If you are in the first release cycle for Office 365, you may have noticed something very different about your document libraries within the past week. Not only are document libraries getting a whole new look…. they way that you work with your files has been drastically improved! Let’s take a look around!
First of all, when I click the Check it out button, it switches my library over to the new look and feel.
This may look familiar to you. It looks more like a personal OneDrive, doesn’t it? The traditional ribbon is gone, and all of the actions that I can take when I select a document are more obvious to me.
Before I select any files, the only buttons at the top are New, Upload, Sync, and Alert me.
I click the ellipsis on the expenses spreadsheet, and the properties of it are shown on the right. A scrollable preview is displayed, with information about the file (metadata) and an Edit all button that takes me to the old-school edit properties screen.
With the file selected, there are several simple buttons at the top.
Open – Choose open in Excel Online, or open in Excel
Share – Our familiar screen for sharing a document, and the Get a link screen is more understandable, with descriptions:
It isn’t really obvious what (created) means in these, though. Once I create a sharing link, I can then set an expiration and even click to remove the link. On the Shared with page, there’s a nice Stop Sharing button
Get a Link – This just takes me to the Get a link page on the Sharing screen.
Download – This directly downloads the file to my default downloads folder, without any confusing prompts asking me where to download it to.
Delete – Of course, sends the file to the recycle bin (which is a handy link on the left navigation now)
Pin – This one is interesting! The file is pinned to the top of the document library, so it looks sort of like a web part of the file/document. After you pin it, you can then use the same button to Unpin if you’d like.
Move to – Nice! Gives you a panel on the right, to quickly move the file to another folder in the same library. You can even select multiple files and choose Move to or Copy to.
Moving on to views. There is a little ellipsis on the far right of all of the columns in that library. Click it to get to the Edit View Columns pane. Definitely much more simplistic than views have ever been.
What about all the other views, and more settings? Look at the top right corner. If you don’t see this, it’s because you have one or more files selected. Unselect them.
Okay where in the heck are the good old library settings? Click the Settings Gear at the top right, where you’d usually go to get to site settings.
One more thing, the ellipsis on each file opens up the drop-down box with all of this:
How do you control all of this new look stuff? Go to the library’s settings, and advanced settings, and look for this:
There is a lot of documentation on this, very detailed documentation on Microsoft’s site, that will help you with everything you need to do:
Switch the default for document libraries from new or classic
Add a link in a document library
Randy Drisgill’s Blog: SharePoint Online Doc Lib UI Update April 2016 – Impact on Custom Branding?
Mark Rackley’s Blog: Changes to SharePoint Online Document Libraries & What They Mean
Oh, and don’t forget, big announcements are coming up on May 4th this year! You won’t want to miss it, so register here to here about THE FUTURE OF SHAREPOINT.