A common problem in SharePoint Explorer View (The possibility to view the contents of a document library in the good old Windows File Explorer) is that exploring takes forever…
Update 2013-05-31: Reference https://www.stefanjohansson.org/2013/05/unable-to-open-sharepoint-online-document-library-in-file-explorer in case you have Windows 7, Internet Explorer 10 and this doesn’t work…
Open in explorer can be accessed through the user interface using the Library tab as below. You can also directly access a library by entering the address in explorer such as serversitelibrary etc…
To fix this, you need to change a setting in Internet Explorer Options, go to settings – Connections and click “LAN settings”
Change the Automatically detect settings check box so that it is not checked, as below:
This makes the explorer interface work better…
If you are having other issues, are using Windows XP or are having issues creating files through the explorer view, the following TechNet blog entry have some general information:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/manjesh/archive/2010/01/03/all-about-explorer-view-in-sharepoint.aspx
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Stefan,
I can not see the Categories in Explorer View even when I try to Group By Categories in Explorer View. I need to be able to see them so I can copy files by category in a folder structure on cloud. Any ideas how it can be done?
Hussain
Hussain,
the file explorer window will only show plain files and folders, if you need metadata translated to something (categories to folders in this case) you need to use another approach.
I’d suggest looking at 3rd party integration tools for file management in SharePoint. If it is a one-off migration you might be able to leverage PowerShell to apply custom logic in your operations
/S
I was having trouble making explorer view work in SharePoint. So I finally just mapped a drive to it using the “map to a web page feature”
This worked, and the only things I had to worry about were the fact that the folder structure looked a little odd, and potentially the path names could become too long for Windows (depending on how far down it’s nested, names, etc.)