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
Thank you for your continued feedback, we have addressed #1 in the list above. Contextual search within a specific chat or channel is now available. To learn more, please visit https://support.microsoft.com/office/search-for-messages-and-more-in-teams-4a351520-33f4-42ab-a5ee-5fc0ab88b263.
The feature team continues to make progress on these asks, and we will share an update when one is available.
80 comments
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JP
commented
I suspect this may be a renderer issue as it's there is a similar bug present in MS Word, but for any text that is not currently loaded to memory, the search results will not show them. The message is not shown in context, only the one that returned a search hit as old messages are not loaded by default. To view the rest of it I had to scroll back all the way, after which the search shows messages in context.
Why is there no functional "Jump to message" option?
Additionally, the messages just abruptly stop, I've scrolled back as far as it allows but it cuts off halfway through a conversation. Where's the rest of my messages?
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Joel
commented
How are number 2 and 3 still not something that is resolved? This is basic chat functionality and renders chat search pretty much useless for anything older than 2 months.
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Thota
commented
Its frustrating, If you cannot write a code to the better search, at least copy from Slack. You are atleast good on the front.
Microsoft was never good at search tools and not sure how you are going to lead the teams without proper search in the long run. -
Annoymous
commented
I like many others would like the option to jump to that time in a conversation available. Currently I am scrolling through 9 months worth of chats to get to some info I need. I was able to tell from searching a keyword that the convo I had was on 1/21/20 however since that only shows me a single chat w/ the key word I am now scrolling endlessly to get to the time in our chat so I can read everything that was said for backup on a change that was made :( Unfortunately I chat w/ this person way too much.
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Anonymous
commented
This is a must have feature. Scrolling back to the old conversation is a big pain (as it only returns one line in search). Also make it easier to navigate back in history wrt Year and Month.
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Nathan
commented
Part of the issue is that fact that you can only effectively return conversation results for the past 30 days. Anything outside of that window returns just a single response if a result is found. You can't even click on the message to take you back to see the context of the conversation.
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Kathleen
commented
Please fix this Microsoft! I just spent 20 minutes manually scrolling back to find a message I sent to a coworker 6 months ago. I know it was 6 months ago because I searched a keyword and was able to find one message from February 6, but of course I was not able to view the whole conversation. I manually scrolled back to the beginning of July and gave up. Luckily I saw the comment from KarenKim and was able to find what I needed that way, but this won't work for all situations.This is a serious flaw.
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James Nair
commented
When will this be fixed? Like Arthur Lee below, I had to spend over an hour searching upwards through the chat window to locate something that I discussed several months previously.
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Arthur Lee
commented
Still hoping to jump to a point of time in the conversation. Holding my breath but I'm running out of air. Please get this feature to us Microsoft!
PgUp or Ctrl+Home a million times to find something from last year just isn't the right solution.
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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 ?