This post describes how to show or hide fields based on a choice column from a SharePoint list in Power Apps.
I was recently working on a Power App form for new site/ teams requests. The fields were all based on SharePoint list columns and one of the key fields was a choice column. What I wanted to do was have an additional field default to being hidden from the screen unless a particular choice value was selected.
Now I’ve used the Microsoft guidance to create dependant drop-downs before but this scenario was slightly different and it was based on a choice column which isn’t compatible to my knowledge. I’d done something before in my Power App to toggle the display mode of a button in my app if fields are blank. So starting with this I used a simple if function in my formula to show/ hide my field based on the selected choice value.
Solution
Here’s how to hide a field based on a choice value in Power Apps:
Open your Power App to edit it > ensure both the choice field and the field you want to hide are added to the screen
In this example, a drop-down list will be hidden by default until project site is selected from within the request type choice field.
Select the data card for the field you want to hide until a choice value is selected
In the top, left-hand corner of the Power Apps editor, select the visible property
Select the Visible property when selecting the hidden field in your PowerApp.
Add the following if statement to the formula bar, replacing the parts highlighted below:
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
OneDrive
Launched (1)
Rolling out (0)
In development (4)
🍾 LAUNCHED
Sync admin reports – New dashboard to check sync app versions, sync status, top sync errors on individual devices and monitor deployment progress of Known Folder Move. Roadmap ID: 65909
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2021
🆕 OneDrive: New Command Bar – With this update you can easily identify the right file and access primary commands. The simplified view allows you to focus on the content and that is visually pleasing. Roadmap ID: 85602
🆕 OneDrive: New information architecture on iOS – To make it easier to discover options, OneDrive on iOS has a new information architecture (IA) using the bottom sheet to show all commanding options. Roadmap ID: 85571
🆕 OneDrive: Sync admin reports – sorting and filtering – Add support for sorting and filtering the list of devices in the Sync admin reports. Roadmap ID: 85595
Release – October 2021
🆕 OneDrive: Sync admin reports – aggregated errors view – Adds ability to view an aggregated summary view of the top sync errors happening in the organization. Roadmap ID: 85596
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
OneDrive
Launched (1)
Rolling out (2)
In development (8)
🍾 LAUNCHED
OneDrive: 64-bit OneDrive – A preview of 64-bit OneDrive is now available for download. It will only be supported on AMD64-based devices. Roadmap ID: 70695
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Sync admin reports – New dashboard to check sync app versions, sync status, top sync errors on individual devices and monitor deployment progress of Known Folder Move. Roadmap ID: 65909
OneDrive: Universal Print integration with OneDrive web for work or school – This feature allows users to print directly to their organization’s printers from OneDrive web for work or school. Roadmap ID: 82099
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2021
Shareable address bar links – Tenant admins can specify whether the link that shows up in address bar for files is sharable within organization or not. Roadmap ID: 61529
OneDrive: Office offline edit support in iOS – If you download an Office file for offline use, you’ll be able to open it in WXP or Office app and edit it, all while offline. Roadmap ID: 66191
OneDrive and SharePoint: Adjusting version retention for PST files – This update will help customers manage PST file versions from consuming storage capacity for OneDrive & SharePoint Online. Roadmap ID: 72237
OneDrive: Sharing experience – “Shared with” list – At the bottom of the Share dialog, the “Shared with” list will give you an at-a glance view of everyone you’ve given access to the file. Roadmap ID: 83725
Azure Active Directory, OneDrive, and SharePoint for Business: Azure B2B integration with OneDrive and SharePoint is now generally available – The Azure B2B Integration with OneDrive and SharePoint is now generally available. This integration is currently disabled by default but can be enabled using the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Roadmap ID: 81955
OneDrive and SharePoint for Business: Library Dropdown – We’re adding a dropdown that allows you to easily switch between multiple document libraries associated with a Team or Site. Roadmap ID: 81990
OneDrive for Business: Progressive Web App (PWA) – You can now install the web version of OneDrive for Business as a Progressive Web App (PWA) in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox, or other browser that supports Progressive Web Apps. After you install the web version of OneDrive for Business as a Progressive Web App, you can launch it from your desktop, and it will work the same way as it does in your web browser. Roadmap ID: 82040
Release – October 2021
OneDrive: Sync admin reports macOS support – New dashboard to check sync app versions, sync status, top sync errors on individual macOS devices and monitor deployment progress of Known Folder Move. Roadmap ID: 81982
The Microsoft 365 monthly update includes updates and recently recent features across all of Microsoft 365. Press a button to read about an individual technology or continue reading for more. You can take a look back at previous monthly updates here, plus take a look at our weekly roadmap roundup.
In SharePoint: Boost SharePoint news, collapsible sections, custom list templates, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition
Boost SharePoint news
The SharePoint news service now lets you can prioritize important news and announcements, so they appear at the top of employee news feeds across Microsoft 365. You can boost the visibility of a news article for a set time, until an employee has seen your content, or until a viewer has seen the item in their feed a set number of times.
Microsoft Lists now supports custom list templates! You can create and manage custom list templates using Microsoft PowerShell – leveraging the Add-SPOSiteScript cmdlet. When users create new lists, they can select one of your custom list templates from the new “From your organization” tab. This new tab will appear next to the “From Microsoft” tab that showcases the out-of-box ready-made templates from Microsoft.
SharePoint Server Subscription Edition represents the next step in the SharePoint Server journey emphasizing the specific needs of our on-premises customers. This new way of staying up-to-date with SharePoint Server means new levels of reliability and performance, delivering features and capabilities that simplify administration, protect communications and information.
In Teams: Find recordings based on what was said, lock meetings, slide translate, auto recording, video gallery paging, org-wide backgrounds, real-time telemetry, related content for mobile, hard audio mutes PSTN, Human Interface Device support, call transfer, speed dial, emoji picker, immersive reader, inline message translation, Headspace integration, share-to-stage support, app risk evaluation, multi-geo support, safe links
You can now find meeting recordings in Microsoft Search based on the meeting transcript. This feature is available to all users by default and makes it easier to find videos in Microsoft 365. You can access this feature through the search bar in Teams you use to find other file types.
You can now choose to lock their meetings to prevent subsequent join attempts. Anyone attempting to join a locked meeting from any device is informed with a message that they are not able to join as the meeting is locked. This helps avoid distractions from late joiners during the meeting. This feature is currently available in Desktop app only.
Make your slides more inclusive with slide translate in PowerPoint Live in Teams. This private setting allows you to see a personalized view of the slide where text is translated in your chosen language. Now you can better understand the presented content privately. This feature supports 19 languages with more to come.
Meeting organizers are now able to set a single meeting occurrence or series to auto-record by enabling the “Record automatically” setting from Meeting Options. The meeting automatically starts recording once the first participant from the same organization joins the meeting. The recording is saved to initiator’s OneDrive (privately scheduled meetings) or SharePoint (channel meetings).
This feature is available in Desktop and Mobile and not available to an A1 user.
When you are in gallery view mode, and there are more videos than what can be shown at once on the meeting stage, navigation controls < and > now appears below the Video Gallery. You can use these controls to view more video participants. The maximum number of videos on the meeting stage can vary depending on your device configuration and internet bandwidth.
You can now tailor your Teams meetings background to your organization. To enable this feature, simply upload images in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center under Meeting policies and they are available to all your users. You can add up to 50 images.
NOTE: Organization-wide backgrounds is now temporarily available and will require an Advanced Communications license when it becomes generally available by the end of the year.
Call health panel provides Teams end-users functionality that helps identify issues during a Teams meeting or a VOIP call. This empowers your users with diagnostics to investigate audio, video, content sharing or network related issues.
The real-time metrics are updated every 15 seconds, providing the ability to trace issues as they occur.
Related Content makes meetings more effective by providing you with important information from your mailboxes, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint sites. This helps you prepare before meetings by offering content you haven’t had a chance to read or may want to revisit. You can find this content on the Meeting Details page.
Hard audio mute includes PSTN attendees in meetings
Meeting presenters and organizers can now prevent PSTN participants from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hand. The PSTN participant can request to speak by raising their hand in a meeting via dial-pad command (press *5).
Support for Human Interface Devices on Windows Virtual Desktop
Now you can connect external devices like a headset or mouse to interact in Teams on the Windows Virtual Desktop platform. For example, if you have a mute or unmute button on your headset, the controls are now recognized when using it in a Teams meeting in WVD.
Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. The new endpoint transfer capability allows you to seamlessly move your calls between different devices, such as from your laptop to mobile phone, without any interruption in call service or quality.
Calling users on mobile devices can now access their Speed Dial contacts that were available on Mac, Windows and Teams devices. You can also add or remove speed dial contacts. This feature gives mobile users one tap access to reach their most important contacts.
Now with more than800 emojis, select a category and easily find the emoji you need and use the skin tone selector to pick an emoji that better represent you. Quickly add emojis directly when composing a chat, use the short code picker to add emojis using text.
Immersive Reader, which uses proven customization techniques to support reading across ages and abilities, is coming to Teams iOS and Android apps. You can now hear posts and chat messages read aloud using Immersive Reader on the Teams mobile apps. This functionality was previously available only on the web and desktop apps.
Immersive reader now available in the Teams mobile app.
Inline Message Translation in channels for Android and iOS
Inline message translation in Channels lets you translate Channel posts and replies into your preferred language. To translate a message, press-and-hold the channel post or reply and then select “Translate”. The post/reply will be translated to your UI language by default. If you want to change the translation language, go to Settings > General > Translation.
Headspace integration with Microsoft Viva Insights
A curated set of guided meditations and mindfulness exercises from Headspace are now available in the Viva Insights app in Teams to help you start your day grounded, relax your mind before a big presentation, or disconnect from work in the evening.
Headspace integration with Microsoft Viva Insights.
Developers can now configure their Teams meeting apps to use the “main stage” – enabling several collaboration scenarios. This integration allows the app content from the meeting side panel to take full screen and allow users to interact with it.
Teams admins are now able to view the security, compliance, and data privacy details for apps coming from Microsoft Cloud App Security. This helps Teams admins save time on security reviews and enable a more focused selection-based security specifications, resulting in increased app quality.
To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo has been extended to include Microsoft Teams. This allows organizations to specify where their Teams core customer data sits, down to the team and end user.
Safe links are now available to protect users in Microsoft Teams. You can enable or disable Safe Links protection for Microsoft Teams within Safe Links policies. Specifically, you use the Select the action for unknown or potentially malicious URLs within Microsoft Teams setting.
Educators can now create class teams based on the enrolment roster of their courses in Canvas. Each class team will have the appropriate user roles and students and educators can navigate to their respective class teams directly from their Canvas courses using desktop, mobile, or web platforms.
With the new group assignment feature, groups of students can work together to create, collaborate, and submit one assignment for the whole group. Educators can give individual comments and grades or group grades, and all students in the group will receive credit. This makes it easy to encourage student collaboration and for the educator to grade group work.
Now, educators can return an assignment to students for edits. This way it’s easy to share feedback and allow students to learn from and incorporate that feedback into the original assignment. If you’re an educator just select the More options next to return and select “Return for edits”.
Filter assignments by class in main assignment view
Now educators and students can filter their Assignments by the class in the main assignment view. It’s a small tweak, but a great one if you like things organized and visible by class.
For IT admins looking to set up Microsoft Teams in their tenants for the first time, now there is an education tailored plan in Teams Advisor. The Teams Advisor helps IT plan their overall deployment, and helps bring the project team together to create a cohesive strategy to deploy Teams in their education institution.
Education policy wizard now automatically incorporates new features and policies
IT admins can now easily apply education tailored policies for a secure learning environment for students, educators and staff in few clicks. With the new improvements, whenever a new feature is added to Teams, the appropriate policy for that feature will be automatically added by default without any admin’s intervention.
Cortana voice assistance is now available in the Microsoft Teams for Education mobile app. With this new capability, you can perform a variety of tasks with the click of the microphone button and a voice command such as check your class schedule, join a class and much more.
Suggested Replies in chats now available for educators
Now, educators using the Teams mobile app can easily see up to three recommended responses to choose from while in chat, helping you save time and respond quickly. This is enabled by default for educators and faculty and disabled for all students.
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).
Virtual Breakout Rooms – Breakout rooms allow meeting organizers to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions.
Guest Access – You can invite users in other DOD tenants to collaborate on documents in Teams channels, resources, chats, and applications while still maintaining control over your data.
Together Mode for Teams Rooms – Together Mode for Teams Rooms uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class. Available in GCC-High.
Teams Meetings Auto Recording – Meeting organizers are now able to set a single meeting occurrence or series to auto-record by enabling the “Record automatically” setting from Meeting Options. Available in GCC.
Live reactions in Teams Meetings – All attendees can now use emojis to react during a meeting. Available in GCC and GCC-High
End user real-time telemetry for meetings – Call health panel provides Teams end-users functionality that helps identify issues during a Teams meeting or a VOIP call. Available in GCC, GCC-High, and DOD.
Spotlighting multiple users in a meeting – Organizers and presenters can now spotlight up to 7 participants simultaneously during meetings. Available in GCC.
Organization-wide background – You can now tailor your Teams meetings background to your organization. Available in GCC.
Live Events with Live Caption – You can now schedule and host a live event in the DOD environment – broadcasting video and meeting content to large online audiences. Available in DOD
Large meeting support – Hold interactive meetings and webinars with more attendees—up to 1,000 people, including chats and polls. Available in GCC-High and DOD.
Windows 10 Native Notifications in Teams – You can now choose the style of your notifications: built-in Teams or Windows native notifications. Available in GCC.
Chat preview notification settings – Now, you can change your settings and control whether the message previews shows up on your screen. Available in GCC.
Missed activity email – You can now continue and monitor your Teams’ notifications via email. Available in DoD.
Device management capabilities – Device management capabilities in Teams admin center are now included in the GCC-High environment.
Tags – Tags in Microsoft Teams let users quickly and easily connect with a subset of people on a team. Available in GCC-High.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Command designer with Power Fx (preview), custom pages, performance insights, Portals & Power BI enhancements, multi-table lookups, pricing changes
Command designer with Power Fx (preview)
You can now customize command bars in model-driven apps without code! These new capabilities play a major role in the convergence of canvas and model-driven apps. These new capabilities are built on a new, modern infrastructure that’s conducive to both model-driven and canvas app technologies and will scale into the future. Key improvements include:
Enhances custom pages (or the convergence of canvas and model-driven apps), open custom pages as dialogs, trigger cloud flows from a button
Power Fx support for visibility and action logic, or use JavaScript for advanced logic
Command designer simplifies customization – whether low-code or pro-code
Better ALM support along with standardized localization and presence in the solution interface
Better app level control – commands are applied to individual apps
Simple, flat data model
Classic commands remain supported, Apps can run both classic + modern commands side by side
Custom Pages for converging model-driven apps and canvas apps
Custom pages are now in public preview. A custom page can be used in places where all pages are supported including main area, dialogs, and the new app side pane. This allows scenarios like a pixel perfect landing page with data pulled from across the organization, data driven pages that use a record’s data to change the experience, dialog designed to optimize specific business actions, and productivity tools that support the main tasks for the app.
Performance Insights (preview) for Model-driven apps
Performance Insights, now in preview is a self-service tool for enterprise app makers that analyzes runtime user data and provides a prioritized list of recommendations to help improve the performance of Model-driven apps. With this feature, raw telemetry data is converted into actionable work items for you to tackle.
Performance Insights (preview) for Model-driven apps.
Power Apps portals/ Power BI integration enhancements
Power Apps portals has native support for Power BI reports and dashboard. Portals with version 9.3.4.x have additional support for more Power BI functionality, including:
Multi-table lookups are now available in preview for use via API. Multi-table lookups (also sometimes known as polymorphic lookups) allow the creation of a lookup in one table that looks up records in multiple other tables at once.
With multi-table lookups, you can perform a lookup on 2 or more tables at the same time and locate the record you want from the referenced tables. For the current preview:
Lookups can be constructed and managed through API only
Model driven apps currently provide the best experience with the lookups
Microsoft have announced the following changes to Power Apps pricing and licensing coming into effect on October 1, 2021:
The Power Apps per user plan will be priced at $20 per user/month, a decrease from the previous price of $40 per user/month. The plan will be available across Microsoft’s commerce channels – Volume Licensing (VL), Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and web direct – without license minimums or other purchase requirements. Plan entitlements remain unchanged, including the ability for users to run unlimited apps and portals.
The Power Apps per app plan will be priced at $5 per user/app/month, a decrease from the previous price of $10 per user/app/month. Like the per user plan, the per app plan will also be available across the same commerce channels without license minimums or other purchase requirements.
Additionally, Microsoft are simplifying entitlements for the per app plan by providing users with the ability to run one app or access one portal, in contrast with the current entitlement of two apps and one portal. This approach more directly aligns with the plan’s intent of providing flexibility for customers seeking to license users one app at a time. Customers with existing per app plan subscriptions purchased prior to Oct 1, 2021 will maintain the current entitlement for the duration of their agreement term.
New connectors through the Independent Publisher connector program
Independent Publisher connectors are connectors developed, tested, published, and supported by connector developers that are independent from the end service or API. Independent Publishers include Microsoft employees, MVPs, developers, and other community members focused on helping the community make the best use of Microsoft Power Platform connectors.
As part of the new Independent Publisher connector program, you can view and use connectors to the following services: Airtable, HubSpot Marketing, Jira Search plus more.
7 new connectors were released in July 2021 for Power Automate, including:
Amazon S3 – Amazon S3 Connector provides connectivity to the Amazon S3 API, enabling processes to interface with Amazon S3 to store objects, and build applications that require internet storage.
Amazon SQS – Amazon SQS connector will connect to the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Service provided by Amazon Web Services, allowing queue management, push and get messages.
CardPlatform – CardPlatform allows users to send Adaptive Cards to Outlook inboxes, other email platforms, as well as service desks and ServiceNow.
Elfsquad Data– Elfsquad CPQ enables sellers, or even end-customers to configure complex products. Using the Elfsquad Data connector you can easily integrate your internal IT-systems with Elfsquad.
Alemba ITSM Azure Connector– Alemba Service Manager is a leading IT Service Management (ITSM) platform that leverages the Azure ecosystem to provide product extensibility and enhanced customer experiences.
Lasso X– Lasso X makes it easy to connect to Danish public data sources, delivering information about companies and their finances, properties, ownerships, and much more.
IN-D Aadhaar Number Masking – Use IN-D Aadhaar Number Masking connector in your process to eliminate risks and ensure compliance by redacting first eight digits of Aadhaar Number and QR Code from Aadhaar images.
Several new capabilities were added in this months AI Builder update, including:
Invoice processing – Read and save information from invoices which now also include the ability to extract line items.
Receipt processing – Read and save information from receipts, with support now for sales receipts from Australia, Canada, United States, Great Britain, and India.
Identity document reader – Read and save information from identity documents.
Invoice processing is now generally available in AI Builder.
In Power BI: Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights, visualise SharePoint lists now GA, July 2021 Feature Summary, PivotTable refresh, Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium, On-premises data gateway July 2021, free virtual workshops
Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights (Public Preview)
Now in Public Preview, a suite of new admin APIs that provide much-enhanced visibility into user access and permission levels. These new APIs allow you to programmatically retrieve user and permission information for most Power BI assets (reports, dashboards, datasets, dataflows, workspaces, and capacities), or asset permission for any user or security group.
Additionally, Microsoft are enhancing the read-only scanner admin API by including user permission information in the scan results. With these versatile new tools, you will be able to easily produce access reports for various Power BI assets on demand.
Power BI – SharePoint list visualisation available to all users
A few months ago Microsoft launched a new Power BI integration for visualizing SharePoint lists. This feature is now available to Standard release users and is now accessible to everyone! This experience empowers SharePoint list and Microsoft List users to easily explore your data. With just a couple of clicks, you’re able to go from looking at a list of data to interacting with an auto-generated report. You’ll find this new option under the Integration menu on any list.
The Power BI July 2021 feature summary includes making small multiples generally available, as well as the new model view and sensitivity labels in Desktop plus lots more:
PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web now available
PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web is now 100% available to all eligible Office users. This feature is part of a broader investment to enable seamless and secure data sharing and collaboration with Power BI data in Excel for the web.
Connected PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web allows users to work with PivotTables connected to Power BI in a web browser just like in Excel desktop. With the Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) label integration, you can control sharing while keeping your data secure in Excel as an MIP label applied to a Power BI dataset is inherited in Excel.
Refreshing connected PivotTable in Excel for the web.
Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium is now available in public preview. Streaming dataflows allow authors to connect to, ingest, mashup, model, and build reports but based on continuous streaming, near real-time data. This is done directly in the Power BI service with beautiful, drag and drop, no-code experiences.
Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium now available in public preview.
Virtual workshops and training to get started with Power BI
Microsoft have announced a series free 60-minute trainings where you will be able to follow along with live demonstrations and ask Microsoft trainers questions in real time. This training is open to anyone curious about Power BI.
There are no required pre-requisites and courses are offered at least once a week. This training provides an overview and demo of Power BI to show how you can get maximum value out of your data in a way that was previously not possible.
Congratulations if you have made it this far through the monthly update! For getting to the end you will be rewarded with other related titbits from around Microsoft 365…
Organisation Explorer
he new Organization Explorer in Outlook allows you to find, discover, and explore people and relationships through a new organizational browser experience. Find colleagues, discover team relationships, explore their skills, see their current availability, and more right within Outlook. Organization Explorer is now in preview and available for Office 365 Insiders.
New Microsoft Graph connectors for Microsoft Search
New Microsoft Graph connectors for Microsoft Search enable your organization to bring in information from systems like ServiceNow, so you can find what you need wherever you’re working, whether in one of your favourite productivity apps or one of the many Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint or Office.com. Connectors are now generally available and can be installed in just a few clicks in the Search and intelligence admin center.
There are now stricter administrative controls to help ensure each user within Bookings has the appropriate level of access and control. Additional customization and branding options for company logos, coloured themes, and a rich text editor to customize confirmations, cancellations, and reminders have also been added.
Finally, improvements have been made to the appointment scheduling to provide a simpler experience with easier calendar switching, more filtering options, and more. To try out the new experience, toggle on the Try the new Bookings switch on the top right corner of the Bookings web app.
Scheduler is a new Microsoft 365 service that works with Cortana to automate meeting scheduling. Just add Cortana to your email and ask something as simple as “Cortana, please find a time to meet next week.” Cortana will then work with the Scheduler service to find times that work best for everyone and send out invites.
Microsoft Scheduler.
Outlook extension for Microsoft Edge
The Outlook extension in Microsoft Edge to quickly read, send, and receive emails, manage your calendar, tasks, and more in any browser tab, no need to go back to Outlook.
New features in Microsoft Forms for Education and Government
The Microsoft Forms team have announced five new features for both education and government customers:
Education– Launch Multiple Choice Quizzes in Microsoft Teams meetings, Create and edit a quiz directly from a Microsoft Teams assignment, Analyze responses with word clouds, rich text formatting in Forms & Send and share your forms more smoothly.
Government– Add a File Upload question to your form, Send a form using a shortened URL, Launch Polls in Teams Meetings, rich text formatting in Forms & Access your forms in a new interface
Launch Multiple Choice Quizzes in Microsoft Teams meetings in Forms for Education.
This post describes a change to how site designs/ templates are applied to sites in SharePoint Online.
Intro
Microsoft published MC249248 in the Message Center on 7 April 2021 stating the following:
This new SharePoint release of scenario-based site templates will help you expand what’s possible with content, pages, and web parts while helping you quickly get started building your own site. Each template contains pre-populated content and web parts that are fully customizable to meet the needs of your organization. This is rolling out on SharePoint Online and mobile.
This was updated on 23 July 2021 with a new timeline stating that this will be complete for Standard Release in late August 2021. What the message doesn’t detail is how this affects the current process for applying site designs to sites you are creating via the SharePoint admin center.
This change landed in my Standard Release environment around the week commencing 16 August. We first noticed it because we no longer had the ability to apply site designs in the admin center!
Before this change you applied your site designs at the point of site creation:
Before the recent site template change, site designs were applied to SharePoint sites at the point of creation.
Following this change the “choose a design” option is no longer present for team or communication sites through the SharePoint admin center. In order to apply designs you now have to apply a site template within the sites settings after you create it.
How to apply a site template
Navigate to the site you wish to apply the template to
Press the cog > then select apply a site template
Here you are able to choose from Microsoft pre-built templates, or those you have created and deployed into your SharePoint Online environment (from your organization). The experience is slightly different depending on whether you are using pre-built or your own templates.
Using Microsoft pre-built templates
Under From Microsoft > select the template you wish to use > press use template
The wizard below will show you a progress bar as the template is applied
When applying a Microsoft template, a progress bar will appear as the template is applied.
This wizard will disappear once the progress bar reaches 100% and your template will be applied to your site.
A SharePoint site with a Microsoft template applied.
Using custom site templates from your organization
If like me you had already deployed site designs, these are now shown as site templates available from your organization.
Press the cog > then select apply a site template
Select From your organization > select the template you wish to use > press use template
Once you press use template, an orange message bar will appear letting you know that the site template is being applied.
The orange message bar will change to green once the site template has been applied. You have to refresh to see the changes
Recently I had the task of creating, then modifying a few hundred sites in SharePoint Online. In our case we provisioned the Microsoft 365 group connected SharePoint sites using PnP PowerShell, but as part of this we set the primary owner as an individual admin.
During the process of updating the sites manually, it become more and more annoying that other SharePoint admins had to keep adding themselves into the recently provisioned sites in order to do anything – that is until I found the SharePoint Service Administrator group!
What is the SharePoint Service Administrator group?
The SharePoint Service Administrator is a security group that includes everyone that has been assigned the SharePoint Admin role in Microsoft 365. It’s also worth noting there is also a Company Administrator group also, which includes all users with the Global Admin role.
Greg Zelfond has provided a great write up of these roles over at SharePoint Maven. For the purposes of this post I will be focusing on the SharePoint Service Administrator group.
How to assign the SharePoint Service Administrator group to a site
Follow the steps below to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group as an additional admin of a SharePoint site:
Open the SharePoint admin center
Under Sites > Active sites > select the site you wish to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group to
Press Permissions > Manage additional admins
Select your site then press Permissions > Manage additional admins.
Under Add an admin > enter SharePoint Service Administrator
Press Save
Issues and troubleshooting
#1 Cannot add SharePoint Service Administrator as a group owner
If you are creating or editing Microsoft 365 group connected SharePoint team sites, you are unable to add security groups as owners or members of a M365 group. Security group driven M365 group membership has been a long-standing request of Microsoft, but Roadmap ID: 83113 added in May 2021 has group driven membership management as targeted for release in December 2022.
Workaround: When creating new sites, set the group owners/ members as you would normally (i.e. one or more individuals), then edit the site once created to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group as an additional admin.
For existing sites, just update the additional admin as per the guidance above.
#2 No SharePoint Service Administrator group to choose from
If you have not assigned the SharePoint admin role to anyone in your tenant yet, the SharePoint Service Administrator role will not be available to select from when trying to assign it as an additional admin. In the below example, this tenant only had one global administrator, but the SharePoint admin role had not been explicitly assigned.
When I tried to add the company administrator role it worked no problem.
Workaround: Assign the SharePoint admin role to those you want to be included in the SharePoint Service Administrator group, or use the Company Administrator group if you only have global admins in your tenancy.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
OneDrive
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (1)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – August 2021
🆕 OneDrive: Universal Print integration with OneDrive web for work or school – This feature allows users to print directly to their organization’s printers from OneDrive web for work or school. Roadmap ID: 82099
This article describes how you can remove commas (thousand separator) from number columns in Microsoft/ SharePoint Lists.
Introduction
You may have noticed a comma or thousand separator appearing when using the number column in Microsoft/ SharePoint Lists. Commas appearing in number columns in SharePoint have been a long-standing issue, going back as far as SharePoint 2010 and beyond.
In classic SharePoint, a common way to solve this problem was to convert the number column into a text column and validate it to remove commas using a formula such as =ISNUMBER([ColumnName]+0). However, with modern SharePoint, plus the advent of Microsoft Lists it’s now become easier to manipulate columns using column formatting to achieve the desired result.
I personally encountered this issue when importing data from excel into a modern SharePoint list. In my situation, the preview offered when importing from Excel did not show the commas in my data. It was only once it was imported into SharePoint that the commas appeared.
Remove commas from number columns
Left-click on your number column
Under Column Settings > select Format this column
Ensure the Format Columns tab is selected, scroll down and press Advanced mode
Remove the text from the box and add the following JSON:
How to add JSON formatting to number columns to remove commas.
Note
Microsoft added roadmap item 68716 in October 2020 for Microsoft/ SharePoint lists to include support for thousand separator in number columns. As this time of writing, the roadmap states this feature is due for release in June 2021 which will allow List owners/ members to choose if the comma should appear or not.
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