August 2019 - Updates to SharePoint page and news authoring
Published Aug 12 2019 01:59 PM 63.6K Views
Microsoft

Building informative and attractive pages is an essential step in engaging employees with news, applications, and critical information in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Today we’re pleased to announce a series of enhancements to make authoring pages faster and more intuitive.

 

All of these are scheduled to start rolling out to Targeted Release in August 2019, with general availability following soon after.

 

Undo/Redo 

Office applications such as Word have long offered “undo” actions after a change.  Now, we’re bringing this option to SharePoint pages as well, providing the option to undo changes during authoring.  Once you save or publish your page, you can no longer undo previous changes. 

 

Drag and drop files to the canvas

Adding files to pages is simpler than ever.  You can drag and drop files from desktop views and SharePoint will automatically add the file viewer and upload the file to the SharePoint document library.  We’ve also added a rich preview for links pasted into the text editor to embed videos from Stream and YouTube links, or images with title and description from other links.

 

Click here or on the image below to see how easy it is to drag and drop files into your pages.

 

 

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New vertical sections 

As mentioned on our home site announcement blog, modern pages can now have vertical sections as shown below.

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Recommendations 

Pages and news can now include a section showing recommended content.  Pages are suggested based on trends and personalization derived from the Microsoft Graph.

 

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On page anchors 

Beautiful long-form content brings expansive information to your pages.  Now you can add links to headings within that content to focus readers on the most relevant portions of your content.

 

SharePoint automatically adds anchor links to all first, second and third level headings in your page. Then simply hover over the headings and you’ll see a link symbol.  Clicking it will give you the fully rendered URL, including the anchor. If you click this symbol, the heading will be added to the URL bar, or you can right-click to save it to your copy buffer. 

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Please continue to stay engaged with us on the TechCommunity and on UserVoice as we continue to update our page and news authoring experiences.  Thanks.

 

 

39 Comments
Iron Contributor
Page anchors are here!! Huzzah!
Brass Contributor

@Chris McNulty  These all look great! Super excited for page anchors! When can we expect to see these updates in the GCC?

Brass Contributor

Love all this @Chris McNulty. Keep them coming.

Silver Contributor

All of these were just posted a week ago as July updates (PitStop post). Why are you reposting same stuff over and over again (this goes to all MS blogs and categories..). This is annoying to track your news with so many repeats.

Brass Contributor

Have been waiting for Related and Recommended pages. This will be super beneficial to our staff and us in getting our training out there!

Copper Contributor

@Chris McNultyreally some nice enhancements to SharePoint :)

 

We are really looking forward to news on audience targeting for content pages (highlighted content webpart), news (news webpart) and navigation. Do you have good news on audience targeting for next month?

Copper Contributor
Copper Contributor
Not seeing the option to add a vertical section on a modern page. Is it just for homepages?
Iron Contributor

Has anyone managed to do some anchor links yet? Can't work out if i've not got it yet or not.

Iron Contributor
@Michael Butterfield Not yet. It usually takes a couple of weeks at least between these sorts of announcements and the actual feature being made available in the initial tiers of external member access. At least, that's when MS is on a good 'release' streak.
Brass Contributor

@Michael ButterfieldI've noticed this available today when setting up a new site on a tenant on full targeted release. When the cursor goes over an appropriate heading, a link icon appears at the right hand side of the text. You can then see the full link including the anchor in the bottom left of the screen. You can right click on the text and copy the link. It all works well and as described as far as I can see based on a quick look.

 

I've not see any of the other features as yet.

Iron Contributor

Page anchors have arrived in my tenant but I noticed one issue.  You are not able to use a page anchor in the site or hub navigation menu.  The page anchor section (#pageanchorheading)  is removed from the navigation link when you save it.  hopefully this will be fixed.

Iron Contributor

Ok well it's arrived for me now and i've tested it and it works fine. 

 

However what I think is really needed is a proper Table of contents web part, which would give a 'back to top' link next to each heading.

Brass Contributor

@Michael Butterfield I like that idea a lot! Is it in the user voice at all?

 

Also are you on a targeted release tenant?

Iron Contributor

@Sam Gray I'm not sure but it would be very useful, with a few nice styling options.

 

I've created something simple content list for mine but a similar out-of-the box web part would be great:

Capture.JPG 

 

Unfortunately though the anchor links only seem to work for me - when any of my colleagues click on them the page just refreshes. 

 

Iron Contributor

@Michael Butterfield - is your colleague also a Target release user?  Perhaps the anchor links will not yet work for Standard Users as the code for the heading IDs (which is what the links rely on) is not yet available in the standard release tenants.

 

I've discovered that you can't add anchor links to the Quick links web part - a bit disappointed by that as some of my authors can relate to that web part more readily than in-text links. Also, if they worked with Quick links, the additional styling/layout options may be possible.  I agree with Michael that a dedicated Web part that authors can add to the page that detects the anchors and automatically creates the table of contents would be a good thing, and pretty much what I expected.  However, I can live with the solution as delivered - hopefully it's just the minimum viable product and will be enhanced over time.  

 

I've noticed something else in my tenant that was not mentioned in this (or the earlier) post.  I now have a control that allows for the duplication of sections and web parts.  It's working fine, but would be good to have some information about how Microsoft see this feature helping users.  

 

Iron Contributor

@Jenny Bruce  I have successfully used anchor links in the quick links web part.  What behavior are you seeing?  One place I have not been able  to use anchor links is in the actual site or hub navigation.

Iron Contributor

@Rick DeFoe  - The behaviour I am seeing is that the page just refreshes.  Links work fine when created in the text web part.

 

As you've mentioned it's working in quick links for you, I'll give it another go.  Perhaps I began testing things out just a little too early.

 

Copper Contributor

@Rick DeFoe - how were you able to make it work in the quick links web part? My anchor links get ?web=1 pasted to them when they are clicked, making them refreshing the page and not navigation to the anchor... Do you have a solution?

Iron Contributor

@Kim Schrooten , I didn't do anything special when creating this quick link.  I've included a screenshot of what it looks like.  I just copied the Header link to clipboard, and then when I setup the quicklink I used "From Link", when changing the URL of the specific quick link.  Below is a screenshot of the setup

 

clipboard_image_1.png

Copper Contributor

I'd like to be able to use anchor links on a SharePoint Office 365 page, but I can't see any of the above mentioned functionality. I would like an explanation regarding 'targeted release' versus 'general availability'? @Chris McNulty Please, please, please let me know when everyone will get this feature. It is very frustrating to be unable to link to sections of a web page in the year 2019.

Copper Contributor

@Rick DeFoe - thanks for the feedback! We figured out why it works for you and not for me :) When you're using quick links in combination with anchors on a homepage of a site collection, it works fine. But when you're using anchors on a "normal" page, which means you have the pagename.aspx in the hyperlink, quick links automatically pastes ?web=1 behind my anchors. As a result my anchors are not working, just refreshing the page...

Brass Contributor
Neat
Iron Contributor

@Kim Schrooten , I have checked on an article page instead of a homepage and we are experiencing the same problem as you.  Hopefully they get this fixed.

Copper Contributor

Anyone else alienated, that we are getting exited about anchors? Will this core feature ever be available for SP2019 on premise?

Copper Contributor

It's September 10th and I don't have the anchor feature on my pages yet. Am I doing something wrong? The pages I use are from Microsoft Teams Sharepoint, I have created the titles formatted as title 1, do i need to do something else?

Copper Contributor

I've got the vertical content sections but not the anchor links. Not sure how the tenant is setup for me. also just recently got the 'button' and CTA webpart options so I assume we're running some version of delayed release

Copper Contributor

Good afternoon,

 

I am working on a training team SharePoint for my employer. I understand that the "Team" or "Group" SharePoint is different than the general site SharePoint. When will the anchor feature be added to teams or group pages? I have created the headings with H1 tags, and the anchor link does not show. @Chris McNulty 

 

Naomi

 

Annotation 2019-10-10 130001.jpg

Copper Contributor

I am also looking for the anchor links on Modern Team and Communication site pages.  When will they be generally available?

Copper Contributor

Yeah, I am unsure. 

Copper Contributor

The page anchors don't work due to SharePoint still wanting to add web=1 to the end of each urls. Time to ditch it, it makes no sense.

Steel Contributor

@Chris McNulty,

 

As @samhegarty said, we cannot use the anchor in a quick links webpart because of the ?web=1. Any plan on fixing that or a possible workaround?

Copper Contributor

@samhegarty @Chris McNulty @Benoit Fournier I'm not seeing the "?web=1" in my anchor links (I just started on targeted release today) but really, there's not much point doing anything with these links if the staff are on "standard" release (and there's no ETA for when they see the links) and the links just reload the page ...

 

anchor links.JPG

 

 

Copper Contributor

@garyminato I’m not seeing it now either in prod, so it looks like they’ve fixed it thankfully

Copper Contributor

I am using demo tenant to test page on page anchors. I have created new modern page and under Text app, added content with headings. Also added sample text similar to heading. I dont see automated links. Will it take some time to generate these links? Please help me

 

As per following i have created Overview and scope headings. also added Overview and Scope text on top. 

 

 

Copper Contributor

I have taken care. i can see hyperlink icons next to heading. I copied that link and used as section link.

Copper Contributor

Yes, it seams there are problems using anchors in quick launch. If you try to add a link with an anchor and then save the page, the anchor will be removed. A workaround for that is adding ? before #

 

Antonima_0-1584874392504.png

 

Iron Contributor

A bit of a hint for everyone - try to make sure your page titles and headings don't include special characters.  While the ID value in the code is displaying the symbol, the system is converting the anchor link to valid html equivalent. I've observed that sometimes the anchor works okay, but other times the user just gets taken to the top of the page. 

Copper Contributor

are page anchors available for on premise SP 2019?

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