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
71 comments
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Sarah S
commented
I'm having a problem after using the search feature. I cannot clear the search no matter what I do. Mind you, the search is in fact cleared, the PC has rebooted, I no longer need the information I searched for, but no matter what I do, whenever I come back to this chat, it jumps to the message that I searched for previously. It's driving me crazy. For over a week now, I have to scroll through months of messages to get to the bottom. It gets worse and worse as I chat with this person more and more, as one can imagine. What on earth do I have to do to just be able to come to this chat and not see that previously searched for message?!
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Anonymous
commented
It's been over two years and this is still unchanged. Are you going to work on this?
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Tyler
commented
Any news on this? Specifically point #2 and 3.
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Anonymous
commented
Come on Microsoft! I want to jump to the point in time of the conversation, after finding the result!
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KarenKim
commented
If you know the person and date of the conversation you want to review, you can use Keyword Query Language to return results in a way that's a bit more meaningful. Perform the search like this: (Sent:2019-11-13 From:Karen) OR From:Brian Sent:2019-11-13
The returned results on the left include all messages from me (Karen) or Brian on 11/13/19, in order of message timestamp. Not perfect, but better than scrolling through months' worth of chats.
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Louise
commented
All excellent points - the first one in particular!
Most of the time you know who you had a chat with/which channel it was in, so you don't want the search being slowed down and clogged up by a load of results you knew were irrelevant prior to starting the search. -
Anonymous
commented
The 3 point is really really crucial. It's impossible to have the context (previous and next messages) of a message found whil searching for a word. Often when searching for a topic, we are interested in knowing what discussion we had on the topic not only have the message that contains the topic word.
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Andrew Pfaff
commented
Almost 2 years later and still no functioning basic search ability. I love spending 20 minutes scrolling up through a chat just to find a conversation from 2 weeks ago.
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Rob Leavitt
commented
Does anyone know a faster way to scroll back into chat history? Related to the above request that Warren said was being worked on a year and a half ago, how about way to instantly jump to the start of a chat, or go directly to a specific date? This is apart from having done a search, though I guess it would essentially provide the same functionality.
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Anonymous
commented
Would be nice if Teams folded into Outlook like Skype did. If I knew I had the conversation last week, I could just jump into Conversation History and look at last Monday. Why can't I filter by date without a search term?
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Maciej Michałek
commented
@Alex, @Warren, what is happening with this issue according to https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18678067-help-us-search-and-find-things-in-teams ?
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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!!