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.

How do I get a site to show up in the Move to or Copy to dialogs? If there's a trick other than waiting overnight after creating a new site, I haven't found it. #SPHelp #veryfrustrating pic.twitter.com/c0Zt6rnAR4

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) February 16, 2023

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.