Pinning a Destination to Quick Access in SharePoint Online
Here’s the scenario: we have a site called Clients where we track potential clients and store files we get from them during discussions. Once they become an actual client, we create a Team Site, connect it to Teams, and we move the files into that site.
For years, this has frustrated me no end because when I create the new Team Site, it can take until overnight for that site to be visible in the Copy to / Move to dialog.
As I am wont to do, I finally turned to Twitter for a solution (though I don’t think this is the first time!). with the #SPHelp hashtag.
It was gratifying to get many responses (and many people expressing the same frustration). Most of the suggestions were things I’d tried before: upload some dummy files to the new site to generate “activity”, follow the new site, etc. None of these actions seemed to reliably make the site show up where I wanted it.
Francis Laurin (@pzkfwg) and Gregory Zelfond (@gregoryzelfond) responded with the winning answer. Turns out the answer has been staring me in the face – though I don’t think it’s all that obvious. If you notice, the list of destinations on the left of the Copy to / Mode to dialog screen is called Quick access.
The solutions is to navigate to the specific Document Library you want to copy/move to and pin that Document Library to Quick access. That option has been there for a long time, but I never connected it to this process in my mind.
This great video from Greg shows how this all works:
Unfortunately, that feels backward. Ideally, Microsoft will make the Copy to / Move to dialog smarter and let us just search for the site we want to use as the destination. I shouldn’t need to go to that destination before I copy/move the content.
At the very least, the dialog should have some way to know that pinning to Quick access is a “thing”, by offering some in process help or tip. I’m thinking that a little info icon next to the words Quick access which takes me to an article which explains what Quick access even is would be a huge step in the right direction. When I Bingle for the *right* search terms “SharePoint quick access”, for example, I only find information about Windows Quick access (which seems to be broken for me lately, but that’s another post).
I feel like I’m a reasonably smart guy with some familiarity with the platform. This shouldn’t have been so hard to figure out.
Great Share!!
Do you know how to unfinished from Quick Access as right click does not seem to provide an Unpin facility?
Just go to your onedrive online, there you have the “quick access” bar and can unpin it.
Here’s a challenge for this one: Quick Access works great if you have only a few sites. Now think about a person who has 100’s of case files on the go at any time in 100’s of case file sites, with many destination libraries in each site. They are working in one site, ‘creating’ the content. They then want to copy from the one working location to one of the 100’s of case file sites they work in, into one of the many possible libraries in one of those 100 case file sites. This is extremely difficult and quick access is challenging at best to make this happen. Add to this they might ‘saving as’ from a document to a PDF in this process. This happens frequently in a legal or investigations or case file type scenario. Any ideas how to make this one work?