How To Save and Print Text Messages for Court
Welcome to our Decipher Tools tutorial about how to save and print iPhone text messages for court trial or any legal related matter.
We're gonna keep today's instructions short and to the point
so at the end of this quick video you'll be able to instantly save and print your iPhone text messages and attachments.
Keep in mind while we're running today's demo on a Mac, this also works on any Windows computer.
To complete the tutorial you'll need three things: 1. An iPhone or an iPad.
2. A Windows or Mac computer with a copy of iTunes installed.
If you don't currently have iTunes on your computer, you can simply download it from Apple's official website.
3. A copy of Decipher TextMessage.
Decipher TextMessage is the desktop program that lets you export your iPhone text messages to your computer in a PDF document so you can save them for court.
Let's get started! Navigate to your web browser and go to deciphertools.com.
When you land on the deciphertools.com website
you'll notice a little green lock in the toolbar. If you click on that that shows you that the website is encrypted, secure, and trustworthy!
Anytime you're downloading software for the internet you want to make sure the website you're on is secure.
Scroll down, click on Decipher TextMessage and you'll be brought to the Decipher TextMessage product page.
Here you'll see features and also compatibility notes. If you click try for free, you'll be then taken to the download page.
Click download to download Decipher TextMessage.
We're being prompted to download the software for Mac,
however, if you're on a Windows computer your web browser will automatically default to give you the download option for Windows.
If you're on a Mac you can open up the DMG installer and drag the Decipher TextMessage icon into the Applications folder to copy it to your computer.
If you're on a Windows machine, you will download the installation package and run the installer as you would with any normal Windows program.
After the program installs, we're going to go to our Applications folder and double-click on Decipher TextMessage.
Now when the program first opens, you'll notice a little backups loaded window that appears in the background.
This window has information about each of the iTunes backups that are being read into the program,
including things like where the backups are located on your specific computer,
the version of iOS for a backup, and also whatever version of Decipher TextMessage you are running.
Here's the main program window
When you first open the program in this example, you'll see that I already have two iPhones in the program.
This means that in the past. I've previously backed up two different iPhones on my computer.
Now if you launch Decipher TextMessage for the first time and this left-hand column is blank
that simply means that you've never used iTunes to backup a device and you need to backup your phone via iTunes on your computer.
After doing so when you launch the program, you'll see your device here in the left-hand column.
Now if we click on a phone, you'll immediately see all your iPhone contacts in the middle column of the program.
If we select one, let's pick my friend Allison Richards,
you'll see in the far right hand column all the text messages between myself and Allison.
We're running the free trial. The free trial lets you see and save a few text messages from each contact and gives you a good
overall feel for the program and whether it's right for your needs
If you want to access or save all your text messages for court, you can upgrade to the paid version.
Now for today's demo purposes, we're going to go ahead and activate a phone with a license code so we can convert the trial to the paid version of the software.
Once the device has been activated with a license code you'll see a little green check mark on it here.
That means that you're running the full version of the software!
If we click on the phone again, you'll see all your contacts in the middle column. Let's select a contact.
If we scroll up and down in the far right column, you'll see that we're no longer limited to the trial version
and we can see all the text messages
that we've exchanged with Allison. At the bottom it says you have ten total messages and three total images.
One of the special features of
Decipher TextMessage that is useful for court is that the program has a unique preference that will display the contact name and phone number
on every single text message both sent and received.
Even text messages on the iPhone itself and in the messages app are not displayed this way.
This feature of the program is something that many lawyers and courts appreciate since it helps with documentation and
clarification of exactly who sent and received every single text message. Now this feature is on by default,
however you can always double check by simply clicking the preferences and
making sure there's a check mark next to the show contact on every message option.
Follow these specific specific steps of how to Save and Print Text Messages for court.
Step 1. Select a contact. Step 2. Select "Export" from the menu.
Step 3. Choose "current conversation" and select PDF.
You'll then be prompted to where on your computer would you like to save the text messages.
Step 4. Choose "desktop" to save the text messages to your computer. We're going to save them to our desktop because it's convenient.
Once you save the PDF of your text messages for court, the program will automatically launch a window containing the PDF document for convenience.
Step 5. Double-click to open the PDF document containing your court-related text messages.
You'll see that the text messages with Allison were saved in chat bubble format
and they have the contact name and phone number on every single text message
Notice too that your photo attachments are inline with all the messages.
Step 6. Choose Print and print the text messages for court or trial.
You can also email them to your lawyer or anyone related to your court or legal case. It's that easy!
Now a few quick additional features to keep in mind if you don't want to export all your text messages
and you only have a few messages that you want to export, you can simply use the export date range option.
Now in this case, let's say we want to export text messages for selected dates between myself and Chelsea.
We would navigate again to the export menu choose "export current conversation", however this time we would choose the "PDF date range" option.
A little calendar will pop up and you can choose the exact dates for which messages you want to save.
I'm going to only export text messages from April 24, 2018.
We'll select that specific day and then we'll choose export
We now pick a place on our computer where we want to save the exported PDF with the text messages
A window will open up.
You can double-click on the file and you'll see all our text messages are exported for the one single day.
Again, all the text messages have the name and phone number on them and any image attachments are inline
with the messages just as they would be on your phone.
It's that easy!
One last thing to keep in mind
When you use Decipher TextMessage to export or print your text messages for court,
all of your text message data is private and local to your computer. Nothing is stored on servers or in the cloud!
The user is in complete control.
We hope today's quick overview about how to save text messages for court has been helpful!
If you have any questions
simply contact us via our support page or leave a comment here and we'll reply.
You can also navigate to deciphertools.com and select the reviews page.
Here you'll find over a thousand Facebook
testimonials from Decipher Tools customers,
many of whom have successfully used Decipher TextMessage to save and print their important text messages for court or legal matters!