In theory SharePoint allows for up to 30 million documents in a single library. Reading official documentation one can get an impression that there are no major problems with managing large libraries, as long as you use the modern interface. While it mentions that “when a list view shows more than 5000 items, you may run into a list view threshold error”, there is no explanation to when it can happen or what the consequences are. Let’s look at it a little closer.
List view threshold
In SharePoint’s classic experience in large libraries, it was common to see a message “This view cannot be displayed because it exceeds the list view threshold (5000 items) enforced by the administrator.”
The solution was to create views filtered on indexed columns, which would limit the number of items in a view to less than 5000 at a time.
SharePoint’s modern interface has improved the experience in the large libraries. Indexes are created automatically for any columns which are used for filtering and sorting in saved views. In libraries with less than 20,000 items indexes are created even when a user uses a column for sorting.
It is rather rare for the modern interface to show a list view threshold error at all. Does that mean that we can forget about the list view threshold limitation? Well, no. Not all columns can be indexed, for example fields that can contain multiple terms or multiple users cannot be indexed at all and filtering on those will always cause issues.
“Load more items”
Let’s say you have a document library with two custom managed metadata columns. One of them is a single valued and the other multi-valued. Let’s say you have 200,000 files in that library. You create a view filtering on your two columns. As a result an index on the single-valued column will be created automatically and you will be able to use this column for filtering without issues. But the multi-valued columns cannot be indexed, so when you try applying a filter on this column, your view may open like this:
You will see an empty list with a link on the bottom “Load more items”. You click the link and SharePoint will try to load some documents. It can take several clicks until you actually see any files matching your criteria. And even then, there can still be a link “Load more items”.
Sometimes the link will disappear before all files that match the filters are loaded. In some other, even more interesting cases, duplicates will start appearing and you will be able to continue loading more and more items, giving you the impression that there are more files matching the criteria than there really are. You will not see any error, but can you trust that all files you were looking for were retrieved? No, you can’t.
So, is SharePoint’s modern experience really handling large libraries better than the classic did? Just because users don’t run into errors it doesn’t mean the situation has improved. In the past we could trust that the retrieved list of documents was complete. We could create custom search pages and teach users to use those whenever their views exceeded 5000 documents. With no errors in SharePoint’s modern experience there is no easy way of telling when it would be better to use search instead of library views.
Solutions
How can we workaround this problem? There are a few options.
1. Avoid getting there.
Don’t let your document libraries grow beyond 5000 items. Split and organize documents in multiple libraries and/or sites. This may also help reduce oversharing, by limiting users’ access to only those documents that are relevant for them. It is especially recommended if you want to prepare your organization for Copilot or any future AI solutions.
2. Use Search.
When filtering libraries becomes unreliable you can choose to use search instead. Custom search pages handle large number of results without any issues.
3. Use MetaShare, it can help you with both.
MetaShare can help you both keep your libraries smaller and sites more organized, and seamlessly switch to search when needed.
Organizations let their libraries grow because it’s not always easy for the users to understand where they should upload or create their documents. SharePoint doesn’t really make it easy to see all your sites, tag them and filter when needed. Each new site and library needs some configuration steps to keep consistent metadata structures. New changes, for example adding a column to a view, are not easily propagated to all existing sites and libraries.
MetaShare lets you organize your sites into categories, set metadata on them just like you do for your documents. Users can easily see a complete list of all workspaces they have access to, can filter them, search and find the right location for their documents. Administrators can easily modify structure for all existing and future workspaces. This way, having many smaller workspaces is no longer an issue.
But MetaShare will help you even if your libraries exceed 5000 items and use columns that cannot be indexed. Our application recognizes those situations where SharePoint returns incomplete results and will automatically switch from querying library directly, to seamlessly combining search results, queries and all applied filters, so that users can see the right documents without the need to navigate to any custom search page.