SharePoint document library report

SharePoint Manager Plus offers a wide range of reports as part of its SharePoint reporting capabilities. These reports help administrators monitor and manage SharePoint without the struggles posed by native admin centers. One such report is the Document Library report.

What is the Document Library report in SharePoint Manager Plus?

The Document Library report gives details about every document library hosted across your SharePoint Online sites, covering their structure, content volume, storage footprint, permission boundaries, and versioning configurations. These primarily include the site URL where the library resides, the library name, when it was created, when its items were last modified or deleted, and the number of files and folders it holds.

Why you need a document library report

Document libraries are where SharePoint actually lives. Every contract, design file, policy document, and shared asset ends up inside one. As tenants grow, libraries multiply across thousands of sites, and each one carries its own permission inheritance, version settings, and storage footprint.

Without a single source of truth, IT teams chase issues one site at a time. They scroll through site contents, open library settings, and stitch together fragmented PowerShell results. Sensitive documents end up in libraries with broken permission inheritance no one noticed. Storage quotas creep up because nobody flagged the libraries with runaway versioning. Audits become a scramble because there is no centralized record of which library was created, when, and with what configuration.

A document library report gives you that visibility, helping you stay ahead of risks and storage waste rather than discovering them after the fact.

• Reclaim storage from oversized libraries: Identify libraries with unusually high file counts, item counts, or list sizes so you can prioritize cleanup, archival, or migration of stale content before storage quotas are breached.
• Audit permission boundaries at scale: Spot libraries that have broken inheritance from their parent site so you can review whether the unique permissions are intentional and aligned with your access control policies.
• Enforce versioning and recovery standards: Verify that versioning and minor version tracking are enabled on libraries holding business-critical content to support recovery, change history, and regulatory retention.
• Detect inactive or abandoned libraries: Use the last item modified and deletion timestamps to surface libraries that have not been touched in months, signaling candidates for archival, ownership reassignment, or decommissioning.
• Standardize new library provisioning: Compare creation dates and configuration settings such as folder creation and library descriptions to confirm new libraries follow your organization's templates and metadata standards from day one.

What does the Document Library report show?

Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter Document Library report data with the following fields.

• Tenant/Farm: Select the specific tenant or farm where you want to analyze document libraries.
• Site: Choose a specific SharePoint site to view only the document libraries hosted within it.

The Document Library report displays the following details for every document library.

Native SharePoint admin portals and PowerShell vs. SharePoint Manager Plus

In the SharePoint admin center, administrators have to navigate into each site collection and drill into site contents to view document libraries, with no consolidated cross-tenant view of library-level data. It provides basic visibility into document libraries and lacks granular filtering and reporting capabilities, such as isolating libraries based on size, activity, or permission settings. Generating detailed document library reports often requires manual navigation across sites or the use of PowerShell scripts. Additionally, these reports cannot be scheduled for periodic generation, and exporting data is limited and not optimized for quick audits, making continuous monitoring and governance more challenging.

PowerShell, especially when extended with PnP PowerShell, lets administrators script library-level data extraction across an entire tenant and export it to CSV. It bridges some of the gaps left by the admin center, but it still demands scripting skills, ongoing maintenance of authentication and module updates, and additional tooling to schedule, mail, or visualize the output. The data also comes out raw, not in a format ready for review by managers or auditors.

Benefits of SharePoint Manager Plus' Document Library report over native reports

SharePoint Manager Plus' Document Library report gets the power and granularity of PowerShell with the convenience of an admin center that provides the features offered in SharePoint but with fewer steps and more capabilities to the count.

For a detailed comparison, check out this page on how to manage document library permissions in SharePoint.

Features that enhance the Document Library report

SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you manage, automate, and secure the data found in the Document Library report:

• Export reports: You can download the report in multiple formats, including CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX, for sharing with department heads, supporting audits, or maintaining offline records for compliance.
• Automated report generation: Set the Document Library report to be generated at specific intervals (daily, weekly, or monthly) so you can run library audits regularly without fatigue.
• SharePoint alerts for storage and access changes: Configure real-time alerts to notify administrators when a document library exceeds a defined size threshold, when items are deleted in bulk, or when library-level permissions change unexpectedly.
• Bulk permissions management: Grant, remove, or copy permissions across multiple document libraries directly from SharePoint Manager Plus' interface, without juggling site-by-site settings or maintaining separate scripts for each library.
• Granular filters and conditions: Apply filters and conditions to narrow down the information you need, and save it as a custom report so you can generate it in one click anytime.

Reports that complement the Document Library report

If you are reviewing the storage, access, and life cycle of your SharePoint content, SharePoint Manager Plus provides several other reports that complement the data found in the Document Library report:

SharePoint permission reports: Provide detailed visibility into who has access to the sites that host your document libraries, including inherited and unique permissions assigned to users and groups, helping you trace library-level access back to its source.

External sharing report: Identifies document libraries and items shared with external users along with the sharing links involved, so you can flag oversharing risks tied to libraries surfaced in the Document Library report.

Storage usage report: Shows tenant-level and site-level storage consumption, giving wider context for the library-level size and item counts surfaced by the Document Library report.

List reports: Show an overview of all lists and document libraries in your environment, including details about versioning, creation and modification time, item count, and unique permissions.

Activity reports: Track site activity and inactivity for a custom period, helping you correlate library inactivity in the Document Library report with overall site engagement and identify true cleanup candidates.

Other features of SharePoint Manager Plus

• SharePoint management: Grant, remove, or copy SharePoint permissions, and group members in bulk without relying on complex scripts, simplifying your SharePoint administration.
• SharePoint reporting: Access more than 140 prebuilt and custom reports for SharePoint, including permissions, site usage, content inventory, and security insights, all from a centralized dashboard.
• SharePoint auditing: Maintain a comprehensive, searchable audit trail of all activities across your SharePoint environment, including user actions, permission changes, and content modifications.
• SharePoint alerting: Get real-time alerts on critical events such as permission changes, suspicious user activities, site access anomalies, and policy violations.
• Delegated administration: Empower help desk technicians with granular, role-based access to perform specific SharePoint administrative tasks, without elevating native privileges.
• SharePoint migration: Simplify SharePoint migration by enabling seamless content and permission migration across sites and tenants, with minimal downtime and visibility into migration progress.