SharePoint Online: How to See Who has viewed a File?

Requirement: See who has viewed a document in SharePoint Online.

How do you see who viewed a document in SharePoint?

Can we see who has viewed a file in SharePoint or OneDrive? Yes! We can track who has viewed a file in SharePoint Online with this nifty feature, “SharePoint Viewers”. To see who has viewed a document in SharePoint, do the following:

1. Go to your SharePoint site >> Click on Settings >> Site Information >> View All Site settings.
2. Click “Manage Site Features” under Site Actions.
3. From the list of site features, activate the “SharePoint Viewers” feature.

Wait for a few minutes, and when hovering the cursor over a file name, You’ll see the names of the people who have viewed a document on a file card – including unique views and total number of views!

Tracking who has viewed a file in SharePoint Online can be an incredibly useful feature for many organizations. Whether you’re monitoring document engagement, ensuring compliance, or simply curious about file activity.

Implementing these steps ensures that you can keep a close eye on important documents and understand how they are being used within your organization.

Get the Number of Views on Files without User Names

If you want to disable the user names (and get just the number of views), you can set the Policy settings in the SharePoint Admin Center.

1. Go to SharePoint under Admin center >> Expand Policies, click on Sharing
2. Scroll down to the bottom and uncheck “Let site owners choose to display the names of people who viewed files or pages in SharePoint”.
3. Click on Save.

It will take a while for this change to take effect. Without this feature active, SharePoint just gives you how many people have viewed a document (without telling who has viewed it!).

Find All Users who accessed the File using the Audit Log

Need a detailed report to see who has edited, downloaded, etc., a document in SharePoint Online? Use the Audit logs feature in the Compliance Center!

To find all users who accessed a specific file in SharePoint Online using the Audit Log search in Microsoft Purview, follow these steps:

1. Login to Microsoft Purview Audit log search at https://purview.microsoft.com/audit/
2. Select the From and To date values. Set the Activities as “Accessed file”. (You can select a relevant activity, such as a downloaded file, viewed page, etc., as per your requirements.). Set the “File, folder or site” URL according to your search and hit the “Search” button.
3. Wait for the report generation to be completed.

This will get you an audit log report listing all users who accessed the specific file using the given search parameters. You can get a full list of all users who accessed the file using the Export button in the toolbar.

Conclusion

Being able to see who has viewed a file in SharePoint Online is a powerful feature for maintaining transparency and monitoring file activity. By utilizing the SharePoint viewers feature or “File and folder activities” in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, you can easily track user interactions with specific files.