Microsoft SharePoint Wiki Syntax cheat sheet
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) now includes the ability to quickly and easily create Wiki web sites. This is great! Wikis are perfect for documentation, meeting note taking, brainstorming and basically just creating content that a group needs to edit easily.
Unfortunately, there is very little documentation on MOSS features out there. I’ve been hunting everywhere for a guide to all the Wiki tags that MOSS’s wiki supports. After a lot of extensive research and questioning and trial and error, I now present you with the complete and concise master cheat-sheet to MOSS’s wiki syntax:
Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 Wiki tag syntax
- Link to another wiki page: [[Name of page]]
Feel free to print out this handy guide and post it next to your computer.
29 Comments
There are twice more features. Remember something like:
Custom named link to another wiki page: [[Name of page|link text]]
Wow … that’s really extensive … how did you manage to come up with it??!?
Am I missing something here? I can’t find the info or a link…. or is my sense of humour failing ;-|
I’m trying to find out how to link to a section of the same page (so that I can do a contents list at the top) but do you think I can find any help from Microsoft (or anywhere else)?
Steve’s sense of humour is probably as bad as mine because I found this page in a Google searching hopeing to find an extensive list of tag help. The sad thing is, [[Page Name]] is the only help there is. Not bloody good enough, Microsoft! Wiki support must have been a last-minute addition, surely.
I have my own syntax at http://www.inatalie.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070919-043418
I think this page should be read as sarcastic…
SharePoint wiki is lame at best.
Too bad my IT chose it over the lovely MediaWiki.
Forced to work with SharePoint wiki, I’m searching the web and MS to find usable syntax (to say nothing of the extra features of a real wiki).
And where are the CSS tag definitions? I cannot even get bullet lists to appear after customizing a stylesheet!
Hilarious! I am currently implementing this as the wiki cheat sheet in my company’s Sharepoint wiki.
Apologies to all who didn’t get my dripping sarcasm. To clarify, the built-in Wiki in SharePoint is just lacking any real wiki syntax features. The ONLY wiki syntax it supports is the one I mention above.
So, while you can have a Wiki in SharePoint, it’s not going to have much semantic markup in it, nor contain useful features like the ability to add photos with ease.
If your org needs a wiki, don’t use SharePoint. If you have sharepoint, then maybe the built in Wiki will be somewhat useful, but don’t expect it to have a full feature set, unfortunately.
If any vendors are reading this, a ‘wiki text editor web part’ would be a great add-on. Something that would replace the default text editor in the wiki and provide real wiki syntax and things like the ability to upload photos directly from the Wiki rather than having to first create an image library then manually link to the images.
This list is a life saver. Thank you for all of your work bring together disparate information on the Microsoft SharePoint Wiki Syntax to share with all of us. I can’t wait to begin publishing to my company knowledge-base with it. We are so tired of having to use a WYSIWYG for everything. It’s nice to know that placing a tag will be simple and mouse-click free! Will you be writing a book on the Microsoft SharePoint Wiki Syntax in the future? Perhaps you could contact the folks at MS Press. An interactive computer based training would be helpfull as well. Good Luck!
Thanks for your work. It’s a shame there is no title for this at MS Press. There really should be a certification. The Syntax makes it possible to be free from the WYSIWYG once and, well, for a moment. Artemy does have a point that by adding a pipe character we greatly increase the power of the Syntax like so: [[Name of page|link text]]. Being that the “Name of page” and “link text” can be replaced with variable data it opens the possability for some really usefull combinations. As a SharePoint Wiki power user, I appeciate the ability to write in a comprehensive markup language so can see the formating with the text.
Microsoft says it best “To link to another wiki page in this library, type [[Page Name]].”.
Good job!
Saved me a lot of time, I was searching for some help on the syntax. I’ve already published your work on the company’s MOSS, I hope there’s no copyright on it.
In case you are interested, ThreeWill integrated SharePoint with the Confluence enterprise wiki. You can read more about it here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/SharePoint+Connector+for+Confluence.
You are such great saver! I spend whole morning to find out what I can do with SP wiki. Now I GOT the ANSWER!!!
It would be nice to have tags that would bring Sharepoint content into the Wiki. A list of documents that match a query would be nice or a tag for including a webpart. They don’t allow the IFrame HTML tag so I can’t use that to do anything like this. Seems rather hobbled to me.
Great post. I have been searching everywhere for some real SP wiki syntax. It must have taken you forever to write this.
I’m the PM responsible for SharePoint wikis in the next version. I’d be happy to hear any other feedback. You can reach me through email or on twitter (@spwiki).
Regarding syntax – we went for a wysiwyg experience because we thought it was more approachable for our users, by far most of whom have never heard of a wiki.
Kevin: please, install ANY other wiki software and use it an entire month. Then go back to the design table. SP Wiki is nothing more than a normal webpage with an edit button. A lot of academic works have been published about wiki usage in enterprises, and all of them talk abou basic wiki features, all of them missing in SP wiki. I am trying to use SP Wiki in my company, but we are almost giving up. Thanks.
I can’t tell if half of you posting are playing along with my sarcasm or just don’t get it.
Kevin, thanks for posting. I have to agree with Daniel. It was a real shame that MS got away calling the Wiki features in MOSS an actual Wiki. It made the brochure look nice but was a real disappointment to anyone that was actually looking forward to using an actual Wiki.
I do wish you the best with your project, though. On the plus side, ANYTHING your team can add in terms of Wiki features will be much needed and much welcomed.
My main disappointment was that there was no easy way to add images, which is what is needed for it to be a decent tool for documentation. To be fair, that’s an overall issue with sharepoint in general.
I’m amazed. I’m doing some documentation for a customer and I suggested MediaWiki. They use Sharepoint, so I said sure. I’ve searching all over for the tags to use and I’m floored to find none! How can they call this thing a Wiki? It’s just a basic flat web page. Very disappointed.
I am working on Sharepoint migration from SP07-SP07, and I created one link on source and migrated it on another moss but Link donot preserved.
The wikifield of source and target wiki item is same but in target there is Rajan instead of [[Rajan]]
Can you plz any of you help me to render [[Rajan]] instead of Rajan
Put a Backslash in front of the pair of brackets. \[[Rajan\]] will do it. Or do you want [[Rajan|http://mnteractive.com/sites/MyTestRootSite/Pool/Rajan.aspx]]. Or just do it in HTML. That’s their real markup language.
Well I’d rather use Confluence with teh Sharepoint adapter but they wouldn’t let me have it. In it’s defence, the SP Wiki is kind of okay, it is easy for people to create content on the fly in a page linked format, you can include external links and graphics pretty easily and in general is doing the job at my company. I’d like a nice, lazy way to better format text to wrap around the graphics and a way of actually editing my Sharepoint documents from the Wiki but I think I will ahve to live without that for the moment. I could mess with the raw HTML I suppose, not sure it is worth it to me.
The tag list for SharePoint wiki’s is not quite correct. There is a bit more to our single tag. The actual syntax is:
[[Name of Page | Text to Display]]
Am I missing something here? The commenter named “Greg” talks about a WYSIWYG editor, but all I can find is a BLANK TEXTBOX in which I am expected to type RAW HTML. How much of the Microsoft kool-aid is that guy drinking, to make him hallucinate so badly??
Now I know the secret… if you use IE, you get WYSIWYG editor in the page. However if you use Firefox, you don’t get help and may don’t know how to write a good Sharepoint WIKI page at all.
I found this as I wanted to link to the home/root page of a section. It turns out that [[Home]] does the trick.
What I have not seen is a clean way to link from one site to another on the same SP server. I end up using HTML mode and <A class=ms-wikilink href=”/Site%20Name/Wiki%20Pages/Home.aspx”>Site Name</A> though the “wiki” editor promptly changes the URL part to include “http://wiki-server-domain-name/”. Ideally, there’s a clean [[]] way to link between sites. To make administration of access rights easier we have multiple sites but also regularly link between sites.
Well, since the big org I work in looks like its going SharePoint and replacing a lot of other document systems, including TWiki, Confluence,Documentum and lots more, this is a very disappointing outcome. No TOC generation, no anchors in page, no nothing really. might just as well use Word.
This is typical of Microsoft – put in just enough to be able to call it a feature. In this case, one thing was enough.
Don’t hold your breath for new features since they also tend to remove features with new product releases so that they can add them back later and call it new.