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
32 comments
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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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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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Anonymous
commented
Awful! Took me 45 minutes to scroll back to a message from January 2018.
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Rick
commented
What Serhiy said... It would be really great to have this type of feature. As someone who has to go back though my chats to fill in my timesheets for my business being able to scan chats for a day / week would make things great!
THanks!!
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Zig Mandel
commented
two years later, a basic feature might get implemented. Its so frustrating to constantly encounter super basic UX issues terribly handled by Microsoft products.
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Rockridge
commented
Any update? Our team is transitioning from Slack to Teams. This is unacceptable. If we get enough end user complaints, we may have to dump MS Teams and stick with Slack.
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Serhiy
commented
Hi Warren,
The request reached the backlog a year ago and work on this feature has started more than half a year ago. Could you please provide some ETA on when should this feature be available?
Thank you,
Serhiy -
Alex Bassermann
commented
at least in skype you could search the conversation in outlook or by opening chat log files and use CTRL +F to look for some specific text or day.
Teams is a stopper and make works much harder especially for office users -
Anonymous
commented
This is just one of many areas where Teams fails horrible.
I always wonder if someone really, actually sat there, looked at it and said: 'yup, thats good, lets do it this way'... and its not only the search feature - like with so many other things that are broken it makes me feel like noone on the development team ever wasted a thought on usability. Or speed.
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Gizmo commented
this is an area where teams fails, makes history unusable.
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ThePangy
commented
This chat search desperately needs improved. Now that we've rolled Teams out as an organization and told everyone the chat is kept indefinitely, turns out it's nearly impossible to search for and browse to the section of chat history you want to review. The loading of the history is extremely slow and the endless scrolling to get where you need to be is not at all acceptable.
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Anonymous
commented
isn't there an 'F' key (F1, F2, F3, etc) that allows your to search any and all logs???
I saw it about a month or so ago and can't find it...Thanks for your efforts
Bub
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Anonymous
commented
I spent 30 minutes just to scroll from july to january. Imagine that!
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Anonymous
commented
This is bad, already july and still no updates
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anonymous
commented
I just saw that this was backlogged and I am sad to see that. The #3 issue that is listed in the main post here is our biggest issue in moving forward with Teams as a company. Anything we try to share in channels is then extremely difficult to search for later (well we can find it, but as # 3 suggests it takes manual scrolling, and in some cases through months of chats). This has been our #1 frustration and is also causing us to find alternative options for team sharing and communication.
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Anonymous
commented
This is the most important thing for any soft which has the aim to organize conversations. Without possibility to search throw the messages and an easy way to jump to required place of the dialogue it becomes useless. Please, take it into consideration. Many thanks.
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Ross
commented
Absolutely agree with #2 and everything in general. For Microsoft to claim that Teams has "chat history" is them being disingenuous. Yeah, there's a chat history, it's just barely functional. Being unable to jump to the message in the search results is literally the worst part of Teams.
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Steve P
commented
If the dev team dog fooded their own product, then these features would be in there.
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Ryan
commented
I feel your pain, these are all valid issues that make make Teams frustrating to use. I've been fighting off requests to move our team to other chat apps... makes it hard when other apps already have these issues ironed out.