Instantly Make the Settings Gear Icon Appear in SharePoint

One of my colleagues in the Microsoft 365 world posted this on his blog today, and it makes me so happy… When you are going to a SharePoint site, often the Settings Gear icon in the upper-right corner takes 5 to 10 seconds to load. That is a pain when you really just want to get to permissions or site contents. But with this little hack, you can get the gear to show up instantly with a single click. Here’s how that works…

When you first go to a SharePoint site, you’ll often see this… your profile icon, but nothing else for 5 to 10 seconds:

However, if you click on your profile icon, the Settings Gear icon shows up immediately:

If you’re spending a lot of time navigating SharePoint sites and you need to go to Settings, this little hack will save you a lot of time and frustration!

To be clear, Microsoft really needs to fix the issue with that loading so slowly. But until then, this will allow you to keep working without getting irritated… at least for that reason. 🙂

Instantly Make the Gear Appear In SharePoint from Marc Anderson