Slack Export Viewer & Converter (HTML, PDF, CSV, Excel)

About the Slack Export Viewer & Converter (HTML, PDF, CSV, Excel)

Open the ZIP file Slack gives you when a workspace’s data is exported and read it the way you read Slack: channels, private channels, direct and group messages in a sidebar, each conversation with its days, its threads under their first message, reactions, edits, deletions and the names of shared files. Mentions such as <@U02AB…> become names, channel links become #channels, links become links and :shortcodes: become emoji.

Search every message at once and narrow it by conversation, person and date; see how many messages each channel, person and month has; and show times in any time zone. The export is read in your browser, in a background worker that takes the ZIP piece by piece, so even large workspace archives open without being uploaded anywhere.

Common uses

• Reading and searching an old workspace after moving to another chat tool.
• Keeping a readable, offline archive of a closed project or team.
• Finding what was decided in a channel months ago, and who said it.
• Handing over a conversation’s history as a document, spreadsheet or PDF.
• Counting activity per channel, person and month.

What a Slack export contains

As Slack’s help article How to read Slack data exports describes it, the ZIP holds users.json (or org_users.json), channels.json, and — when the export covers them — groups.json for private channels, dms.json and mpims.json for direct and group messages, plus a folder per conversation with one JSON file per day. Which conversations are included depends on your Slack plan and on what Slack approved for your workspace (Export your workspace data).

An export holds no files: shared files and pictures are links to Slack, which open only while the file, the channel and the workspace still exist and you are signed in. The viewer shows each file’s name with its link and never loads pictures or profile photos from the internet, so reading an archive tells no one that you opened it.

How messages are shown

• Threads: replies (messages whose thread_ts is another message’s ts) sit under their first message, which shows how many there are; a reply that was also sent to the channel appears in both places.
• Edits and deletions: an edited message is marked “edited”; a deleted one says so, with its earlier text when the export keeps it.
• Notices: joins, leaves and topic changes are hidden at first; tick Joins, leaves and topic changes at the top to show them as small grey lines.
• Text: bold, italic, strikethrough, code, code blocks and quotes as Slack draws them; <@U…> mentions, <#C…|name> channel links, <url|label> links, @here/@channel and user groups; :shortcode: emoji from the shortcode set Slack uses (skin tones included). A workspace’s own custom emoji stay as :name:, since their pictures are not in the export.
• Time: every time is shown in the time zone you choose (your device’s by default), and days are split in that zone.

Search

Search looks through every message’s text with names resolved, plus file names and link previews. Words match at their start (“launch” finds “launches”) and longer words allow a small typo; every word must be there. Put a phrase in quotes for an exact match. Narrow the search with a conversation, a person and a date range, and choose the best matches or the newest first. On very large archives (more than 150,000 messages) and for scripts written without spaces, such as Chinese or Japanese, the page matches exact text instead of an index.

The files

• HTML: one file with a list of the conversations and each one’s messages, days and folded threads, readable offline in any browser, in light or dark, and printable. It has no script and loads nothing from the internet.
• CSV and Excel: one row per message: conversation, kind, date and time in your time zone, author and ID, text, the thread it belongs to, replies, reactions, files with their links, edited, deleted, subtype and the message ID (ts). In the CSV, text that a spreadsheet would run as a formula starts with an apostrophe; the Excel workbook stores every message as text, so nothing in it runs either. An Excel workbook is made with up to 200,000 messages; export more as CSV, which Excel opens too.
• Text: each conversation as plain lines — time, author, message — with replies indented under their thread.
• Print or PDF: a conversation laid out for paper; choose Save as PDF in the print dialog for a PDF in any script, emoji included.

Limitations

• JSON exports with Slack’s lists of people or conversations (users.json or channels.json) at the top of the ZIP, as workspace exports have; Slack’s text (TXT) exports are not read.
• Every message is kept in your browser’s memory while you read, so how large an export can be depends on the device: very large workspaces (millions of messages) may not fit, especially on phones, and the page says so when an export is too large.
• Files, pictures and custom emoji are not part of an export, so they appear as names and links only.
• Printing is limited to 30,000 messages per conversation; for longer ones, export the HTML file.

Privacy

On this device: nothing is sent

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.