Dear Microsoft: Please Give Us Back “Discard changes” in the New SharePoint Page Editing Mode

If this bugs you, please go vote on this item in the Feedback Portal: New Co-Authoring Feature REMOVES Discard Changes · Community (microsoft.com)

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Recently as I’ve been editing SharePoint pages, I’ve noticed that the Discard changes button is missing in the toolbar. It’s a tiny little thing, and I just assumed that it was an occasional bug. But now that the new experience has rolled out to more tenants I work in, I’ve realized it’s a real change, not just a bug.

If you’re not familiar with this little button, it allows[ed] you to throw away anything you’ve changed in the page. It’s both an escape hatch (“Whoa, I really screwed this up!”) and a real convenience.

I understand through my observations that this is a real change. I’m not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to remove it.

One extremely common reason why we put a page we have access to into Edit mode is to check the settings on something. We just want to look at an existing Web Part or two and see which settings we used so we can reproduce something similar elsewhere. Without the Discard changes button, we can’t actually leave Edit mode, leaving things as they were.

My bright idea when I was seeing this as a bug was to just remove the ?Mode=Edit query string value, which then shows the page in View move, rather than Edit mode.

The problem here is that when we navigate away from the page we’ve opened in Edit mode, it stays in the Needs publishing state. Effectively it’s checked out to the person who did it as a draft, even though they haven’t actually changed anything.

Now we are forced to Republish the page to put it back into the right state. But what if I’ve inadvertently changed something I didn’t realize. OR, even worse, I’ve changed a few things just to test something out and now my escape hatch is gone?

I can only imagine that this has something to do with co-authoring pages. If you ask me, the frequency of co-authoring is going to be exceedingly small. Most often a single person is responsible for a page and they manage it and its content. If I were to hazard a guess, co-authoring will be used less than 10% of the time. It’s a shiny new feature which few people have seen a need for.

As part of these feature updates (which also includes a new toolbox for the Web Parts, image suggestions, and additional page layouts), we did get an improved Version History. As before, we can restore an older version of the page from an earlier time. Unfortunately, this is going to be a required action when we simply wanted to put a page into Edit mode to check something.

Yes, we have the Undo button on the toolbar, but even if I undo all the way back to no changes, I can’t leave the page in its previous state without publishing it, creating a new version with no changes.

Here’s the Version history from a page where I simply put it into Edit mode and then abandoned it.

Without knowing what the logic was here; this is my request. Dear Microsoft: Please give us back the Discard changes button!

References

• Introducing Coauthoring for SharePoint Pages and News (microsoft.com)
• Collaborate on SharePoint pages and news with coauthoring – Microsoft Support

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Since I posted this, I’ve found quite a few other posts and threads about it, so I figured I’d gather them here. If you know of others, let me know and I’ll add them. If we have one list to show to the folks at Microsoft, maybe we can sway them.

• If this bugs you, please go vote on this item in the Feedback Portal: New Co-Authoring Feature REMOVES Discard Changes · Community (microsoft.com)
• Julie Turner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/juliemturner_dear-microsoft-please-give-us-back-discard-activity-7237476362373017602-TY7H
• New Co-Authoring Feature REMOVES Discard Changes – Microsoft Community Hub
• What Happened To The “Discard Changes” Option When Editing SharePoint Site Pages??? – Microsoft Community Hub