Two workarounds for overcoming the listview threshold

Anatoly Mironov

These are two workarounds to see documents / list items in a view that exceeds the listview threshold of 5000 items.

Overcoming the listview threshold is as fun as succeeding in the limbo games.

This is changing all the time. When you read this, it might have changed. Today, 2021-01-05, me and my colleague found following two workarounds for listing over 5000 items in a list view in SharePoint Online:

  1. Sorting by name in a view
  2. Adding a shortcut to OneDrive

Both methods require the Modern UI in SharePoint Online.

In our case we have a migrated document library with many items. In the source, the threshold was much higher, in SharePoint Online some folders didn’t show anything. It showed only “Something went wrong”:

The classic view had a better error message, but no solution for that:

This view cannot be displayed because it exceeds the list view threshold (5000 items) enforced by the administrator.
To view items, try selecting another view or creating a new view. If you do not have sufficient permissions to create views for this list, ask your administrator to modify the view so that it conforms to the list view threshold.

Sorting by Name

We will split those big folders into smaller ones. But while trying things out, we found that having Sorting by name, suddenly showed the documents in the big folders.

As a user you have to scroll a lot to find your document (because of the infinite scroll), but still, now you are able to see your documents!

Also, you can start selecting files and re-organizing them by using “MoveTo”.

Adding shortcut to OneDrive

Another workaround (or I’d rather say trick) is to open the folder from within your personal OneDrive by adding a shortcut:

With that you’ll get the folder linked in your OneDrive.

Even with a big number of files, OneDrive will list the folder. Why is that? Maybe, Microsoft treats personal OneDrives differently, more gently, in a more forgiving way.

On your computer you’ll see the linked OneDrive folder, too.