Forum Discussion
Why do modern team sites prevent you from using the full width of a page?
I don't know if anyone else finds this to be a big problem in SharePoint Online. One thing that frustrates me is that inserting web parts and page content only fills the left side of the screen. When viewing a team site on a widescreen monitor (which the vast majority of people are using), half the screen is just filled with white space instead of using the full width.
I've been creating a number of sites for staff and almost always they comment on this. It looks like a page hasn't been designed properly and all I can say is "sorry, that's the way SharePoint works".
Is there a reason team sites are designed like this? Any solutions or upcoming updates that might resolve it?
There are various reasons for this. The first being, Microsoft has invested a lot of time and money into accessibility in Modern SharePoint. Today, we have monitors with extremely large resolutions and it really poses a complexity for accessibility to make sure content is easily read across screen sizes. It's basically an industry standard now to not use full width layouts in order to better support various screen sizes.
To give you some insight, David Warner made a great video about why the whitespace exists and in fact, why it really isn't a bad thing at all. http://warner.digital/modern-sharepoint-pages-layouts-and-whitespace/
As someone else mentioned, there is an effort to support 1920px, but as you expect, you still wouldn't get full width on a 4k screen. Watch the video, it will definitely help understand the purpose around white space.- 2022 and still the same. There's always some kind of excuse for every gotcha.
- Yup, if you want to develop an internal site for your end users that doesn't look amateurish you're definitely going to want to go with a modern CMS system not one that is constantly 10+ years behind.
Dynamic page sizing is used by many other companies and many other products for the purpose of maintaining readability across platforms. The current modern Sharepoint pages assume people are still using old resolution monitors. I currently use a "standard" 1920x1080 screen size and have approximately a third of the screen unused (blank white on the right side). The reasoning listed is simply an excuse. This is not acceptable, ever.
Hi Chris. HOW DARE YOU SPEAK THE TRUTH!!??
You said it right, just an excuse. Why? Because like the rest of their 'stuff', nothing is truly completed. All the tech is relegated to ~75% completion missing small but important, standard, everyday expected functionality. But, nope. You have to add these requests into the rabbit hole: "UserVoice".
- It all depends on your resolution, if you use a standard 1080p screen it's fine, the issue is when you have 1440p+ you really notice this white space. It's mostly there I believe because it's going to be best practice around creating sites that are responsive. Otherwise, mobile devices would have a hard time if you have many more web parts or webparts with very wide width. You also get some odd results trying to stretch that far across.
On comm sites it's even worse with white space, but I know they are looking into and have been touching up UI and eliminating a bunch of white space over time I'm sure we'll see some improvements here especially as higher resolution screens become more mainstream. Hello Toby McDaid ! Can you pls. describe with a screenshot, what you mean? Wide screen can be filled with so many useful webparts as the quicklinks. Pls. see my screenshot: I had 2 important sites to link and one document set.
Them and the NEWS webpart opens new horizonts with better search tools within.
- Hi Toby, Microsoft has committed to 1920 page density as ‘top of mind in 2019’. This doesn’t put a precise date a things but they are aware. Personally as a widescreen user too I can’t wait! Copying in Mark-Kashman and John_Sanders for their views on this one!
