In SharePoint Online modern pages, the article pages and the news pages are stored together in the Pages library. Using the available columns in the view we have no options to make visible, what type a page has. To resolve this issue, create a new calculated column in the Pages library with the following formula: =IF([Promoted State]=0,”Article”,”News”) This formula uses the hidden field “Promoted State” that could be used to differentiate between the two page types: 0 for an article page 1 for an unpublished news page 2 for a published news page The result will look like this, when you have ..read more

In the Site Pages library in the modern interface in SharePoint Online we can have article pages and news pages. This page type is set, when the page is created by the author. But how can this be changed, after the page is created? The content type of a page has a hidden column named “PromotedState”. The value can be 0 for an article page 1 for an unpublished news page 2 for a published news page To modify the site type, some simple PowerShell scripting is helpful. Connect to the SharePoint site with Connect-PnPOnline and then… … when we have an article page and want to move it to a news pag ..read more

For images in the user interface in SharePoint, Microsoft makes use of the formatmap32x32.png and formatmap16x16.png that are stored directly on the server and could be reached via the link “/_layouts/15/1033/images”. How can we use these images, when we want to provide out own user interface? Let’s assume, we want to use the workflow symbol , how can we address this image in the map? The symbol is found in row 15 and column 5 in the map. To make it visible using html and css, we can use this simple snippet: The classes used in the span are important. We see the image addressed in the ..read more

The following GitHub repositiory will show a simple solution to use SharePoint Search as the source for an overview of visits to a SharePoint site. The readme in the repository describes, how to recreate the solution without development. An example output could look like this. Find the repository here: https://github.com/OlafD/Simple-SharePoint-Metrics ..read more

Today I had to investigate a problem, where the type for a field in a SharePoint list changed from User to Lookup. Using the web interface for SharePoint it is not possible to do this modification. A user field is internally a lookup field to the UserInformation list in the site collection, this could be proofed in the SchemaXml of the field. That means, this change did not modify or destroy any data. But we still do not know what happened to our list. We where able to solve the problem by modifying the FieldTypeKind using PowerShell PnP. This member of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Field ..read more

When we create a survey in SharePoint, an overview will be created with several information. Under some circumstances it might be necessary, to hide the line with the Number of Responses. Because this is a simple html-table that shows the information, a Script Editor webpart and some jQuery could be used to solve this problem. First, we need jQuery in our site. To make jQuery available, we can use PowerShell PnP, connect to our site and execute the following cmdlet: {add jquery} Next, we open the overview page of the survey and switch into edit mode for the page (click the gear icon top r ..read more

For a document library in SharePoint Online, I want to send notification mails for documents, where the “NextRevision” date is 30 days in the past or older. The Flow should run once a day. This sample would send the mails each day, when a document was not modified. To avoid this behavior, add a field to the library, to mark that a notification was sent ..read more

In some cases, it could be necessary to hide a field in the editform in SharePoint. This could easily be done with the SetShowInEditForm() method from the Client-side Object Model of SharePoint. In this short demo, I have prepared a demo list with the fields “Target Date” and “Planned Date”. When a new item is created by a user, both fields could be edited. But, when the item was saved, we do not want to be able to modify the value in the “Target Date”. In the web interface in SharePoint, we do not have any option to change the necessary property of the field. But with PowerShell, this prob ..read more

The last days I was asked, how to handle indexing of pdf-files that contain scanned content. In these files the content often are just images and an OCR approach is needed to make the content readable and accessible for the crawler. From my point of view, we have two options to answer the question. The first is a Flow, where we can use the ElasticOCR connector. Actually, the connector is in preview, but it can already get a trial license for your tests. The way of working of the connector creates a new version of the document with readable content for the crawler. Good approach and it does wh ..read more

I got the request to create a nice FAQ in SharePoint Online. The user interface should not be a simple list but should be fancy or modern. Additionally, the content should be in two languages, English and German. So, what would be a simple approach for the solution? The content itself would be a custom list in SharePoint Online, where we have a choice field for the languages. For the answers we use a Note field with FullHtml style. To display the contents of the list, we use some html, CSS and JavaScript in a Content Editor Webpart. In the JavaScript we query the list by language and build u ..read more