How to search for stuff in your old Skype messages [Solved]

When searching through old Skype messages it’s often difficult because you need to know exactly which chat or chat-group the message was in before being able to press Ctrl-F to find the text that you are looking for.  So, if you have a lot of chats or chat groups then this can be an impossible task. 

Here’s an easy method to search all your messages for specific test without knowing the specifics about which chat it was in.

 

 

 

Skype stores all its information about past chat in a database called SQLite.  So, you need to use a free database browser called SqliteBrowser to use browse/search/extract the data.
Download SqliteBrowser for free from here [7MB]:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser

Open your Skype account’s database file eg: C:\Users\<<your windows username>>\AppData\Roaming\Skype\>>your Skype username>>\main.db
The messages are stored in the “Messages” table.
If your sql statement writing skills are good then use the “Execute SQL” tab to find the information,
OR, if your Excel filtering skills are better than your sql skills, then you can export the data to a .csv file and then process it using Excel:
File->Export->Table as csv file->select “Messages” table and give it a filename.

Open the csv file in Excel and use its search and/or filter tools to find the data that you are looking for.

Hope this helps?  Tell me in the comments…