Export AppendOnly Comments

Remember the old comments in SharePoint Lists? I am sure there are tons of lists that use the Append-Only Comments. They are implemented using versioning. The problem is that it is hard to export the comments, unless you know the tricks. The trick I want to share comes from a colleague of mine. The reason why we need export all the comments is that we need to document and save/archive the decision making process that took place in the comments field.

Step-by-step instruction

1. Go to the list and open your view with the required columns and the comments.
2. Switch to Classic View (as of today, 2021-12-15, the classic view is a bit easier, if you want to know more, leave a comment below).
3. Click on the ribbon -> List -> Export to Excel
4. Open the downloaded query.iqy file in a text editor
5. Add &IncludeVersions=TRUE between ?XMLDATA=1 and &List=...
6. Paste the updated url in the browser.
7. Open Excel and drag-n-drop the newly downloaded owssvr.xml file. Choose open as an XML table
8. Adjust the columns and proceed with the printout/archiving.

Explaining images

The AppenOnly comments are not shown in the views directly:

You can see them by clicking on “View Entries”:

Update the url to get the versions (= comments):

Import and adjust the list data and comments in Excel:

• sharepoint
• excel
• export
• versioning
• comments
• guide