Picture this: it’s January 2019, and you’ve made a resolution to be more tidy this year. You’ve just hidden a bunch of old chats in Microsoft Teams, but alas! You need to reference one of them and cannot find it again for the life of you. Fear not! We’ll walk through how to hide and unhide chats in this blog post.
To hide a chat, head over to Chats, then select the “…” button, and click “Hide”:
Now your Chat area looks like this:
To unhide a chat, simply search for the chat in the search box and select it:
Click the “…” next to the chat and select “Unhide”:
Voila!
To unhide GROUP chats, follow the same instructions as above, but search for the names of the people included in the group:
How do you unhide a group chat?
Great question! I just tested this myself, and created a group chat with two coworkers, Corey and Kari, then hid the chat. To unhide it, I searched for “Corey and Kari” (Corey Kari and Kari Corey, etc, also all work). I’ve updated the blog post above with a screenshot of this search–it’s at the bottom of the post.
From there you just select the chat, and use the “…” button to unhide it again as described in the blog post. I hope that helps!
This is assuming you remember all of the participants in the original Group Chat… Unfortunately, I have some Group Chats with 10-15 people in them. I can’t hide these because I’ll never be able to find them again without knowing the exact participants… Teams really needs a way to view all hidden chats and allow you to selectively unhide them without having to search for them.
Hi Marcus,
I just tested this again to confirm, but for whatever reason, I’m able to enter in just ONE participant in the search and the group chat does appear in the results. I completely agree, though–this is a glaring omission from Microsoft!
@Megan,
this worked for me as well!
I agree, this is a BIG HOLE in TEAMS, and this is supposed to be world class software? I just want to unhide all my chats… who can remember what they hide in trying to clean up space… not good.
hi, how to get back hidden conversation from the groups?
unhide solution not help.
How about unhide in the Mobile App? I tried doing the steps but there seems to be no option to unhide in the mobile platform (im using android in my case)
Unfortunately, I don’t have an android to test on, but on my iPhone I could not figure out how to permanently unhide chats from the mobile app. You CAN temporarily see hidden chats with a single user by searching for the person’s name, selecting it, then selecting the chat button on their “profile”. This does not seem to work for group chats on the mobile app. I just hid a group chat to test, however, and it did say that it would “unhide” itself if someone posts a new message to it..
Try swiping left on the chat in the iOS app (it works for me).
I do not see an area to hide a chat, I am looking at the individual person chat, not team chat.
Hi Sylvia,
Please feel free to send me a screenshot of the window you’re talking about at megan@marksgroup.net. This guide does also cover individual chats within Microsoft Teams–you should be able to follow the same steps.
Hi, there,
Does anyone know if after you hide a chat, if you will still get notifications in that chat if someone sends a new message in it?
yes. the chat will reappear on the left column.
I would like to hide a chat and NOT get notifications. I don’t want to delete the chat. For example, The group is in a meeting that I am not participating in. I have hidden the chat, but with each comment, the chat keeps reappearing. I want to be able to review the conversation later, but not have it reappear after I have hidden it.
Ellen you will also want to Mute the chat then. If you mute it, you won’t get any notifications.
“To unhide a chat, simply search for the chat in the search box and select it:”
yeah…good luck with that. Doesn’t work
Hi Robyn,
Sorry, I’m not able to replicate that issue. I just tested this again and was able to unhide a hidden chat by searching for and selecting a chat participant, then following the other steps above. Are you not seeing any search results?
Robyn is right, does not work at all.
Hi Richard,
I just went through the process as described and can verify that it works for me. What isn’t working for you?
Thanks
Yes Richard and Robyn are right, it is not working and i am unable to unhide the chat/person.
Hi Navya,
I’m still able to hide and unhide chats this way. Could you describe what step isn’t working for you?
Having the same issue:
– Search for person in chat
– Get a list of messages, choose one
– Chat opens, with only messages on the left pane.
– The view in your 4th screenshot doesn’t appear at all.
– Can’t find any way to get to “unhide”.
Hi Ken, and anyone else not able to unhide chats,
I’m still able to unhide chats this way, so I’m not sure if this is a version discrepancy issue (as in, they removed the ability to unhide/hide chats), or it’s a bug.. I would try the same behavior in the web app and see if that works, and if not, I would consider opening a ticket with Microsoft. Thanks and good luck.
What if you forget what chats you have hidden and want to unhide them later in the future? How do you see a list of all the hidden chats?
Hi Vivek,
Unfortunately Microsoft still hasn’t released a feature for that yet–right now, this is the only way that I’m aware of to hide/unhide chats, and there’s no way to display a list of them.
Is hide the only option to remove the chats? Is there a way to delete them?
Hi Michael,
I looked into this, and it turns out that chats cannot be truly deleted due to legal reasons – MS Teams UserVoice: Delete Private Chat threads
I’m not wanting to see the last chat I was involved when whenever I go to chat. Is there a way to make it not display last message as default? Meaning every time I open Teams it opens to the last conversation. That’s kind of like everytime you visit someone you are forced to re listen to the last conversation you had with the last person you saw, instead of having a conversation with the person you are wanting to have a conversation with, kind of annoying
I agree. I want to see my colleagues’ availability in the left column, but not have to have an entire chat string open all the time (like Skype). Having all that clutter is very annoying and distracting.
Here’s a crappy workaround.
You can create a new chat with at least two other people (so it can be renamed), rename it “Blank” or “Start” or whatever, then pin the chat. You can then remove one of the two other people from the chat, but the other (third) person will need to Leave themselves, since you apparently can’t remove all other parties from a chat. It’ll appear above the Recent section, but unfortunately there’s no way to set the Chat tab to default to view any particular upon startup.
What is so hard about just adding a group for Hidden chats? There is a Pinned and Recent groups that can be folded up but not for Hidden? Pretty simple to implement MS! Not everyone can remember everyone’s name or chat topic that they might have hidden just to unclutter their chat list.
Bring the best of Lync for Business into Teams maybe???
Is there a way to Unhide a Meeting?
Hi Kari,
Apologies for the delayed response–did you figure this out? As far as I know, there’s no way to hide a meeting, so I’m curious what happened here
but how if you forget the name
Hi Agatha,
Unfortunately this is the only way to currently unhide a chat at this time
Hi, How do you unhide a channel in a Team? They seem to automatically hide when they are added. Is there a way to make sure they are all unhidden for everyone beforehand? To not do it on an individual basis?
Hi Jill,
There is a small checkbox in the window that pops up when you click “Add Channel”, “automatically show this channel in everyone’s lists”–maybe try that? The test channels I’m adding now all seem to be unhidden by default. Good luck!
Is there a shortcut to hide a chat conversation?
Unfortunately not at this time–as far as I’m aware this is the only way to hide/unhide chats
I need to unhide all my chats how do I do it.
Hi,
Microsoft has not made this possible at this time unfortunately–this tip is the only workaround I know of. Thanks
I am not able to unhide a chat. Like said before- not working. Person doesn’t show up in a search.
Hi Skocha,
If this is still not working for you I’d suggest opening a ticket with Microsoft–this method should still be working in 2020. Thanks
Same here!
How do I retrieve an old chat with a colleague from 2019 without having to scroll all the way back? I have gone into our chat and hit CTRL + F using a keyword and found the conversation I am after …. however it does not let me open conversation or if I hit the hyperlink it takes me to our whole conversation history (which is not what I want). I just want the spiel from 2019.
Hi Tee,
I would have suggested exactly what you did (Ctrl+F)–so when you select the conversation preview in the results it takes you to the very beginning of your chat history with them? It’s supposed to hyperlink back to that specific part of your conversation. That almost sounds like a bug, maybe contact Microsoft if you find yourself in this situation again. Good luck!