Recent Documents Web Part Sort Order

Question

I've added the recent documents web part to one of my modern pages. I have a question in regards to the sort order. How is it being sorted? When I click on the See All link on the web part and view all the documents I'm seeing the column Last Accessed with the following dates:December 21, 2018December 3, 2018August 29, 2017October 5, 2018August 20, 2018December 3, 20183 hours ago&nbsp;20 hours agoIt seems like it should be in descending order which would put the 3 hour document at the top of the list followed by the 20 hours, etc.Does anybody have any insight into this or does this happen to others?Thanks!

robin nilsson · Answer

I had that as well - had to refresh my page a couple of times. I think under the covers there's a general Delve/Graph API to get recents that used everywhere you can see recents - but that's just a guess. That might take time to run.

At the very least they should put a pinned icon on the document name, like they do everywhere else.
Or maybe don't force pinned documents to show up at the top - just do it by date descending no matter what. That would be even better. Pinned and Recent should be separate concepts.

deleted · Answer

So I finally figured out where the documents that were at the top of my web part view were coming from. I first checked to see if they were pinned in my libraries and they were now. I then decided to go into one of the Office applications like Excel and on the Home page of the Excel there are three view, Recent, Pinned and Shared with me. I had those documents pinned in the Office client. Once I unpinned them there they stopped going to the top of the web part. At least now I know why it showed that way. But I can see how that can be confusing to the end users since there is no indicator that those documents are pinned and that it was done in the Office vs. being done in a SharePoint library. Thanks&nbsp;Robin Nilsson&nbsp;for pointing me in this direction.

robin nilsson · Answer

What I found when I tested this webpart is that any pinned documents show up at the top, no matter what the date. They don't have any icons showing they're pinned, though.

I told it to show 10 documents, and I had 4 pinned PowerPoints and 2 pinned Word documents. Those showed first, then the rest were in decending date order. I unpinned some of the documents and they disappeared/ended up in the proper date sequence.

deleted · Answer

So I think that you are correct. Now that I look back at the documents that are at the top, they are ones that have pinned. But they are all not pinned in the document library anymore, which is odd that they are still going to the top. After my document that was updated 3 hrs ago, it is showing in the correct order.

This is good to know, it gives me something to to explain to end users, but in my opinion it should almost be a filter. "All documents" would show all documents, if you add the filter "Pinned", then it would just show documents that you have pinned.

But still doesn't explain why I still have some at the top that use to pinned at the top.

Forum Discussion

Recent Documents Web Part Sort Order

4 Replies

Resources