Saving Zoom Chat Transcripts

If you’re one of the millions of people who have scheduled or joined a conference call with Zoom, you may have engaged with other attendees in the chat window. Sometimes people share their email addresses or links to websites. However, the chat window is not as interactive as it could be. For example, clicking on an email addresses does not invoke your default email client, and clicking on a link does not invoke your default web browser. Instead, nothing happens. Furthermore, you cannot copy/paste the contents of the chat window. These are features that I hope Zoom will introduce in a future update. But here we are, stuck in the present with a first world problem.

As a workaround, you can manually re-type the information. However, this has 2 main limitations. The first limitation is obviously that you can make a typo or possibly mis-read the information and faithfully re-type what you mis-read. The second limitation is that you must re-type the information before the call ends. As soon as the meeting host ends the call, your session ends, and the chat window disappears. I’ve addressed this second limitation by taking a screenshot of the chat window and then taking my time later on to re-type the information. This is particularly necessary when someone posts a link to Google Docs, Google Sheet, or Google Slides toward the end of a call—those URLs have lengthy alphanumeric strings that are cumbersome to transcribe.

But enough of this silliness with workarounds! I needed to level up my Zoom skills and found that there are 2 ways for you to save a transcript of the chat window. The first is to click on the ellipsis (3 dots) in the chat window. From there, click the “Save Chat” option.

Voila! Your chat will be saved to a plain text (.txt) file in your default location. If you want to change the default save location, go to Preferences > Recording and select the file path under the “Store my recordings at:” option.

The second way of saving your chat transcript is to configure Zoom to do it automatically after every call. To do this, go to https://zoom.us and sign in to your account. Navigate to Settings > In Meeting (Basic) and toggle the “Auto saving chats” option to enable or disable auto-saving your chats. With auto-save enabled, your chat transcript will appear in your default location after the meeting ends.

There are a couple of nuances that are worth mentioning. First, I like how the chat transcripts are saved in a folder that is named by year, month, day, and time so that the transcripts and recordings are saved in chronological order. Second, if nothing was entered in the chat during your call, then no file or folder will be auto-generated. For more information, visit Saving in-meeting chat in the Zoom Help Center.