SharePoint Holmes and the disappearing Datasheet View

Part of my role is solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I have a standard response, but sometimes I need to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it.
As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce SharePoint Holmes, SharePoint investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud.

The first case is about a Datasheet View.

The case

One of the users of a site did not see the items in a list. Having access to the data was a requirement for his role and he had always been able to see this content before it was migrated to SharePoint Online.

So, I put on my SharePoint Holmes cap and rolled up my sleeves.

The investigation

1. I logged in with my Admin account and went into the site.
2. I saw the items perfectly well. Just items in a Datasheet view.
3. Permissions check – the user had Read permissions to the site.
4. Items with unique permissions check – the list had unique permissions but the user had Read access.
5. Item-level permissions check – in the Advanced List Settings it showed that all items were visible to all users of the site.
6. Workflow check – no workflow reducing permissions after going through a process.

Right, that was an interesting one.

1. It was time to look through the eyes of the user, so I added myself to the same user group and checked. An empty list stared back at me.
2. I went through the other views and found a standard one. I could see the items in there, and so could my user.
3. One of my colleagues mentioned that issues with the latest IE update had been reported, which might have influenced the Datasheet view.  We tried different browsers. That made no difference, but there was always that difference between user and admin.

Hmmm….

The solution

Search engine to the rescue! One of the results surprised me, and I had to test that.

I created a datasheet view in my own tenant. It looked like this:

Then I logged in with Contribute permissions. It looked like this:

Then I logged in with Read permissions. It looked like this:

You need at least Contribute permissions before you can see items in a Datasheet view.

The Datasheet view is meant for editing, so only people with edit permissions can see items in it. It makes sense and I have always told people to use the Datasheet view very sparingly as it is only too easy to change something. The many Excel-addicts in my user base however loved it and have also used it for display purposes in our SharePoint 2007 intranet.
Now they either have to elevate permissions or recreate their views.

Interestingly enough this was a permissions issue, but different from what I have ever seen before!

Image courtesy of Geerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net