The immediacy of Instant Messaging (IM) makes it an excellent form of communication. Once downfall of IM is that your messages are not automatically saved, like they would be in email. Using the following method, you can save any IM.

Finish Your Conversation</b> : Once you finish your conversation, before you close the window of the current conversation, go to the file menu (image 1) and select Save As.

Specify Location To Save : Next, specify the location to save the file. If you intend to do this often, I would suggest creating a folder to save all of these files in and name it IM Conversations or something else that would be relevant to you. You specify the location to save the file by selecting the location from the Save In menu (see image 2).

Name Your File : I would suggest including who the conversation was with and the date in the file name. This would help you later when you want to remember who you were talking to. In my example (see image 3, I simply named the file Conversation).

Open and Read Your File : Now that you have saved your conversation, go to the Folder or location that you saved your file in (see image 4 below) and double click on the file. The file will then open as a text document with everything that was said in that conversation (see image 5 below). You can now print the file by going to the File Menu and selecting print.

Have a question? Found this useful? Let me know at .