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Often I come across a page that is using some web part and I think, "Hmmm I could use that for my project that I'm working on." But often I don't know which webpart was used. And there are so many that are similar.

Sometimes it is in a site that I have rights to and others it isn't. But even if I am able to go in and edit there generally isn't a clear way to know which part it is.

Even more embarrassing is sometimes it is a page I did several months ago and I can't remember which webpart I used and either I need to recreate it elsewhere or somebody asks me how I did it.

Is there a way to find which webpart is in use? Through editing? Or maybe using view source and the different ids and guids on the page?

2 Answers 2

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You can always add ?contents=1 to any url in SharePoint to see what specific webparts that are used in the site/page.

Example: http: //test.sharepoint.com/Pages/default.aspx?contents=1

enter image description here

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  • This is genius. Thanks. Is there somewhere a list of all the useful things that one might add onto the end of the url?
    – Rothrock
    Dec 12, 2014 at 19:58
  • 1
    Yes, there are! blogs.msdn.com/b/how24/archive/2013/05/23/… Dec 18, 2014 at 10:41
  • Thank you. That is enough to probably get me in a lot of trouble!
    – Rothrock
    Dec 18, 2014 at 15:29
  • Haha indeed. "With great power comes great responsibility". :) Dec 19, 2014 at 9:20
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user19952 has the easiest (and probably best) method, however as you can see from their screenshot there can be many web parts on one page, and it can be hard to differentiate which is which if you're not already familiar with the web parts. If you want to use the ID to find exactly what the web part is, you can use Powershell:

$site = Get-SPSite http://yoursitecollection
$web = $site.RootWeb
$page = $web.GetFile("Pages/yourpage.aspx")
$wpm = $web.GetLimitedWebPartManager($page, [System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope]::Shared)
$wpm.WebParts | Where-Object {$_.UniqueID -like "*12345678_1234_1234_1234_123456789012*"}

It sounds like you know how to get the web part ID already, but just in case you don't, I find the easiest way is:

  1. Edit the page that contains the web part
  2. Click on the web part you are looking for to highlight it
  3. Click on the Edit Source button from the Format Text tab
  4. Your web part markup should be highlighted still. Look for a GUID (i.e. 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012). This will be your web part ID.

One last thing - you will have to replace all of the dashes with underscores before you can use the web part ID as a filter in PowerShell. I don't know why Microsoft decided to store it with dashes in the page markup, but underscores in the back end. That's just the way it is.

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  • Thank you that looks like it could be useful. I can't seem to use powershell and when I edit the page there is no Edit Source button, nor any Format Text tab. Are you editing the page in Designer? I don't have that. If I view source I can find a guid with a name of webpartwpq3_webpartstoragekey. Is that a likely candidate?
    – Rothrock
    Dec 12, 2014 at 20:09

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