Microsoft 365 SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 – Drag and drop requirements

I wrote an article about document management in SharePoint 2013. You can find it here. I was not able to drag and drop documents directly into a document library. After installing Office 2013 it worked perfectly. I talked with Microsoft support about this and tweeted the following:

#SharePoint2013 drag and drop with document libraries is ONLY supported with Office 2013 #Office365 #Wortell

I got a reply from SharePoint MVP Michal Pisarek:

@sharePTJasper No its not. For IE 9/10 and other browsers its natively supported, for older versions of IE then you do need Office 2013

The last thing I want is spreading false information so I contacted Microsoft support again and got the following reply:

Office 2013 is a requirement if you are using IE8 or IE9. The rest of the browsers will work without Office 2013 installed:

  • FireFox latest version
  • Chrome latest version
  • IE 10 desktop
  • IE 8 or 9 desktop + Office 2013 installed

I have not been able to test this but I am assuming this information is correct coming straight from MS Support.

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21 Comments

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    November 12, 2012 at 10:24 pm

    That sucks .. always with the restrictions.. isnt there a way to enable it without office 2013 for IE 8 / 9 ? seems that is should be possible since it natively works in chrome / firefox.. kinda of smells like ms did that on purpose. Were on to you Billy! its plainly obvious that supporting only ie10 (win8) and office 2013 is a lame excuse for pushing new software sales… shame! shame on you! greedy ….

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    December 13, 2012 at 11:02 am

    Thanks for your post! Pretty stupid this doesn’t work with IE9 without office 2013.

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    January 2, 2013 at 2:55 pm

    Shame they felt they had to say it works natively in IE9 when it doesn’t; thanks for taking the time to get this cleared up!

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    January 12, 2013 at 1:41 am

    When will Microsoft solve this browser compatibility issues with most of their products. Is it business bureaucracy or is it bad developers? They will start loosing their well earned respect in the market. Such a major drawback.

  • Reply
    Jasper Oosterveld
    January 12, 2013 at 10:34 am

    Microsoft has really improved compared to SharePoint 2007. The multi browser support is a lot better.

  • Reply
    A. Barraque
    February 5, 2013 at 3:52 pm

    Having SharePoint Designer 2013 installed is allowing me to have this feature with IE8. Thought I’d throw that out there 🙂

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    March 5, 2013 at 10:05 pm

    What about SharePoint 2013 on premise?

  • Reply
    Jasper Oosterveld
    March 6, 2013 at 6:51 am

    This is for on premise and online.

  • Reply
    hurna
    March 7, 2013 at 3:48 pm

    First the good news, drag and drop does work with Safari (tested with version 5.1.7). I do have Office 2011 installed on the Mac, I don’t know if that is required or not.

    Now the bad news, the document managment uploading experience using either IE 8 or 9 without Office 2013 is terrible.

    First the Upload multiple documents option is gone regardless of what browser you are using. So with non-IE browsers, drag and drop is the only way to upload multiple documents. Which is better than 2010 so I’m happy so far.

    But with IE 8 or 9, when you click on the Add a document option a popup window appears and where the upload multiple document option used to be in 2010, there is now an option to “Upload files using Windows Explorer”. This provides a terrible experience where the popup window stays open, and then Windows Explorer opens. Even if the End users figure out how to add documents using the windows explorer option (not a given), they then have to return to the IE window, and Cancel the Add a document popup window (clicking OK gives an error because the window doesn’t think you have uploaded anything). This closes the popup, but doesn’t refresh the library. So users won’t even think their upload was successful. They need to refresh their browser in order to see any of the uploaded documents.

    There is a windows explorer option in the ribbon just like in 2010, which at least doesn’t have the popup window which you have to cancel out of. We might look into a css hack to hide the Windows explorer option on the Add a document popup as I don’t even want to think about the training issues this will cause us.

    And I was so excited after the SharePoint Conference………

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    May 8, 2013 at 8:48 am

    Hurna I totatlly agree with your opinion. There are many more points where the experience is terrible in SharePoint.

  • Reply
    Victor
    June 4, 2013 at 8:31 am

    Drag & Drop also works with IE8 / IE9, if you take a installation package from Office 2013, for example the SkyDrive Pro standalone version which you can download for free. Install onyl the “Support for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation” feature in section “Office Tools” of the package and it will work fine… This is why it also works with SharePoint Designer 2013 package, because the same feature is contained there.

  • Reply
    Wilco Jonker
    June 10, 2013 at 1:43 pm

    For the record,

    Drag And Drop functionality is HTML5 dependent. This is why IE8 and IE9 default are not able to utilize this by default.

    As with any Office 2013 package (SPD2013, Sky Drive Pro, Office 2013, any seperate office 2013 program) there are so called “integration tools” available.
    These integration tools make it possible to use (through Active-X components) Drag & drop in Internet Explorer version 8 and 9.
    (just like the integration tools in Office 2010 made the explorer view possible)

    The support of HTML5 of IE10 makes that this is natively supported 🙂

    This is why laterst versions of IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox have the Drag & Drop option by default (HTML5 support)

    hope this will clarify it completely for everyone!

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    July 15, 2013 at 4:27 pm

    Hi Victor and others… I want clarify, that the “Support for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation” will brake another functionality – you will not be able to EDIT documents directly from SharePoint site.

  • Reply
    Dave Kuehling
    July 31, 2013 at 2:44 pm

    I found in my testing I needed to do three things to get everything fully working. Just applying the Designer 2013 foundation items solved one issue but then made it so you could not open files directly from a library, adding Office 2010 SP2 fixed opening files, but made it so files would not fully upload when using drag and drop, copying the DLL fixed the last drag and drop issue and everything worked as expected.

    Here is what I did:

    1. Started with a clean Win7 PRO x64 install running IE8 fully patched to 7/30/13
    2. Installed Office 2010 STD x32, apply SP2
    3. Install SharePoint Designer 2013 x32, Foundation components only
    4. Renamed OWSSUPP.DLL in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14 to OWSSUPP.DLL.OLD
    5. Copied OWSSUPP.DLL from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15 to C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14
    6. Rebooted
    7. All drag and drop working, can open office files directly from library, and can save files directly to library from Office client (tested Word 2010 and Excel 2010)
    8. Applied update to upgrade to IE9
    9. All drag and drop working, can open office files directly from library, and can save files directly to library from Office client (tested Word 2010 and Excel 2010)

    Hope that helps.

    Dave Kuehling

    Codesigned

    http://www.codesigned.com

  • Reply
    Jasper Oosterveld
    August 5, 2013 at 6:01 pm

    Thanks for your feedback Dave 🙂

  • Reply
    Frederique
    September 13, 2013 at 12:55 pm

    Thank you for giving us the official word on this problem! I was going submitted a Service Request for this, but now I’ll save my breath 🙂

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    September 26, 2013 at 12:28 am

    My IT staff state that Chrome does not work with SharePoint Online; and I’ve tried to login, but failed. FireFox works with Online SharePoint. Perhaps it is our particular licensed environment with MS Cloud.

  • Reply
    Anonymous
    October 22, 2013 at 9:29 am

    Drag and drop is working for us in chrome but open with explorer is then greyed out and unusable. Anyone else noticed this?

  • Reply
    Microsoft…what else? – SharePoint 2013 – Drag and Drop limitations
    March 2, 2014 at 11:10 am

    […] I wrote a blog about the requirements for drag and drop in SharePoint 2013. You can read it by clicking here. […]

  • Reply
    Fahd
    February 20, 2015 at 9:52 pm

    Any idea why drag and drop might stop working in Chrome? It’s working in IE 8 with Office 2013 installed…

  • Reply
    Cynthia
    June 27, 2016 at 7:13 pm

    Not working with IE11 and Office 2013…wonder why

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