Have you ever wanted to see exactly who has viewed a document and when? In this guide, Tony demonstrates the SharePoint Viewers feature, which allows you to see who has viewed your documents in SharePoint.
By default, when you hover over a document in SharePoint, it shows how many people have viewed the file. But, it doesn’t show you who those people are.
However, if you change the settings for your SharePoint site, you can easily see who has accessed your files.
This feature is handy for organisations who have policy documents or other important documents stored in SharePoint, as you can see who has opened and viewed the file.
You need to be a Site Collection Administrator or ask your IT Administrator to turn on this feature.
- Go to Settings (the cog in the right-hand corner) and select Site information.
- Select View all site settings.
- Open Manage site features.
- Scroll down the list of site features and look for the SharePoint Viewers feature.
- Select Activate to turn on the SharePoint Viewers feature. This is then turned on for all the files in your selected SharePoint site.
Here’s an example of a policy library in SharePoint where the SharePoint Viewers feature is activated.
As you can see, when you hover over the document, you can see exactly who has viewed the document and when they viewed it.
If you click through on X Views, you can see a timeline of when people have viewed the document and compare unique views with the total number of views.
How long this information is kept for?
Hi Tan,
Great question, I cannot see any Microsoft documentation on how long data is kept for. If anyone else knows, please post here!
Thanks,
Tony
Hi Tony.
Can you get this information via PowerShell or the graph api?
I’m not sure on that, I can’t see anything obvious in the API documentation.
Hi,
by default the viewers list is limited to 25.
How to see all viewers ?
Thanks
I see more than 25 viewers on some of my documents, once I followed his instruction to activate the tool.
I am facing the same issue despite following all the steps.
We published our document on 11th May and I see that there are 198 views from 106 viewers.
But I can only see the last 25 viewers’ names, going back to 23rd May.
Is there a way to see all 106 viewers?
Is it possible to export this information in any way? I can see the information on the panel, but is there a way to export the list, even as a .txt or .csv?
Not that I’m aware of. That would be a good feature!
I think you can use Power Automate to extract the info to track who has viewed, created or modified a file and log this to a Excel worksheet/table.
Depending upon your SharePoint subscription/plan you can use one of the following triggers:
“When a file is viewed (properties only)” or “When a file is created or modified (properties only)”
Get the file properties, e.g. filename, who accessed/modifed it and date/time. Then add a row to an Excel table.
Very cool, thanks for sharing Cliff!
Hi, is below an existing trigger:
When a file is viewed (properties only)
I cannot seem to find it even with a premium power automate license.
Hi, Tony. Thanks for sharing this. Once the feature is set up, does it only show people with full admin access to this information? So, if I was a standard viewer and hovered over the link, is it going to show me any stats, or can this only be accessed when you view the document via Site Contents?
Thanks,
Rhi
Hi Rhi,
As far as I’m aware, all users can see this information. Even users with Read-only access.
Thanks,
Tony
How can we use Power Automate to extract the info to track who has viewed, created, or modified a file and log this to an Excel worksheet/table?
Good question, not sure there is an API to extract this or a PowerAutomate step. Welcome ideas from anyone?
Did anyone get anywhere with no. of viewers limited to 25 viewers? I’ve followed the steps and got the same problem
I am facing the same issue despite following all the steps.
We published our document on 11th May and I see that there are 198 views from 106 viewers.
But I can only see the last 25 viewers’ names, going back to 23rd May.
Is there a way to see all 106 viewers?
It would be nice if we knew how it worked under the covers so to speak. Obviously it is using some form of code. I need to be able to do it without going to each page separately. I was hoping there was a documented way of how the feature works programmatically as the data is stored somewhere so how is it getting it?
I’m not sure about user names but you might want to try this api – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/itemanalytics-get?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http