SharePoint rant

We were forced to switch from Google Documents to Microsoft SharePoint at work. This article is just a rant to outlet my deep frustration. 😁

In short, SharePoint is a crappy piece of software, and here is why:

First, let's start by mentioning what happened to some folders during the migration. Some of them got duplicated, yielding one version with the correct name and another one with a cropped name. See below - the top part was how folders looked like in Google Documents and the bottom part is what they became in SharePoint:

Lots of commands are hidden in the FILES and LIBRARY tabs. It took me a long time to find them. To copy a file, you have to go to FILES and Send to. Come on, couldn’t you call it “copy” as in “copy and paste”? There is no browse option when you copy, so you have to know the exact file path. There is no proper command to move a file. You have to copy it and then remove the original. You can't rename the extension of a file.

The search is very unhelpful. Have a look at the example below. The required file only appears in 28th position, although none of the titles of the other file names contain anything remotely related.

The Word web app is way less elaborate than Word. Collaboration with other users is just indescribably buggy. When closing a file, it doesn’t remember if it has been saved so it warns you that you may lose data, although you obviously won’t because you just saved it. In some cases you may even come across this kind of curious error message:

As we just mentioned, SharePoint is a collaborative document edition system. When someone adds comment on documents you've shared to them, you would expect to receive these comments in some way. Good news: you can set up email alerts. Bad news: you have to set them up yourself. Here's how: go to folder view (1), find the file you want an alert to (yes, of course you have to do this for each file), tick the checkbox next to it (2), open the FILES tool bar, click Alert, set up the alert in the dialog, click OK, receive a confirmation by mail and you're done! For comparison, in Google Drive, all this is only a single step: you're done. If you've managed to go through all the hassle, you will finally receive notifications, saying that your file has changed. Click on the links to your file and you're welcome to read the whole document and comments to find out by yourself where the changes are.

(1) Going back to folder view from file view: there is a tiny link in the top left corner of the file view. Only it is very misleading. The text is the name of the top directory of your SharePoint file system. However, when you click on it, it directs you to the containing folder.

(2) Selecting files in the folder view: on the left of each item in the list of files, there is an checkbox to select them. Only the developers decided it was a good idea to make those checkboxes invisible unless you hover them.

Finally, here's a funny graphical bug I saw in Excel. It's not exactly related to SharePoint, but it's still Microsoft, so I might as well share it here. The weird light yellow shape is meant to be a comment box related to the cell on the left:

In conclusion, if you ever have to choose a document management and storage system, don't choose SharePoint.