SharePoint Holmes and the Continuous Classic View

The case

“Why can I not set my document library to the New experience?” the user asked me.

“Of course you can, let me show you”, I said confidently.
Over-confidently, as it turned out. Because there was no “Exit Classic View” link bottom left.

Huh? No “Exit Classic View” bottom left of the page.

 

And the Advanced Library Settings showed that the library was already set to display in New experience.

The library was set to display in the New experience

Sigh…I got my SharePoint Holmes hat and magnifying glass out of the cupboard and set out towards…

The investigation

1. I remembered some other sites which did not display their “Exit Classic View” button. Those all have a banner on top of the page,  a popular feature from our old intranet, that has been migrated to the new intranet.
   I set the user’s page into Edit mode. There was a web part zone on top but there was no web part in it, so that did not give me any clues. Hmmm.

   

   Empty web part zone!

2. I looked at the other views in the library and those were in New Experience. Huh!
3. I created a new view and this was in New Experience as well, so the issue was with the default view.
4. To check my sanity, I did some searching (Yes, I know I should do that straight away but I like to look at things and push buttons 🙂 ) and what did I find?  This.
5. So, I dove into that Classic View, edited the page, looked at Closed Web Parts…and found a Content Editor Web Part.

   

   There was a closed web part on the page.

6. I added it to the page, then deleted it and that turned out to be…

The solution

The library now shows in New experience, with the “switch”-link bottom left.

So, there are two options when you can not get your document library to show in New Experience while it is set to be New:

1. Remove all web parts on the view page, open and closed.
   Set the page to Edit mode.
   If you see a web part, DELETE it.
   If you do not see a web part, click Insert > Tab > Web Parts > Closed Web Parts. If you see one or more web parts mentioned, add part(s) to page, and then DELETE it/them.
2. Create a new view by copying the old view with a new name, setting it to be the default view if needed, and deleting the old view.
   I must admit this did not work in my own tenant – all views showed and were created in Classic SharePoint. But I have seen this multiple times in our work tenant.

If you want to display a picture, you could also upload one or more pictures and pin it/them to the top.

Microsoft also has some things to say about the Classic vs Modern view. They also mention the influence of web parts (at the end of the article) but the language is not very clear.

About SharePoint Holmes:
Part of my role is solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I have a standard response, but sometimes I need to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it.
As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce SharePoint Holmes, SharePoint investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud.

Picture from unknown source but it was too funny to let go. See the trailer of Sherlock Gnomes! With Johnny Depp…