If you visit somewhere in SharePoint Online and select an item (here a document in a Document Library), as shown above, you can press the little ‘i’ in the top right hand side of the screen, as shown, to reveal the details pane.

What you might not appreciate is that you can also simply press the letter ‘i’ on your keyboard to achieve the same result.

Once the details pane has been exposed you’ll typically see a preview of that file along with all the information about that item as shown above.

If you scroll down a little in the details pane you’ll also find a list of recent activity of this specific item as shown.

If you have no items in the library selected, you will see an aggregate of all the activity in that area (i.e. for every item in that Document Library), as shown above for the Document Library ‘Documents’.

What you also might not appreciate is that you can re-size the details pane by dragging the left hand side border.

The great thing is that when you visit another location in SharePoint and again view the details pane, it will display with the same dimensions as you just set.

And when you return to the original location and view the details pane it will have these new dimensions. Thus, your setting remains ‘sticky’ throughout SharePoint.

One of the new features the modern SharePoint interface now provides is the ability to adjust the width of columns. As you would in a spreadsheet, locate the boundary of a column, click, drag and re-size to the desire width.

You can from the above, that I have re-sized the initial column width of the above Document Library.

Unfortunately, from what I can see, that changed column width doesn’t remain if you navigate away from the page. Thus, if you go somewhere else in your Team Site and then return to the original location the column widths are back to the way they were initially.

Hopefully Microsoft will soon add the ability for ‘re-sized’ columns widths to ‘stick’ after any change. However, having the ability to easily adjust column width in SharePoint is great additional functionality that has been missing for a long while.

One of abilities that I thought Microsoft had removed from the new or ‘modern’ SharePoint interface was the ability to open a document library using the Windows Explorer file manager. Turns out that feature is still available as you can see from the above image.

You’ll find View in File Explorer option in the top right of a Document Library under the All Documents option. However, as with the previous Open in Explorer option, it is only available if you are using Internet Explorer. The reason it doesn’t appear in other browsers is because it uses an Active X control.

When you select the option a new tab will open in a browser and you’ll see the ‘classic’ interface.

A few moments later the Document Library will open in Windows Explorer as you can see above. You can now drag and drop files directly into the library using Windows Explorer as you could previously.