We share answers to 3 SharePoint questions

Updating lists outside SharePoint

Q. When I choose to view my list in Excel from SharePoint and change something, why does nothing seem to change in SharePoint?

A. Viewing a list in Excel is just that. You can just view a list. The advantage is that you can easily use all of Excel’s sorting and filtering power to find items in the list. However, there is no updating. If you were to type something in and hit the Refresh button on the Data tab, in the Connections group, it would revert back to whatever is currently stored in that column for that item.

To edit an item, you can either go to the properties; switch to Quick Edit view, which behaves somewhat like a spreadsheet; or open the list in Access, if permissions allow.

Thumbnail view of documents

Q. We have a library of photos in SharePoint that appear as thumbnails, which makes it easy to select from. Is there any way to get a document library to do that?

A. A recent change to SharePoint Online makes this a simple menu item. On the View dropdown menu, you’ll now see a Tiles selection. Click this and you’ll see a thumbnail image of the first page of the document. This feature works great for PowerPoint presentations, Word documents with cover pages, even Excel workbooks and PDFs.

Quick edit text conundrum

Q. Anytime I copy and paste text into SharePoint using the Quick Edit view, the text adds a bunch of extra lines and uses the fonts from the place I copied it from. How can I get it to just paste the text and not the font?

A. A few updates ago, the underlying structure of Quick Edit changed in SharePoint. The good news is that if you want to paste rich text in a rich text field in SharePoint, it will appear with the proper formatting. The bad news is that if that’s not what you wanted, it can get messy. If you will never want any rich text formatting in that column, it’s best to change the column type on List Settings.