Continued Adventures in Office 365 SharePoint Document Library 5,000 Item Limit

After my last post discussing my experience with the 5,000 item limit in a SharePoint Document Library on Office 365, I decided to do some further testing. The final resolution that I found to have over 5,000 items in a SharePoint Document Library in Office 365 was to create folders.

For the next test, I decided to see what would happen if I put over 5,000 items in one of the folders.

In the folder in my Document Library, I added over 5,000 items and now this page displays when I open the folder:





















I know the folder is not empty because I added over 5,000 items to it. Here is the screen that displays when I open the folder within the Document Library:




















To work around this, I created a view with a maximum of 450 item limit and I still received an error.

Very frustrating..... Finally, I found a work around.

First, go to the Library tab and select Create View.
Second, select Standard View
Third, create the view by giving it a name - however 2 options must be set

The Folders option needs to be changed to Show All Items Without Folders:







Then, the Item Limit needs to be changed to Limit the Total Number of Items Returned to the Specified Amount (any number below 5,000 - keep in mind that the larger this number is the more challenging it can be to work with the library):







Now, files can be deleted to get the item count below 5,000. The trick is to know file names in the folder. The files are then placed in the Recycle Bin.

Hopefully this helps some to get access to their Office 365 SharePoint data after the limit has been exceeded.

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