Sean Wallbridge
Grrr. I get it Microsoft, you like “Agile” (always be changing, improving, iterative changes and get feedback). Well, here’s my feedback. In SharePoint Online, if you are going to take over the Browsers Context Menu (right click in IE, Chrome, etc.), at least give me an alternative to do the things I used to be able to do…
What
The problem is, sometimes I want to share a link to a document, that is in a SharePoint Library to send via email or (in my particular case today) get so I can link a content type to a particular document template.
This is what used to happen when you right clicked on a document in SharePoint (2013 and Online until recently)…
Do you see that? “Copy Shortcut” is something that the browser is letting me do
Today, in SharePoint Online, this has been overridden (don’t get me wrong, I understand WHY they did this and why most of the time I want users to open a document in Word Online so they aren’t inclined to diverge from One Version of the Truth) and a custom context menu comes up. Ok, I’ll even say this is “slick”. But it is still a pain in my ass…
So What
Well, like I said above, my problem now is, I need to figure out the path to my document, when I need it share it for times when I don’t want the Office Web Apps involved (in this case, I needed a URL to paste into a Content Type for reusing it as a template).
I tried all sorts of things, the Ribbon (nope nothing there), document preview (nope, that wants to give me the WOPI/OWA link. What’s a girl to do?
Now What
While this may not be the best/ultimate solution (what if someone turns versioning off?), until someone provides a quicker/less technical way to provide the link (hey, respond in this blogs comments friends!), here’s my solution.
Version History
Yep, that’s right, they haven’t changed that (yet…). Go to Version History, go to the latest version and right click on it. That context menu hasn’t been overridden yet.
Yep, that’s it. Unless a new way comes or someone in the comments provides another idea.
ECB, the first bubble will have the path.
Not the context menu, but if you are just looking to copy the path, there it is.
I had this issue asked of me yesterday by a user.
Click the ellipse which open the document call out window.
the link to the document is shown there
highlight it and copy it.
Paste it into your email.
Don
Hi there, that works as a document link for a person to open. But the scenario I’m talking about, we can’t have the Office Web Apps path in there.
Good tip!
My method is to highlight the title (from left to right), paste it onto a OneNote page, then edit the hyperlink to grab the URL. It’s one more step than your process so I’ll be switching to your method to save myself time.
Also, if you click on the ellipse, and then click on the Post button, you’ll end up with a screen to post the URL to the document in Yammer. If you understand the file path, you can cut the bit you want out of that!
I got complaints from couple of users about this issue recently, the issue is that there is a contextmenu event bound to the parent TR element, one possible approach is using JSLink to bind the contextmenu event to Title column and call stopPropagation() to prevent the event from parent TR.
I actually happened to find a no-code workaround when I was trying the JSLink approach – you can get the browser menu back if there is a Managed Metadata type of column in the view (for example – Enterprise Keywords which I used). I don’t know why it makes such a difference by adding a Managed Metadata column, maybe that is a question for MS, but it works for now:)
Thanks for sharing Kevin
This has helped me out as I originally used the ‘Get a link’ option and from there you get a choice of Edit link, View link or Restricted link. All I wanted was to add the image links to my promoted links list. It worked for a while and then without warning stopped working – so instead of the image – it rendered an image of an empty sheet of paper!!
Nice tip thanks!
Thank-you, it did the trick.
Thanks, the version history trick was useful. I have just posted some JavaScript that will add the Copy Shortcut option back in:
https://howardmcd.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/get-copy-shortcut-back-in-sharepoint-2016/
COPY LINK appeared back for me today next to the share link……… yippeeeeeee! Only took 3 years… love agile, thing happen so quickly 😉