New for Slack: Search Faster With Redesigned Filters and Share Files in Threads
Slack's grown from a simple team chat app to a powerful productivity tool that includes a wide range of features to help your team communicate more efficiently. This week, it's gained two new features that will help you in small ways.
First up, search. Searching through your files and messages, can often be an exercise in frustration. That’s especially true in apps with lots of data, such as team chat apps like Slack with thousands of new messages from your team each day.
Slack’s newly redesigned search pane is designed to help. Click the search box in the top left to open Slack's new full-screen search pane. As you type your query, Slack automatically shows matching people, groups, channels, and files by default. You can select the item you want to jump directly to that person’s messages or to open the document Slack uncovered.
Need more results? Press enter after typing, and Slack’s full search pane opens as in the animation above. Much like Slack’s previous search sidebar, you’ll see search results from actual Slack conversations in the main portion of the popover. These results are sorted by relevance with Slack deciding which channels and people it thinks you’re most likely to want to see. You can then filter down on the sidebar, with checkboxes for people, channels, and direct messages, again showing first the people you chat with the most. Alternatively, add a start and end date to look through messages from a specific timeframe.
Slack Search works much the same as before, using search modifiers such as from:@name or in:#channel to filter through your results. You can still type those in the search to quickly filter through results. The new quick access filters, though, can speed up your search work and help you find the message you need in Slack’s archive haystack faster than ever.
Starting today, you can upload files and images to a thread. No, really — we’re not stringing you along. More about this and other threads improvements: https://t.co/4imOPKQy2Z pic.twitter.com/fPA18nVusS
— Slack (@SlackHQ) July 23, 2018
Then, threads got an overhaul. Slack's the perfect place for your text chats and attachments—unless you're talking in a thread. There, you couldn't share files unless you share them in the channel then copy a link into your thread.
That changes today. Slack now includes a + button to upload files from the chat box in both channels and threads—or you can drag-and-drop a file into a thread to share it directly. Whenever someone replies to your file, those messages will stay in the file's thread instead of filling up your channel with messages that others might not understand.
It is yet another way to keep your Slack chat conversations tidy and focused on getting work done faster.
Header graphic via the Slack Blog