Microsoft got away with releasing Teams with such a bad history and search function!!
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Anonymous
commented
When I search for a keyword in a conversation, I want to jump to that part of the chat, not just display the ONE message with that keyword in it. I want to be able to scroll forwards and back with that keyword search as my starting point.
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Anonymous
commented
Chat history search is a real pain... Point 2 in particular. Also, the display of search results is awful.
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Joe#
commented
I am having to gather details from several channels from 10 mons ago and this is a massive problem. Really need to be able to jump to a specific date or otherwise navigate to the time.
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Fabian Falch
commented
AMAZING good idea.
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mtrudel
commented
I relied on Outlook emails to complete invoicing my time to customers for stuff I may have forgotten to note in my time tracking app. I easlily find 10 hours per month in my Outlook conversation that I can charged to customers.
Now I use more and more Team with customers as guest. I ran into a wall when trying to search conversation by date in Team. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to have all conversation (Teams, Channels, Wiki, Conversations) by date unless I go to each Team, each channel, each conversation.
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James O
commented
I did a search for in the results was a message in conversation I was looking for and discovered it was a almost a year ago. While Teams will show me the specific message that matches my query, it will not let be view the message in context of the history/thread so I could follow the conversation. My only option was to go that that user's chat and scroll up, wait, scroll up, wait, scroll up wait, going back week by week for ~51 weeks until I found the message in the thread. It took forever. And since Teams has not blessed us with the ability to have multiple windows open or separate windows, if I need to reply to a different team member or channel while I'm still trying to research this old conversation, then I lose my place in history because when I switch back to the user it takes me to current history and not where I left off so I have to then scroll back, week-by-week again until I get ~51 weeks in the history. This is a HUGE pain. Having the ability to jump to a specific date would also be nice, not just a "previous month" button.