Save and access the Zoom chat transcript

Often there is important information that is conveyed in a chat in Zoom. You can save the text of the chat to access this information later. Zoom can automatically save the text of the chat from each meeting that you host so that you don’t have to remember to do so each time. Here’s how you set it up.

1. Log in to zoom.umn.edu

2. Click the Settings button in the menu at left and then the link to “In Meeting (Basic):

3. Scroll just a bit until you see the toggle for “Auto saving chats” and make sure the toggle switch is on:

Now whenever you close a meeting, the chat is saved automatically. Zoom creates a plain text file with the text of the chat, including the time of each entry, the name of the contributor, and the text:

But where is it saved? How do you find this text file? 

By default, Zoom creates a “Zoom” folder within the Documents folder of your computer. For each session, Zoom creates a sub-folder within this folder and places the text file of the chat into it. This is also the folder into which Zoom places the recorded video of the meeting if you elect to record the meeting and save the video to your computer.

Open your Documents folder, locate and open the Zoom folder. The folder for each session is labeled with the date and time of the session and the name of the meeting. The text file containing the chat is located within this folder.

Here is what it looks like on a Mac:

And it looks like this in Windows:

You now have a record of the conversation that took place within the chat of your meeting.

You can open this file now in a text editor or even in Excel.