Teams Chat - copy/paste

For enterprise environment having a copy/paste time and date stamp on data that is captured or used to document actions is just common practice and extremely useful.

I don't understand how a simple process can be made so difficult. Please return this functionality.

The logic of this decision eludes me. Why would Teams copy/paste not behave in the same way as every other application? Whatever I have selected should be what I have copied. If I only want the body of a message, then that's what I select to copy. If I select an entire conversation and copy it, part of that chat conversation is the record of who said something. Pasting a chat that shows no indication of WHO made each entry leads only to a complete lack of clarity about what took place in a conversation.

Please revert this change. Or give us options we can choose regarding behavior of copy/paste in Teams.

The issue you are reporting is a feature change deployed by Microsoft.

Affected services: Microsoft Teams

Status: Service degradation

Issue type: Advisory

Start time: Aug 28, 2024, 3:31 PM EDT

More info

This change in behavior removed metadata such as timestamps, sender name, and reactions for text copied within the Microsoft Teams desktop and web clients. We recommend alternative methods for capturing metadata: the Forward feature for message transfer between chats and the Teams Export API for conversation extraction. These tools are more robust and prevent manipulation of message content.

Scope of impact

Any user copying messages in the Microsoft Teams desktop and web clients may experience this intentional change to declutter the content of pasted messages.

Root cause

A by-design change in behavior reduced the noise of messages copied from Microsoft Teams by removing metadata, such as timestamps, the sender’s name, and reactions, in the text that is pasted.

Current status

Aug 28, 2024, 5:19 PM EDT

In response to feedback that most users prefer to copy and paste messages without extra clutter, a recent service update purposefully streamlined the experience of copying messages in Microsoft Teams by removing metadata, such as timestamps, the sender’s name, and reactions, in the text that's pasted. We implemented this change in lower deployment rings, and feedback during this period gave us confidence that most users prefer this cleaner experience without the need for additional options. Therefore, we won’t be reverting this change in behavior. This message is intended to provide information regarding the context of the service improvement and ensure that users and admins are aware that this simplification of the copy functionality was intentional. This message will remain active for a week to ensure users and admins can review this information before the communication is closed.

Next update by:

Wednesday, September 4, 2024 at 5:30 PM EDT

Yeah it's a real shame they mucked this up so much. Even with the workaround to get the metadata it's still formatted so strange, with summaries for each message inline with the rest.

I will say, I've had some decent results with pasting the garbled message into copilot and asking it to clean it up.

Turned this mess:

Tuesday 10:15 AM

Jones, Fred

hi Val

did you get my email about the application ... by Jones, Fred

Tuesday 10:15 AM

Jones, Fred

did you get my email about the application yesterday?

Yea I did but busy this week didn’t get a c... by Smith, Valery

Smith, Valery

Tuesday 12:47 PM

Yea I did but busy this week didn’t get a chance to read it

Into this:

Tuesday 10:15 AM
Jones, Fred:
Hi Val, did you get my email about the application yesterday?

Tuesday 12:47 PM
Smith, Valery:
Yeah, I did, but I’ve been busy this week and haven’t had a chance to read it.

Regular copy/paste option does not work as an offered work-around,
hope this is solved quickly; it is very annoying