Find messages in Slack based on a date or date range

I often find myself needing to find a conversation that happened on a specific date in Slack (a critical part of my digital tool stack) but can't remember keywords from the conversation or who all was in the conversation.

Here are two quick ways to find a conversation in Slack based on a known date or date range.

Jump to date via UI

I can usually remember around the time something happened (or use GitHub merge information) and I'll want to find a conversation that happened in Slack around it.

There's an easy way to Jump to date within a channel or direct message:

• Open the channel or direct message where you want to jump to date
• Find any date in the channel or direct message
• Click it
• Select Jump to a specific date
• This will give you a date picker
• Select the date (or around the date) you want

Search all messages in all channels or direct messages by range

If you can't quite remember which channel or specific day a conversation happened but remember it happened within a range, you can use Slack's Search feature.

Let's say you remember you had a conversation in the first week of July of 2022.

• select the search bar in the top of the Slack UI
• type after:2022-07-01 before:2022-07-05 and hit enter

This will return all results after July 1st and before July 5th.