How to Save a Zoom Meeting Chat

With a good bit of the work at Duke and beyond occurring virtually, we’ve likely all be in a situation where something useful or illuminating shows up in the rolling chat that accompanies a Zoom meeting.

Perhaps that’s a link or helpful insights from fellow attendees, or an involved conversation you want to reference later.

“In large meetings, when people can be more comfortable communicating in the chat, that’s where you can find honest and interesting conversations,” Debbie Suggs, senior IT analyst for Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) and one of Duke’s Zoom experts.

But when a Zoom meeting ends, unless someone takes steps to save it, that chat is gone, along with all of the useful stuff in it.

How can you preserve the chats that unfold in Zoom? According to Suggs, there are three good ways to do it.

1. Perhaps simplest way, is to highlight all of the text in the chat, copy it, and paste it into a Microsoft Word document or text file. The end result may look clunky, but you’ll have everything you need, including any private chats you were involved in.
2. Zoom offers a way to save the chat with a few clicks. During a meeting, a user can click on the chat button along the bottom of the meeting window. Then, click on the three dots at the lower right corner of the chat. Select “save chat” on the drop-down list and it will preserve the entire chat, including your private conversations, in a text file, which you can save on your computer.
3. You can include the chat in a recording of any Zoom meeting. Just be sure to go into the “settings” menu in your Zoom client, click on “recording,” and make sure the box next to “save chat messages from meeting / webinar” is checked. But as the meeting host, the chat you save will only have public comments.

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