Downloading and Organizing all Your Past Tweets on Twitter

Psst . . . I’m planning another book. Well, multiple books, but this one’s different than my normal novels. It’ll be a collection of the microfiction (really, really short stories) I write on Twitter.

I wanted to download all my old Tweets and search for ones with specific hashtags so I can easily choose which pieces of microfiction I want to use in my book. It ended up being a much harder task than I expected.

I decided to make a video for anyone else trying to navigate the craziness of archived Tweets on Twitter . . . and for me, next time I try to do this. I don’t want to have to figure it out all over again!

This 21-minute video will show you how to do the following:

• Download your Twitter archive. In the past, Twitter seems to have let you download a CSV file (which you can open in Microsoft Excel) containing all your Tweets. However, all that was available to me was a JavaScript file called tweet.js, a massive list of gobbledygook. That brings us to the next point on the list.
• Convert the tweet.js Javascript file to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. There are ways to do this for free if you know something about using scripts. That’s beyond my expertise, so I used a website, json-csv.com, to convert. Depending on the size of your Twitter archive, this may be free, or it may cost you $10.
• Organize the Tweets on the CSV/Excel file.
• Filter the Tweets to view only those containing a hashtag of your choice.
• Reformat the Tweets within Excel so they show up with the line breaks you originally used in Twitter.

In the end, you’ll end up with a spreadsheet of Tweets you can read through easily.

These instructions work on Excel 365 for Mac, at least as of today (June 18, 2019).

Here’s the video:

This is the Excel formula you’ll need for inserting line breaks. (See the video for instructions.)

=SUBSTITUTE(G2,”\n”,CHAR(10))

If this blog post helps you, let me know!