Tidying your chat list

Finished work piles up. A chat you spent Tuesday on is still sitting at the top of your list on Friday, between you and the thing you are doing now. You can move it out of the way.

Nothing you archive is deleted. That is the first thing to know, because the word "archive" makes people cautious. The chat, its messages and every file it produced stay exactly where they are. Archiving changes one thing: whether the chat appears in your list.

Moving a chat out of the list

Point at a chat in the list. A small × appears at the right-hand end of the row. Press it, and the chat leaves the list.

Two things about that button are deliberate:

• It only appears on a chat that has finished. A chat that is working, waiting for your answer, or queued has no × at all. You cannot tidy away something that is still doing your work.
• It is yours alone. If you share this workspace with colleagues, archiving affects only your list. Nobody else's changes, and nobody is told. It is closer to putting a document back in the drawer than to filing it away for the team.

The count beside Archive, at the bottom of the list, goes up by one.

Getting a chat back

There are two ways, and one of them needs nothing from you.

Open the archive. Press Archive at the bottom of the list. The list is replaced by everything you have archived, newest first, with Back to chats at the top to return. Each row has a Restore chat button on the right — press it and the chat is back in your list, in its proper place by date. If you have not archived anything yet, this reads Nothing archived.

Or just use it again. If an archived chat starts working again — you send it a message, or a scheduled task or an integration wakes it — it returns to your list by itself. You do not have to restore it first, and you will not find work happening in a chat you cannot see.

That second behaviour is not a convenience feature bolted on afterwards. Archiving is worked out from when you last set the chat aside, compared against when it last did something. If the second is later than the first, the chat is not archived any more. There is no separate un-archiving step that could fail and strand a running chat out of sight.

Where this is

The chat list, the archive and its counter are part of the Task view — the layout where your chats sit in a rail down the left-hand side, above your starred files. If your chats appear as tabs along the top instead, you are in the classic layout and there is no archive there.

On a phone, the archive is its own screen: tap More in the tab bar at the bottom, then Archive. The count beside it is how many chats are in there.

One limitation, stated plainly

In a workspace using shared team chats, chats cannot be archived. The × does not appear on any row. Your list will keep growing, and the only way to shorten it today is to stop starting new chats.

This is a real gap rather than a decision, and it comes from how a shared chat is stored: archiving is recorded against your own copy of a chat, and a shared chat does not have one. If this is getting in your way, say so — knowing it matters to somebody is what moves it up the list.