Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today is the second time I ran into this issue, and I figure I better post it out there before I once again forget how to solve it…

I got a call from one of my customers saying that they didn’t have the option to delete a document library from Library Settings. Odd, as they had full control permissions for the site. When I looked (and I’m basically God when it comes to permissions), I didn’t have it either.

After some digging around, I found that there’s a setting called AllowDeletion that you can manipulate to keep someone from deleting a list or library. I’m still not entirely sure *how* that got get set to false in this case, but it was.

Following is a short PowerShell script you can use to fix that. The actual deletion of the library is commented out here, because I’d prefer just to set the flag and then delete it myself… less chance of something going wrong that way. 🙂

#DeleteUndeletableLibrary.ps1
#This allows you to delete a list or library where the AllowDeletion flag has been turned off...

#Load SharePoint PowerShell Snapin
if ((Get-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null) {
    Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
}
 
$Web = Get-SPWeb "http://foo.com/website"

$List = $Web.Lists["LibraryName"] 
$List.AllowDeletion = $TRUE 
$List.Update() 
#$List.Delete() 
#$Web.Dispose()

Here are my slides from SharePoint Saturday Redmond on October 24th, 2015. Thanks to everyone who attended, as well as all the great questions and comments afterwards. I really do like presenting this information. 🙂

Here are the slides from my presentation at the Portland SharePoint User Group meeting on 2015/10/21. Thanks to everyone who was there, and thanks for the positive comments and questions.

This is a bit of a “drive-by” blog post, in that it’s not overly techie in nature. It’s just a plea to those who figure that pasting content into a Content Editor web part directly from Word is a great idea…

Please don’t. For both your sake and the sake of your SharePoint support person.

When you put content into a Content Editor web part, SharePoint generates all the HTML code behind the scenes so that things render pretty much like you see it on the screen… also known as WYSIWYG (pronounced whizzy-wig, and stands for “What You See Is What You Get”)

When you copy content from a Word document, it’s actually pasting the Word HTML into the web part, so now you have both the Word HTML *and* SharePoint’s HTML. Sometimes they play well together, and sometimes… they don’t.

If someone calls me and asks for help making a bulleted list look right because the third and fourth bullet have different spacing and they can’t seem to fix it, it’s usually because they copied the original list from Word, and then they tried to edit the list in SharePoint. Different HTML, different spacing…

If you’re hardcore and up to the task, you can open the Edit HTML option and wade through all the HTML, removing extra Word styling and tags. It’s not fun.

Or, you can take the content, copy it to something basic like Notepad, erase all the existing stuff in the web part, and then paste the non-formatted text back in. Format it within SharePoint, and things will be consistent.

I want your page to look good just like you do. But I really don’t want to take dozens of lines of HTML and clean things up for you. Just don’t copy directly from Word if you want to update the page in SharePoint later on.

Creating a repeating (looping) workflow in SharePoint 2010.

I got a report from a customer who was having problems opening an Excel spreadsheet in Office Web Apps. They were getting the following error:

When I tried to download it and open it on my desktop in Excel, I got this error:

After that, I’d just sit there with the Excel client open but everything was greyed out. I was thinking that there might not be any way to recover the file, as it was last updated too far back. But fortunately, I poked around the Ribbon bar and found the following option:

When I clicked that, everything showed up!  Whoo-hoo!

This link actually talks about the underlying reason as to why it happened, but I was more interested in mitigating the damage (which Unhide did just fine).

http://fendy-huang.blogspot.com/2011/02/unable-to-open-excel-workbook-as-it.html