I am not able to copy and paste Teams message with Time and sender name

Tyler Theobald

Prior to this not working, I read many articles where people were asking to not have sender & time pasted.

Some say because if the sender is posting code in multiple postings to the chat, copying the code copies the sender & time (and summary lines) which they have to be removed from the pasted code.

Why people post code in a chat, except to discuss it, "will this work?" is not meant to be. Paste the code file into the Files part of Teams is how they should do it.

Why MS didn't give people the option to copy / not copy sender & time is what pisses me off.

In other words, it's not a bug, it's something people asked for. The problem being that those who used it as it was, weren't asked if they liked it the way "it worked".

And yes, this isn't the place to report bugs. It's a discussion board, is it not?

Inema Eylse, select text with mouse and while holding mouse button down with Ctrl+c sometimes works, and I've found that without continuing to hold mouse button down it sometimes works too.

It seems to depend on where/how you select the text. I sometimes start the selection at the bottom and go up, or at the top down, sometimes it works, sometimes not.

On another issue, I've noticed that if you paste (Ctrl+v) the text you get summary information, like

"I should be good by Lastname, Firstname" (minus the quotes), and the sender's/poster's time are on two different lines like

"Lastname, Firstname

6:11 PM"

I paste my text into an Outlook email and to eliminate the summary line and append the time to the end of the sender's name, two Outlook Find & Replace works:

Eliminate summary lines:

Find (turn ON option use wildcards!):

^13[^32-^126]@ by [A-Z][a-zA-Z -]@, [A-Z][a-zA-Z ()]@^13

Replace with:

^13

Essentially, it finds new-line and at least one (@) printable keyboard characters including space until " by " is found, then cap-alpha followed by multiple characters or hyphen, a comma-space, then cap-alpha plus characters including left-right parenthesis, then new-line. Using the cap-alpha eliminates text containing " by " like "and by the way, do you want to come along".

The above code works for hyphenated names like "Ray-Vaugn, Stevie" and in our org, "Coothrapali, Raj (Contractor)"

====================

Again, with wildcards turned on, append time to senders name:

Find (just the time portion of it and surrounding newlines):

^13([1-9]{1,2}):([0-9]{2}) ([AP]M)^13

Replace with (note there is a preceding space inserted before the \1 to separate the time from Firstname on the previous line). \1 is hours, \2 is minutes, \3 is AM or PM as found:

" \1:\2 \3^13" The quotes are only there to show the preceding space. Do not put the quote marks in the replace box.)

I commented AGAINST this one, as the issue says it is still open:

Copying the selected text should only copy selected text, not sender · Community
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/6186a0fe-f402-ef11-a73d-6045bd7e894e

And voted this one up:

Copying messages no longer includes the who/when context · Community https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/4ed7c52a-af58-ef11-b4ad-0022484d3ecc

The top one has 13 votes to NOT include the sender and time stamp.

The bottom one has 237 votes to bring back the functionality.

But has MS done anything, not yet. This is ridiculous!

A few more thoughts about this problem and the Microsoft community site this issue is posted on.

1. I don't believe the Microsoft developers use their own Teams to communicate with others and then record chats in Azure DevOps for history as we do daily. Else, they wouldn't put up with this new "feature" that seems like one developer added with narrow focus and not much thought to the larger group of users. Breaking basic Windows COPY/PASTE that we've known and relied on for approx. 30 years takes an extremely narrow focus on an uncommon use case for general users, or even developers perhaps.
2. This forum doesn't appear to be the right place to truly report bugs and then let others vote them up for resolution. I don't see any Microsoft representatives taking ownership of the problem and posting feedback. Where can (or has) this bug been properly reported and able to be voted up by the user community?

Many users at our organisation are having the same issue with Ctrl C and Ctrl V not copying the Teams message with the sender, date and time details. The holding of the mouse button whilst selecting Ctrl C and then Pasting with Ctrl V does capture this information, but it is in one long text string that requires editing to make it a readable format.

Please can you look to getting this fixed asap as this is an important feature that is obviously required