How to Export Teams Chat History (and Save a Chat on iPhone)

Teams won't export a work or school chat for you: there's no export button, no print button, and "Save this message" isn't a copy. Personal Teams is the exception: you can request your whole chat history from Microsoft. For a work chat, record your screen with TextPort on your iPhone and export a PDF, if your employer allows screen capture.

That recording is the best copy you can keep yourself, because nothing in Teams copies a whole work chat for you. Which route you have depends on the account and the device:

"Save this message" is a bookmark, not a copy

If you're keeping a record of what a coworker or manager wrote, this is the part to know first.

In Teams, you save a message by hovering over it and choosing More options > Save this message. It then shows up in a Saved section at the top of your chat list. That looks like a copy. It isn't. Microsoft's help page says: "If the author of the message edits the message after it's saved, the saved message will reflect those edits." And if the author deletes it, the item stays in Saved with the note "Message has been deleted by author."

If you need the words someone actually sent, keep a copy outside Teams before anything changes.

Personal Teams: export your chat history

Microsoft's export steps "apply to Microsoft Teams for personal use only," its support page says. If you sign in to Teams with a personal Microsoft account, here's how:

1. Sign in to Microsoft's Export page with your Microsoft account.
2. Choose Chat history, Media, or both.
3. Select Submit request, then Continue when asked. Your call log comes with it.
4. Check back on the Export page. Your request shows under Available Exports, and a download link appears there when the files are ready.
5. Select Download.

Microsoft doesn't say how long this takes. The download is a .tar file, and your messages are in a messages.json file inside it. You choose Chat history, Media or both, not a single chat: you get your whole history. That's fine as a backup. But if you need to hand someone one conversation, you'll have to pull it out of the download yourself. If you were removed from a community, you can't export that community's data.

Work or school account: what Teams lets you do yourself

Without admin rights, these are the tools you can use yourself:

• Share to Outlook emails a copy of one chat message. On a computer, hover over the message and select More options > Share to Outlook. Microsoft notes: "The Share to Outlook feature is currently not supported on mobile."
• Copy works one message at a time on an iPhone. Microsoft's steps: "press and hold the message and choose Copy text." On a computer, you can select text and copy it with the usual keyboard shortcuts, then paste it into a document. Check what you pasted against the chat, since you'll want the names and times next to each message.

On an iPhone, neither one gives you a whole conversation in one file.

How to print a Teams chat

Microsoft's Print chat page says it plainly: "Printing chats directly from Teams is not possible at this time." Its workaround uses Teams for the web in a browser:

1. Sign in to Teams for the web and open the chat.
2. Press Ctrl+P, or open the browser's menu in the upper right and select Print.
3. If the page gets cut off in Portrait, switch to Landscape.

Microsoft adds: "You can only print one page at a time." To get a file instead of paper, pick Save as PDF as the printer in the print window. That's Microsoft's only print route, so for a long chat it takes a long time.

What your employer can export

Your employer has tools you don't. They're worth knowing about if a conversation turns into a formal dispute:

• eDiscovery in Microsoft Purview. Microsoft describes it as the way to "preserve, collect, review, and export content from Microsoft Teams" (Microsoft Learn). The search needs an account "assigned eDiscovery permissions." Teams messages come out in an Excel file and a .pst file that opens in Outlook. A one-to-one chat is stored in the mailbox of every person in it.
• Teams Export APIs. These are tools for administrators. They pull one-to-one chat, group chat, meeting chat and channel messages, and "Only an administrator can approve application permissions" (Microsoft Learn).

If you're in a dispute with your employer, HR or a lawyer can tell you how a record like this is requested.

Your employer can block screenshots of Teams on iPhone

Employers that use Microsoft Intune can put an app protection policy on your work account, and that policy has a Screen capture setting. Set to Block, it stops "screen capture of work or school data," including "Screenshots" and "On-device screen recording" (Microsoft Learn). Allow is the default, so it applies only if your employer chose Block. Microsoft lists Teams for iOS among the apps these policies cover. The same policy can block printing and copy and paste of work data.

If a screenshot or screen recording doesn't capture your work chat, or your workplace rules say work chats stay at work, don't look for a way around it. Use the employer route above instead.

Save a Teams chat as a PDF on iPhone with TextPort

If screen capture is allowed, this is the only route on this page that gets a whole work chat into one file from your phone. TextPort lists Teams in its chat picker. You record your screen while you scroll through the chat, and TextPort turns the video into a chat you can search, fix and export.

1. Open TextPort and tap Add Chat.
2. Tap the app name at the top and pick Teams.
3. Tap On Your iPhone, then the blue Start Screen Recording button.
4. Make sure TextPort is selected and tap Start Broadcast. TextPort can open Teams for you.
5. Open the chat and scroll down, from oldest to newest. Keep each message on screen for about one second.
6. Go back to TextPort and tap Stop Recording. Drag the yellow handles so the video starts and ends on the chat, then tap Start Processing.

The recorder stops by itself after 15 minutes, so split a longer chat into two recordings. The Scroll Capture guide has every screen. Prefer screenshots? Use the Screenshots tab instead, and overlap them so the last message in one is the first in the next. Either way, keep dates and times on screen when you can, because TextPort uses them. The same recording works for other chat apps too, like Discord and ChatGPT.

Then open the chat in TextPort and check it against Teams. Long press a message to fix its text or time, or to delete it. When it matches, tap Export and pick PDF, Print, Spreadsheet or Text. The PDF guide shows how to share it or save it to Files. Keep the chat in Teams too, as long as you still have access. It's the original your copy came from.

If you're documenting harassment at work, documenting harassment for HR covers how to put the record together, and Can Text Messages Be Used in Court? explains how messages are used as evidence. You can import your first three conversations for free.