Forum Discussion
What SharePoint library columns might be recognized as columns (details/fields) in File Explorer?
Thanks, not the answer I was looking for but still, your answer is OK. I thought I as much.
I just wonder how I will convince my colleagues, who are huge fans of maps on a fileshare to organize their documents, to use document libraries instead of folders with this. But I will give it a try.
one approach is to consider the metadata values as compliments to folders. Show them how they have one hierarchy with folders, but once they add metadata they get many more options. But just like every other system, not every option is available in every scenario.
Keep in mind that custom views are not visible in Windows Explorer either, once they get used to how powerful Views are, then they will not feel the need to using Windows Explorer, the transition can actually happen very quickly.
How often do they really need to work offline? If it is frequently, then a well designed library and folder structure will be more important than it if just an occasional need.
To continue this conversation. Apparently, they need to upload documents/files to another application created for us (read website).
Files cannot be uploaded directly from the Sharepoint library, only from explorer (thus Sharepoint synced to explorer). So we will need to rethink this.
Back again.
I still wonder why I cannot add the metadata colums in the explorer view for files that are synced to my computer.
I see the metadata allright in the document properties in Word which is great (thank you for putting me in that direction), but I would really like to be able to add the metadata colums to the view of explorer. This would help distinguishing the Office docs from the others (like PDF or JPEG) when we need to upload them to another application/website.
I get a list of explorer details (which are not usefull at all), but I do not get the metadata as an option to be selected. Can anyone confirm that I am not missing something and that it really is impossible to see this?
As already said, you can't add the SharePoint columns to File Explorer.
In fact, as you have discovered, the File Explorer columns list is static, while, to do what you want, it should be dynamic, i.e. it should change in every folder, listing also all the additional properties of every file, which is of course impossible.
