Wednesday 17 June 2020

How to remove the title bar from a SharePoint online Site Page

When you create a new SharePoint Team site (either directly or indirectly via a Teams team) you always get a "home" page that does not contain a title graphic.

Strangely if you create your OWN site pages then you ALWAYS get the title graphic and can't remove it from the GUI.

If you ever delete that default page then you can't ever recreate that page from the GUI.

Fortunately there is a way to switch the title bar "off" via PowerShell.   The secret is to change the "layout type" to "Home".

These are the steps inside an ADMIN PowerShell:

Firstly install SharePoint PNP with

[PS] Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline -SkipPublisherCheck -AllowClobber

If installed already you may wish to update your version with:
[PS] Update-Module SharePointPnPPowerShell*

With that done, enter your admin credentials with
[PS] $creds = Get-Credential

Then set the name of the page you want to change:
[PS] $PageName = "Home"

Then set the URL of the site that has the page you wish to change (use your tenant)
[PS] $LoginUrl = "https://{tenant}.sharepoint.com/sites/Test"

Now connect to the site
[PS] Connect-PnPOnline -Url $LoginUrl -Credentials $creds

or with MFA you may need
[PS] Connect-PnPOnline -Url $LoginUrl -UseWebLogin

Now to do the switch:
[PS] Set-PnPClientSidePage -Identity $PageName -LayoutType Home


Tuesday 21 April 2020

Getting a 4K external screen working with a Surface Book 2

I note that there are many posts around the Internet about this topic - how to get a Surface Book 2 driving a single external 4K screen.
Many authors state that the screen is always reported as a HD scren 1920x1080.
This is what I found:
The lowering of the resolution can be simply related to the use of HDMI to drive the screen.
Now I am not saying it is not possible with HDMI but an immediate solution is simply to ditch HDMI and use the DISPLAY PORT connections from Surface Book 2 to screen.
Hold on you say, there isn't a mini display port socket on a Surface Book 2.
Yep true - you will need a Surface Dock and then you will be given two.
Just connect from the mini display port on the Dock to the Display port input on the screen, tell your screen to accept input from the Display Port and Voila!
Hope this helps someone.