How to see exactly who has viewed your documents in SharePoint – SharePoint Viewers feature

Have you ever wanted to see exactly who has viewed a document and when? In this guide, Tony demonstrates the SharePoint Viewers feature, which allows you to see who has viewed your documents in SharePoint.??

By default, when you hover over a document in SharePoint, it shows how many people have viewed the file. But, it doesn’t show you who those people are.

However, if you change the settings for your SharePoint site, you can easily see who has accessed your files.

This feature is handy for organisations who have policy documents or other important documents stored in SharePoint, as you can see who has opened and viewed the file.

You need to be a Site Collection Administrator or ask your IT Administrator to turn on this feature.??

1. Go to?Settings?(the cog in the right-hand corner) and select?Site information.

2. Select?View all site settings.

3. Open?Manage site features.

4. Scroll down the list of site features and look for the?SharePoint Viewers?feature.

5. Select?Activate?to turn on the SharePoint Viewers feature. This is then turned on for all the files in your selected SharePoint site.

Here’s an example of a policy library in SharePoint where the SharePoint Viewers feature is activated.??

As you can see, when you hover over the document, you can see exactly who has viewed the document and when they viewed it.??

If you click through on?X Views, you can see a timeline of when people have viewed the document and compare unique views with the total number of views.