Microsoft Teams - Exporting Chat with history.

How to export an entire Teams chat history with an individual from a Office 365 work account

The following information guide on how to go about exporting Teams chat history from my work Office 365 / Microsoft account. Please note: you will be required to sign in with your AD account and a Microsoft Live account .

This functionality is only available through the web interface at http://teams.microsoft.com. This feature is not available on the desktop app. Teams may return a single message from over a year ago containing that keyword, but there is no ability to view surrounding context messages nor is there an ability to jump directly to that message in our conversation. I just can't keep justifying scrolling back through months or years of individual conversations to find pertinent messages so I can do my job effectively, so I'm planning on exporting my chat conversations with certain individuals so that I can properly search through them for prior messages.

I've found the following support guide which details steps to follow for exporting Teams data in this manner:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/export-or-delete-your-teams-data-1ed6ac68-5fb4-41be-9861-1a4127fecf68

The following is the section relevant to downloading Microsoft Teams chat conversations:

Export and Delete Your Messages and Media from Chats and Communities

To export your messages and media from chat and community:

1. Sign in to the Export page with your Microsoft Account.

2. Select the option to download your Chat history, Media, or both, and then select Submit request. Select Continue when prompted.

3. You will need to check back periodically to the export page on the status of your export, which you can see at the top of the page under Available Exports. A link to download your files will also appear there when they are available to download.

4. Select the Download button to download your files. Availability on web of download is 30 days.

Note. This download is in a .TAR format that can be open native Windows 11 as of October 31, 2023.

How to Open TAR File in Windows 11

To open TAR file Windows 11, you can use the following 2 ways.

Way 1. Use Windows File Explorer

File Explorer is a built-in tool in Windows. We use it to access folders and files in drives. Previously, it only supported opening ZIP files. But at the Microsoft Build developer’s conference in May 2023, Microsoft announced that it would add native RAR and TAR supports to Windows 11.

On October 31, 2023, Microsoft released the Windows 11 update KB5031455, which adds the native RAR and TAR supports to File Explorer. If you have installed this update, you can now open .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz, .rar, and .7z files using File Explorer.

How to open TAR file in Windows 11 using File Explorer? Here are 2 ways.

#1. Right-click the TAR file and choose Extract All.

#2. Open File Explorer, find the TAR file, and click Extract all on the ribbon.

Then, you need to select a place to save the extracted folder.

Way 2. Use Third-Party Software

Many file compression programs can open TAR files like File Viewer Plus, Smith Micro StuffIt, Deluxe, Corel WinZip, RARlab WINRAR, PeaZip, GNU tar, Estsoft Alzip, 7-zip, and Zipeg.

Among these tools, 7-zip is the tool I like most because it is completely open-source and free. Taking 7-zip as an example, to open TAR files using third-party software, the process is as follows:

Download and install the 7-zip tool.
Locate your .tar file on your computer.
Right-click on the .tar file to open the context menu.
Select 7-Zip and then choose either ‘Extract Here’ or ‘Extract to “file_name/”‘.
After the extraction process is complete, access your extracted files in the directory where you chose to extract them.