Remove a document from conversation in Teams

Teams file no remove

Hello there,

A little tip I found useful while working with files in a Microsoft Teams conversation.
You can upload a file to the conversation using the attachment in your post or directly drag and dropping inside the Files tab.
If your document comes from your computer, the file will be copied to a special folder in your OneDrive called “Microsoft Teams Chat Files” with the right permissions.

If you want to remove that file from the conversation, from the File tab you won’t find any help. Even if you remove the permissions, the file will remains in the Files tab

The way to achieve a file removal from your conversations is not very intuitive, we might actually see some improvement from the Microsoft team…
You have to delete the message in the conversation tab, then your file will be removed from the Files tab 😉

Remove file from Teams conversation

At this point, the file will be removed from the conversation and the Files tab.

Hope this helps, see you soon in the blog section !

Comments

  1. Paul

    To complete the procedure, you will still need to remove the share or delete the file from the folder: “Microsoft Teams Chat Files”.
    As you share a file through Teams chat, a copy is place in your folder “Microsoft Teams Chat Files” and it is shared with the people in the chat. If a user copied the link to the file or if he goes to his OneDrive- files shared with me he can still access the shared file.
    So, in order to remove the shared file completely you will need to do the following:
    1- Delete the message from teams as in the above procedure. This will ensure that the file is removed from the Files section in the chat.
    2- Go to the folder “Microsoft Teams Chat Files” and either
    a. Delete the file. This is a copy of the original file that is place in this folder for sharing through teams.
    Or
    b. Remove the share. This will keep a copy of the file, you can do that if you want to remove a specific person from the shared to. For example, if you shared the same file twice, you may want to keep the file and just remove the person from the shared access.
    Hope this helps.

    1. Post
      Author
      Antoine

      Thank you Paul for this comment !
      You are right, once you removed the document from the conversation it is a good practice to remove it from OneDrive as well 🙂

  2. ivano

    I need to cancel a file in the file section of a team Group. Can I have the possibility to take it off,? for me it’s impossible to find all the messages in which they have been charged the files in the chat.

    1. Post
      Author
      Antoine

      Hey, Ivano. You can use the command box on the top of the application to search for keywords related like “file”.
      Agreed, the experience is not perfect right now… 🙁

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