Inventory of all folders & documents in Sharepoint or onedrive

Question

Inventory of all folders & documents in Sharepoint or onedrive

Andy Ash 0

I need an Inventory of all folders & documents in Sharepoint or onedrive - how do i do that

ideally an excel output

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1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Yes. The supported options depend on whether the content is in a SharePoint list or in a document library/OneDrive.

For an Excel inventory:

If the content is in a SharePoint list
- Open the list.
- From the command bar, select Export to Excel.
- If prompted, select OK > Open.
- In Excel, if prompted and the site is trusted, select Enable.
- In the Import Data dialog, choose how and where to view the data, then select OK.
- Excel creates a table with a one-way data connection. Use Data > Refresh All to refresh the inventory later.
Notes:
- Export to Excel is available only when list items are not selected.
- If the list contains folders, the folder structure itself does not appear as a hierarchy in Excel, but Item Type and Path columns are added so the inventory can be filtered and sorted by file/folder type and location.
- Changes made in Excel are not written back to SharePoint.
If the content is in a SharePoint document library or OneDrive for work or school
- For a small number of files, use the browser options on files and folders such as move, copy, or other library actions as needed.
- For a large inventory or archive, Microsoft recommends syncing the library or folders and then using File Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac to work with the files locally.
- If the goal is to archive list-style data from a SharePoint library, the documented Excel export applies to SharePoint lists.
If the goal is a file-by-file inventory from SharePoint/OneDrive data for analysis
- Power Query can connect to a SharePoint folder and show a table preview of the files found in the site.
- After connecting, select Transform data to open the file system view.
- Each row represents a file found in the SharePoint site.
- This is useful when an inventory table of files is needed, especially in environments with a large number of files.

Important limitation:

When files are downloaded or moved outside SharePoint, metadata such as document properties, permissions, relative links, workflow information, versioning, and templates is not preserved in the downloaded files.