Well, it's finally happened. Sharepoint alerts stopped working :| I know I should have done this earlier, but everytime I looked into it, all I found were long-winded youtube videos that didn't solve my issue.

My issue is, I want an email that shows something like THIS:

ItemABC on TheDoomList was updated
ItemABC was updated by User1 on 01/01/1970 12:01am
COLUMN1: old data changed to new data (changed)
COLUMN2: old data (unchanged)
COLUMN3: old data changed to new data (changed)

I have TRIED to build this in Power Automate, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to grab the stuff.

The reason this is important is because then we have an email trail about WHAT was changed and by who. It's one thing to say "oh yeah, someone updated some info in this list item", but we NEED to be able to look back and say "Oh, User1 updated that item back last January to say that we no longer support that application. Let me reach out to them before I edit it back to say that we DO support it to make sure I'm correct."

Can anyone help me with making an email like that? Or anyone have any alternatives you can think of?

We’re a small company (2) moving our files from OneDrive to SharePoint. I share individual files and folders fairly often, mostly from my phone using the OneDrive app.

The problem: links I create for SharePoint files don’t show up under “Shared” in the OneDrive app the way OneDrive links used to. I want a way to see all the links I’ve generated (especially external ones) so I can keep track of who has access and revoke it later when needed.

Is there a proper way to do this from a phone, or is this strictly a desktop/browser task? And is there a single view that shows all active links across a library, or do I have to check file by file? Would appreciate any workflow tips from people who’ve made this same switch.

TL;DR: pip install sharept-dl and you can batch download entire SharePoint folders (or single files) from "Anyone with the link" shares — no browser, no Playwright, no login. Just pure HTTP + SharePoint REST API.

The problem

Someone sends you a SharePoint share link. Maybe it's a folder with 200 files from a conference, or a bunch of lecture slides from a professor, or documents from a client. You open it in the browser and... it's painful. No "download all" button. You have to click through each file one by one. If you're unlucky, the folder structure is deep and you lose it entirely.

Why not just use a browser automation tool?

Playwright/Selenium-based downloaders exist, but they need a full browser runtime. That means hundreds of MB of dependencies, slow startup, fragile selectors that break when Microsoft tweaks the UI, and no clean CLI experience. I wanted something I could run on a headless server or in a cron job.

What I built

sharept-dl is a pure-HTTP approach. It visits the share link to grab an auth cookie, then talks directly to the SharePoint REST API to enumerate files and download them. Zero browser dependencies — just requests + rich for the terminal UI.

pip install sharept-dl
sharept-dl -u 'https://xxx.sharepoint.cn/:f:/g/personal/...' -o ./downloads

What you get:

• Pre-scan report — file count and total size before downloading a single byte
• Resumable downloads — Ctrl+C midway, run the same command again, and it picks up from .part files via HTTP Range requests. Already-complete files skip instantly
• Preserves folder structure — nested subdirectories are recreated locally
• Handles Unicode paths — double-encoding of Chinese/special characters in URLs is explicitly prevented
• Stable Rich TUI — progress bar, per-file status, transfer rate, time elapsed, all in one non-flickering display
• Single file support — :w: (Word), :x: (Excel), :p: (PowerPoint), :b:, :t:, :s: links all work via GUID lookup
• i18n — auto-detects system locale, displays Chinese or English

Screenshot (terminal TUI during a download):

  📁 Folder Share
  200 files · 1.42 GB · → /Users/me/downloads
  ⬇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 142/200 (71%) · 00:03:27 · ↓ 0.7/s

  ✓ slides/chapter-02.pdf      12.3 MB    2.1s
  ✓ slides/chapter-03.pdf       8.7 MB    1.4s
  ✓ handouts/week-4.docx        1.2 MB    0.3s
  ↓ videos/lecture-05.mp4      245.0 MB   downloading
  ⏳ videos/lecture-06.mp4
  ⏳ datasets/raw/experiment.csv

  ✓ 141 completed · 💾 980.5 MB · ✗ 0 failed

How it works under the hood

1. HTTP GET the share link → follow 302 redirects → get an auth cookie
2. For folders: GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl API → enumerate files & subfolders recursively
3. For single files: extract sourcedoc GUID from the URL → GetFileById API → resolve path
4. Download each file via /_layouts/15/download.aspx with streaming + Range header support

Limitations (honest ones)

• Only supports "Anyone with the link" shares (anonymous access). Org-internal links that require Microsoft login need OAuth2, which isn't implemented yet
• SharePoint REST API returns max 5,000 items per folder — folders with more files will be truncated
• Python ≥ 3.9 required

Links

• PyPI: pip install sharept-dl
• GitHub: [repo link]
• License: MIT

I built this over a few weekends because I was tired of clicking through SharePoint folders. It's been solid for my own use (downloading course materials, conference archives, work document dumps), and I figured others might find it useful too.

Happy to take feedback, bug reports, or feature requests.

Edit: thanks for the kind words everyone! A few people asked about authentication — for now it's anonymous-link only, but OAuth2 support is on the radar. PRs welcome.

my company is looking to move our classic sharepoint online intranet hubsite to modern sharepoint.
we are checking with third party vendors and getting the quotes.
to given idea we got about 200 subsite, most three/four levels deep and approx one tb of data.
can someone give me a ball park number for whole
project, we are getting quotes well in 6-figures for this work.

Not sure if this is possible but I would like to add a few files to a folder in a doc library on Sharepoint and then setup public sharing links for anyone to access these files, however I do not want them to be able to browse the other public files in that same folder, as soon as they close the file it puts them in the folder itself and they can browse through the folder they are in. I also do not really want them to see the folder name in the share link either or be able to interact with the folder structure in any way.

I am also sharing some public picture galleries through SharePoint and want it to always display as thumbnails for public view, is there a particular setting for this so that anyone viewing the public link always will see thumbnails?

Thanks for the help.

Who in your organisation is the intranet owner? What area of expertise are they in? IT, comms, IMS, HR?

I’m keen to hear feedback. If you could provide size of company, who is the owner and organisation category ie construction, healthcare etc.

Thanks heaps

Hi guys,

Is it possible to create a new file (an Excel file) from a template when a new item is created in a SharePoint list?

I've done it with folders before, but is it doable for a file, through PAutomate?

Thanks!

Hey everyone, I’m working on an automation project for my university schedule and I’m stuck at a super annoying part. Our uni publishes a 4‑month semester calendar as an Excel file on SharePoint. The link is always the same, it’s publicly viewable, no login needed, and you can freely download it.

I’m trying to build a live, reliable automation tool that fetches the latest data and syncs it directly to Google Calendar. The problem is: every time I try to fetch the Excel file programmatically, SharePoint’s “protected file” behavior blocks or redirects the request, even though the file is technically public.

I tried multiple methods, different languages, direct URL fetches, etc. Nothing works consistently because SharePoint keeps interfering.

Right now my workaround is:

• manually download the Excel file
• upload it to Google Sheets
• use Google Apps Script to push updates into Google Calendar

It works, but it’s not “live” and not reliable enough for automation.

Has anyone figured out how to fetch a public SharePoint Excel file without getting blocked? Or any trick to get the raw file URL so I can automate the whole pipeline?

I am trying to make an audit form for my work. I have a list set up and I created a form. The form has choice questions and depending on the answer you select I have branching set up to go to the next relevant question. When I hit the "preview" button, the form works perfectly. The questions are hidden until I make a selection and the next question comes up no problem. The theme coloring is nice and the whole thing is pleasant. However, when I go to the list and click "add new item", a box comes up with the all the questions from the form, but it lists all questions. The ones I want hidden are not and it does not appear like the preview. After messing with the settings, it appears I can format by adding JSON which is going to be a pain. What is the point of creating the form, branching, and preview if it means nothing?

Hi so I have a bunch of docs I need to share with external users (company email address ran by outlook) but also some internal users (company email address ran by gmail), I'd like them to have access to them whenever they need, so I felt a link was the best option, but I dont want to go in one by one and manually input their emails.

I thought I could get around it by making a seperate folder on the site and giving people access to view that folder but they still can't access the individual word docs from the links.

Is there anyway I can make a group just for those individuals and that was I can assign access to the whole group? Kind of like how you can make groups in outlook for mass users and same for gmail. Or is this something that I'd need to request our external IT department (admin) to handle?

I'd appreciate any advice please

I originally posted this in the Power BI subreddit but didn't get any responses, so I thought Id try here.

I manage an internal SharePoint site my org uses to share reports and data with staff. The reports are built in Power BI and embedded into SharePoint pages.

Based on recommendations I've seen online, I keep all of the Power BI reports in a specific "app" so they're easier to manage and update. We are not a Premium/Fabric Capacity organization. We purchase Power BI Pro licenses for the staff who need access to the reports.

There are two ways to get embed links from Power BI for Sharepoint. One is from the app, the other is the workspace/service. My question is, is it better to embed Power BI reports in SharePoint using the embed link from the Power BI App or directly from the Power BI Service/Workspace?

I've searched around but haven't found anything definitive, and I'd appreciate hearing what others are doing or if there are any best practices. Thanks in advance for any advice!

Hi, is there a way to back up entire folders / certain files with some specific structure from SharePoint Online to locally hosted servers? The servers are virtualized, Windows-based behind firewalls obviously. This is for a corporate environment, and because the project budget is extremely limited, purchasing additional backup software or licenses is not an option.

I asked about this before, but I did not include enough relevant details. I have also had some personal difficulties recently, so I was not able to continue the discussion properly at that time.

I would be very grateful for any ideas or suggestions.

Is there anyway of listing ALL active sites on your tenant in the admin console rather than root site collections?

We use it as a quick way to determine what our largest sites are, however the Storage Usage on a site with private channel(s) only shows the storage for the root site collection.

You have to drill into the private channel link on each site to see the storage usage for the channel storage usage

I know I can get this from powershell but I'm trying to find a way of getting this done in the GUI where you can simply export to excel.

Whether deleting items from a SharePoint list via MS Access or through the web interface, I get a time out error. This just happened maybe 2-3 weeks ago. Did something change?

I noticed the first 100 items delete fine but anything after that does not and gets time out.

Out of nowhere, nobody can access the site. Anyone else having issues with access?

I am not IT or related. I'm just a user who figured out how make SP do what we needed and built a solution - over 10 years ago. Suddenly, we cannot make new subsites using our publishing template (I had gotten around scripting bans for creating new templates). No, I didn't realize it was getting co.pletely turned off.

We mainly use SP for the co-authoring. If it wasn't for that, we could make a NAS work. We have administrative cases where we prepare and house testimony, exhibits, discovery, administrative, and legal documents. We will have dozens of people working on each case at one time. Each case will have thousands of documents. Our archival storage is NAS. We may have a dozen large cases in play at one time.

Our current structure is a classic site collection with sooo many nested subsides - I did not know that was a problem when I created it. We do keep it to 3 levels. The main benefit is our use of permissions groups to manage who can see what and do what where. We also use Metadata rather than folders for document organization.

We have the parent, a few children that organize things like which state it applies to, administrative, etc. Then the subs under that are the working sites. We do not use chat like features or other "teams" like functions. We have a dedicated set of employees who manage each site and keep things working.

I am thinking communication sites that link to a hub. It seems like a pain because now we have roll up KPI data that is easily accessed within the site collection. I understand a hub will allow searching in each child site (which is absolutely key.) So I am assuming the KPI roll up won't be a problem.

My main concern is permissions. Now we have a few standing permissions groups that are easy to use and control. How will that work with a bunch of sites? We can't use the permission groups we already have and we need to be able to use the same groups and have multiple people administer them. We don't want the wild west with people doing something different on each site.

Now we have a template for the site that provides the organization and functionality we need. Can we create a template that can create new sites set up like we need?

If I can figure out how to best do this, I think I can build something pretty quickly. (I dont see us doing a wholesale migration. Just brute force moving some things and going foward with new cases.)

Hello everyone. Curious what everyone is using for site usage analytics in SharePoint (views, clicks, etc.). The out-of-the-box Site Usage page is pretty limited. I know you can pull some info from SAM (SharePoint Advanced Management) and some from the Audit Log in Purview. Any tips on other options (built-in or third-party)? Thanks in advance.

The MC1243549 notes state:

• Admins can manually create a guest account for the external user at any time.
• Alternatively, an internal user with permissions needs to share or re-share at least one file, folder, or site, which will automatically create the guest account and restore access to all previously shared content.

Are MS being completely blasé here? Having users, or admins, reshare ALL sites/folders/files with external guests is a massive task.

In relation to the first bullet point, could someone please clarify this for me:

We have 100s of native SharePoint users. There is no reference to native SP users on the update. Do I need to create an Entra guest account for them? Is that enough, or do I need to add the newly created Entra user to their native SharePoint group, or do I need to create a new Entra group and add the new Entra group to the SharePoint site/library?

I would really appreciate any advice as this is becoming a nightmare for our org.