How to Connect Quip to Slack for Document Conversion

How to Connect Quip to Slack for Document Conversion

Before anyone on your team can convert a Quip document into a Slack canvas, a Quip admin and a Slack admin must complete a two-sided connection handshake. The Quip admin sends the request; the Slack admin approves it. Until both sides are done, the conversion feature stays locked.

Salesforce is retiring all Quip products — subscriptions cannot be renewed after March 1, 2027. To help teams transition, Salesforce built a native conversion tool that turns Quip documents into Slack canvases. But nothing works until this admin-level connection is configured. This guide covers every prerequisite, both sides of the setup flow, how email-based account mapping works, and every admin control available after the connection is live. (help.salesforce.com)

For the broader migration picture — what survives conversion, what breaks, and how to handle content that doesn't fit canvas — see our Quip to Slack Canvases migration guide.

What are the prerequisites for connecting Quip to Slack?

Quip-to-Slack document conversion is Salesforce's in-product flow for turning compatible Quip documents into Slack canvases, preserving text content, comments, and @mentions. Before you touch any admin settings, confirm these requirements are met on both sides.

Quip-side requirements

• You must be on a paid Quip team (Quip Starter, Plus, or Advanced). Free Quip accounts cannot initiate the connection. (slack.com)
• The configuring admin must hold a Site Admin or Super Admin role. Admins using a custom role need edit access to Slack Conversion Settings permissions specifically. (help.salesforce.com)
• You need your Slack workspace's Team ID and URL before you begin. Collect these from the Slack side first.

Terminology note: Salesforce documentation uses "Quip site" and "Quip team" to refer to the same entity — your organization's Quip instance. These terms are interchangeable in this context.

Slack-side requirements

Not every Slack role can approve the incoming connection request. Approval is limited to specific roles on specific plans:

On Pro and Business+ plans, the approval lives at the workspace level. On Enterprise Grid, the approval lives at the organization level — you navigate through Organization settings, not workspace-level admin. Salesforce Admins can also manage the connection, but note this is a specific system role assigned within Slack's admin settings, not a generic Salesforce CRM admin. (slack.com)

Cross-team coordination

In most organizations the Quip admin and the Slack admin are different people — sometimes in different departments. The Quip admin sends the request; the Slack admin approves it. If these two don't coordinate, the request sits in a queue and expires after 7 days. Get both admins aligned before you initiate the flow.

During the 7-day pending window, the Quip document is not locked. Users can continue editing normally. The pending connection status does not affect document availability, editability, or sharing. Only after approval and account matching does the conversion option become available to end users.

Do not confuse this connection with the older Quip for Slack integration. That integration covers link previews, slash commands, and notifications. The conversion connection described here is a separate admin flow with a separate approval process. (help.salesforce.com)

Destination constraint

A single Quip site can connect to only one Slack workspace or Slack organization at a time. If your company runs multiple Slack workspaces outside an Enterprise Grid org, you must pick one. A Quip managed or child site also cannot connect to the same Slack workspace as its parent site. (help.salesforce.com)

Treat the destination decision as architecture, not data entry. The one-to-one limit is the kind of detail teams discover after someone already sent the request to the wrong Slack org.

How to find your Slack Team ID and workspace URL

Slack Team ID is the unique identifier for your workspace or organization. Workspace IDs start with T; enterprise org IDs start with E. You'll enter it in the Quip admin console to establish the connection.

Workspace ID example:  T01234567
Enterprise org ID:     E01234567
Workspace URL example: acme.slack.com

To find these values:

1. Open a web browser and sign in to your Slack workspace.
2. Look at the URL in the address bar. It follows the format app.slack.com/client/TXXXXXXXX/... (or E... for an Enterprise Grid org).
3. Copy the string starting with T or E — that's your Team ID.
4. Your Slack URL is the workspace address (e.g., yourcompany.slack.com). You can find this by clicking the workspace name in the top-left corner of Slack.

(slack.com)

Write both values down. You'll paste them into the Quip admin console in the next step.

Step 1: Send the connection request from Quip

This is the Quip admin's job. The entire request originates from the Quip admin console — Slack cannot initiate the connection.

1. Sign in to Quip as an admin and open the Admin Console.
2. Navigate to Slack Conversion > Settings in the left sidebar.
3. In the Quip to Slack Connection section, fill in three fields:
   • Slack Team ID (required)
   • Slack URL (required)
   • Preferred Email Domain (optional — explained below)
4. Click Send Connection Request.
5. In the confirmation dialog, click Send Request. This sends a connection request to your Slack workspace admin for approval.

(slack.com)

After you submit, the request goes to Slack for approval and expires after 7 days if nobody approves or denies it. If the request expires, the Quip admin console returns to an unsent state — there is no lockout period, and you can submit a new request immediately. You'll receive an email notification once the request is approved or denied, and you can check the current status (pending, approved, denied, expired) from the same settings page at any time.

Before approval, the Quip admin console also lets you preconfigure rollout controls on the same settings page: whether conversions are allowed at all, whether users can undo a conversion, and whether conversion should be restricted to an allow-list. These settings can be staged before approval but do not take effect until the Slack admin approves the connection and account matching completes. (help.salesforce.com)

What does the Preferred Email Domain field do?

Preferred Email Domain is an optional setting that tells the matching system which email address to prioritize when a Quip user has multiple addresses that each map to a different Slack account. It is a tie-breaker, not a directory sync — it does not create a match where no Slack user exists for that person, and it does not support alias resolution or cross-domain identity reconciliation.

Example: A user named Jane has both jane@acme.com and jane@subsidiary.com on her Quip profile. Both emails correspond to active Slack accounts in the connected workspace. If you set acme.com as the preferred domain, the system matches to the jane@acme.com Slack account.

If you leave this blank and a user has multiple matches, they'll be flagged as unmatched and the admin will need to resolve them manually. (help.salesforce.com)

Step 2: Approve the connection request in Slack

Once the Quip admin sends the request, a Slack admin must approve it. The approval path differs by Slack plan.

Pro and Business+

1. From your desktop, click Admin in the sidebar.
2. Select Manage Salesforce Organizations.
3. Below Salesforce in the left sidebar, select Quip.
4. Click the three dots icon next to the pending request and approve it.

Enterprise Grid

1. From the Home tab, click your organization name in the sidebar.
2. Hover over Tools & settings, then click Organization settings.
3. Click Salesforce, then select Quip.
4. Click the three dots icon next to the pending request and approve it.

(slack.com)

Once approved, Quip admins receive an email notification and account mapping between Quip and Slack begins automatically. Account matching typically completes within minutes to a few hours depending on directory size, though Salesforce does not publish a formal SLA for this step. A confirmation banner appears in the Quip admin console under Slack Conversion > Account Matching when matching is complete.

If the Slack admin denies the request, the Quip admin console displays a "denied" status on the settings page and the Quip admin receives an email notification. A new request can be submitted immediately.

How account mapping by email works

Account mapping is the automatic process that links each Quip user to their corresponding Slack identity using email addresses. It runs immediately after the Slack admin approves the connection request. A banner appears on the Slack conversion settings page in the Quip admin console confirming that matching is in progress. (help.salesforce.com)

The matching logic is stricter than many admins expect:

A Quip user can only be linked to one Slack user within a given workspace. If someone has two Slack accounts in the same workspace (common in messy directories), only one will match. (help.salesforce.com)

Why unmatched users block conversion

In a Slack canvas, every piece of content — text, @mentions, comments — must be attributed to a real Slack user. If a Quip document includes contributions from someone with no matching Slack account, that content would become orphaned. Salesforce blocks conversion of documents containing unmatched-user content to prevent this.

Unmatched user failure modes and remediation

What happens to permissions during conversion

Account mapping also governs access control in the converted canvas. The following permission changes occur automatically at conversion time:

No users gain elevated permissions through conversion. Once the canvas exists in Slack, canvas owners can manually adjust sharing using Slack's native permissions. (help.salesforce.com)

The conversion undo mechanism

When Allow conversion undo is enabled, a user who initiated the conversion can reverse it. Undoing a conversion:

• Deletes the Slack canvas permanently
• Restores the original Quip document to editable status
• Recovers comments and content that existed at conversion time
• Does not recover any edits made to the Slack canvas after conversion

Undo is not available indefinitely — it must be performed before the Quip document is fully deprecated. Keep this setting on during early rollout so mistakes are recoverable. Once the undo window passes or the setting is disabled by an admin, conversion is permanent. (help.salesforce.com)

Keeping matches current

Account matching is not a one-time event. The system refreshes automatically multiple times per day. Admins can also trigger a manual re-match from the Quip admin console by navigating to Slack Conversion > Account Matching and clicking Match Accounts (or Re-match Accounts).

You can update the Preferred Email Domain at any time. Changes take effect on the next matching cycle. This is useful after an SSO cleanup, Slack account consolidation, or a post-acquisition domain migration. (help.salesforce.com)

Admin controls after the connection is live

Once the connection is approved and account matching completes, several controls are available under Admin Console > Slack Conversion > Settings in Quip. Both Quip and Slack expose controls for managing the connection.

Pause conversion without disconnecting

The Allow Quip to Slack canvas conversions toggle turns conversion on or off for all users while preserving the connection configuration and all matched accounts. Use this during migration freezes, when troubleshooting mapping errors, or when auditing already-converted documents. Resuming requires a single toggle — no re-approval from Slack.

On the Slack side, you can also toggle this: navigate to Manage Salesforce Organizations > Salesforce > Quip, click a Quip team, and toggle Document conversion on or off. (slack.com)

Control who can convert

The Restrict who can convert documents setting enables an allow-list. When turned on, only users you explicitly add can trigger conversions. This is useful for staged rollouts — start with a pilot group, validate results, then expand. (help.salesforce.com)

Allow conversion undo

The Allow Quip to Slack canvas conversion undo setting lets users reverse a conversion within the available undo window. See the undo mechanism section above for full details on what is and is not recoverable. (help.salesforce.com)

Disconnect entirely

Delete Quip-to-Slack Connection on the Settings page permanently removes the connection. Disconnecting clears all matched account data. Reconnecting requires a new request, new Slack admin approval, and a full re-match of all accounts — there is no way to restore a previous match state.

To disconnect from the Slack side, navigate to the Quip management page (same path as approval), click the three dots icon next to the Quip team, and select Disconnect.

You can also cancel a pending request that hasn't been approved yet from the Quip admin console, without waiting for the 7-day expiration. (help.salesforce.com)

Troubleshooting the missing convert button

If users stop seeing the Convert to a Slack Canvas option, check these causes in order:

1. Conversion is paused — check the Allow conversions toggle in Quip admin console
2. User is on the allow-list restriction — check Restrict who can convert settings
3. User's Quip account is unmatched — check Account Matching in Quip admin console
4. Admin setup incomplete — verify connection is in approved state, not pending or expired
5. Feature not yet rolled out — this feature is rolling out in phases throughout 2026; if the Slack Conversion section doesn't appear in your Quip admin console at all, the rollout may not have reached your instance yet

(help.salesforce.com)

What converts and what doesn't

Document compatibility decision tree

Is the document a Quip spreadsheet?
  → YES: Does not convert. Export as CSV or XLSX via API.

Is the document a Quip document (text-based)?
  → Does it contain Live Apps (e.g., Salesforce records, project trackers)?
      → YES: Live App content does not convert. Text content may convert without it.
      → NO: Continue.
  → Does it contain embedded Salesforce data components?
      → YES: Embedded data does not convert. Text content may convert without it.
      → NO: Continue.
  → Do all contributors have matched Slack accounts?
      → NO: Conversion blocked. Resolve unmatched users first.
      → YES: Document is eligible for conversion.

What the conversion preserves vs. removes

Salesforce has not published an official breakdown of what percentage of a typical enterprise Quip library is text-document vs. spreadsheet vs. Live App content. Plan your migration assessment assuming a significant fraction of documents will require the API export path rather than the native conversion tool. For a detailed breakdown of these gaps, see our guide on what the native converter doesn't migrate.

What this setup does not do

Completing the Quip-to-Slack connection is a prerequisite, not a migration. It enables one-at-a-time, user-initiated document conversion. Here's what it does not give you:

• No bulk conversion. Each document must be converted individually by someone who has owner-level access to it. (slack.com)
• No automated scheduling. There's no way to queue documents for batch processing through this flow.
• No spreadsheet conversion. Quip spreadsheets, Live Apps, and embedded Salesforce data components don't convert to canvas.
• No link-sharing preservation. Slack canvas doesn't support Quip's link-sharing permission model.
• No two-way sync. Documents become read-only in Quip after conversion. Once a doc is a canvas, Quip is done.
• No programmatic match-status API. There is no published Quip or Slack API endpoint to check account match status outside the admin console UI.

For a team with 50 documents, the manual process is an annoyance. For an enterprise with tens of thousands of documents, embedded spreadsheets, and deep folder hierarchies, the one-at-a-time approach will not scale before the March 2027 end-of-life deadline. That deadline includes a strict 90-day read-only window after subscription expiry, followed by permanent data deletion.

For API-based extraction methods, see our Quip export guide. If you're evaluating alternatives to Slack entirely, see our destination decision guide.

Quick-reference checklist

Use this to verify setup is complete before rolling out conversion to your team:

• Confirmed paid Quip plan is active (Starter, Plus, or Advanced)
• Identified Slack plan and confirmed approver role (Workspace Owner/Admin on Pro/Business+, Org Owner/Admin on Enterprise Grid)
• Collected Slack Team ID (starts with T for workspace, E for Enterprise Grid org) and Slack URL
• Quip admin has Site Admin, Super Admin, or custom role with Slack Conversion Settings permission
• Confirmed both Quip admin and Slack admin are available and coordinated before submitting request
• Sent connection request from Quip admin console
• Slack admin approved request within 7-day window
• Account matching completed (check banner in Quip admin console under Slack Conversion > Account Matching)
• Reviewed unmatched users; resolved domain mismatches, suspended accounts, and external contractors
• Set Preferred Email Domain if any users have multiple email addresses mapping to different Slack accounts
• Configured conversion controls (undo enabled, restrict list if doing staged rollout, conversion toggle on)
• Audited document library to identify spreadsheets and Live Apps that cannot convert
• Pilot-tested with a small batch of text documents before wider rollout

Summary of key operational facts