Reconciling Changes While Moving Content in SharePoint – “Flat” Views

Lots of times when I’m working on a content migration in SharePoint – almost always with Sharegate! – some stuff happens. Probably the most common thing is that someone edits content in the old location before we manage to shut off permissions. People – yeesh!

Here’s a little trick that not a lot of people know about that can really help. As we all know, folders are bad except when they aren’t. Oftentimes, Document Libraries have a lot of folders containing a lot of documents, for better or worse. If you want to hunt down documents someone has changed during a migration, you can set up a “flat” view, sort by Modified (descending) and see what they have been up to.

Here’s how…

Go into Library settings (how you get here will vary based on SharePoint version) and create a Standard view – or more likely start with one of the existing views, like All documents.

Give your view a name (I like Temp – because I’m probably going to delete it), scroll down to the Folders section, and expand it. Click on the Show all items without folders radio button and save your view.

Now you’ll see ALL the documents in a “flat” view (assuming you don’t have any filters set). You can add/remove any columns in the view, but the key thing here is you can sort ALL documents by things like Modified date (descending) in the UI to look for stragglers.