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

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

How to 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 Site Settings >> Click on “Manage Site Features” under Site Actions.
  2. Activate the “SharePoint Viewers” feature.
how to see who viewed a document in sharepoint

Wait for a few minutes, and when hovering over a document, You’ll see the names of the people who have viewed a document!

sharepoint online see who has viewed a file

Get the Number of Views on Files without User Names

If you want to disable the user names (and want to get just the number of views), You can set the Policy settings in 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”.sharepoint online who viewed a document
  3. Click on Save.

It takes 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!).

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!

Salaudeen Rajack

Salaudeen Rajack - SharePoint Expert with Two decades of SharePoint Experience. Love to Share my knowledge and experience with the SharePoint community, through real-time articles!

21 thoughts on “SharePoint Online: How to See Who has viewed a File?

  • It seems this is an on or off function. Is there a way to limit who can see the names of those who viewed a document? On for admin, off for others.

    Reply
  • How to find SharePoint site visited users list.

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  • How do you turn this on for OneDrive?

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  • If you turn on this feature, are other owners of the site notified?

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  • Can you Download this reprot for a power Bi report?

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  • Hi, what is they way to extract this data view count, any api? i want to show it in my UI for Videos. Please suggest.

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  • Can we download this report for a document library?

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  • Same questions, this seems like basic functionality that should be out of the box.

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  • I’ve activated this today, it shows as 54 users having viewed the file, but in the list there is only around 25 names. Is there a reason it cuts off? Is it possible to see all of the users who have viewd?

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    • Do you mean 54 views and 25 viewers. It means that few of those 25 viewers had viewed the site more than once.

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      • I am facing the same issue.
        Our document was published on 11th May. Since then it has 198 Views from 106 Viewers.
        But the window shows only the last 25 Viewers going back to May 23rd.

        Is there a way to see the previous viewers?

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        • Try Compliance Center audit log search: https://compliance.microsoft.com/auditlogsearch (Filter “File and folder activities” and then “Accessed File”)

          Reply
  • Can we activate this using powershell?

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  • anybody knows why if the user have read only rights it doesn´t show that user?

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  • Doesn´t work on images?

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    • ¨No it dont and i have the same problem so if you find out how to do please tell.

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  • Hi Salaudeen, do you think there will be way to get a csv report of the users that have viewed pages/files using PowerShell or out of box?

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    • Same question here – would also like to know if you could tie the o365 audit log api to something in power automate or BI and cross reference that with a subset of users. If someone does not review a document within X time, send a reminder email to view this document for a compliance tracking type thing?

      Reply
  • Would you happen to have a PowerShell script that could turn this feature on for several sites (input a CSV File)?

    Reply

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