Create folders with months names in SharePoint using PowerShell

04-Oct-2020 04-Oct-2020 443 words 3 minutes

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Contents

Hello there! Today’s post will help you create a folder structure in SharePoint Online organized by month’s name! You’ll see that with just a few lines of PowerShell, your folders will be created in seconds without hard-coding the names 😏

PowerShell Core

The scripts also works with PowerShell Core.

Create a script

As we have only a few lines of code, we can go down the route of creating a very small PowerShell script. Here it is:

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#Connect to a SPO Site
Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://<YOUR-TENANT-NAME>.sharepoint.com/sites/<YOUR-SITE>"

#Targeted document library
$myList = "<YOUR LIBRARY>"

#Create the folders
for($i = 1; $i -le 12; $i++){
    Add-PnPFolder -Name (Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.GetMonthName($i) -Folder $myList
}

Or create a Function…

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function New-FolderPerMonth {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param (
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, HelpMessage = "Site Url to connect to", Position = 0)] 
        [string]$SiteUrl,  
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, HelpMessage = "List to create the folders in", Position = 1)] 
        [string]$LibraryName  
    )
    #Connect to the designated site
    Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteUrl
    
    #Create the folders
    for ($i = 1; $i -le 12; $i++) {
        Add-PnPFolder -Name (Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.GetMonthName($i) -Folder $LibraryName
    }
}

New-FolderPerMonth -SiteUrl "https://<YOUR-TENANT-NAME>.sharepoint.com/sites/<YOUR-SITE>" -LibraryName "<YOUR-LIBRARY-NAME>"

UPDATE OCT 5TH, 2020

After sharing the post on LinkedIn, people also asked for the month’s number in front of the month name. When the folders are created like above, they are in alphabetical order. By adding the month’s number, the folders will show in a better order visually.

For this script, we need to change tactic. The reason being that above, we use the For loop, with a variable $i which is a number. Now, we’d need this $i to be a string. So if we keep it as it is, we’ll run into an error that $i++ cannot be converted to a string!

Therefore, we’re going to use the foreach loop, and format the numbers 1,2,3… to 01, 02, 03… Otherwise, we’ll face the same problem whereas our folders won’t be in order 🙂

Function with numbers

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function New-FolderPerMonthWithNumber {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param (
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, HelpMessage = "Site Url to connect to", Position = 0)] 
        [string]$SiteUrl,  
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, HelpMessage = "List to create the folders in", Position = 1)] 
        [string]$Library 
    )
    #Connect to the designated site
    Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteUrl
    
    #Create the folders
    foreach ($monthsNumber in @(1..12)) {
        
        $monthNumFormatted = "{0:d2}" -f $monthsNumber
        Add-PnPFolder -Name ($monthNumFormatted + "_" + (Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.GetMonthName($monthNumFormatted)) -Folder $Library
    }
}

New-FolderPerMonthWithNumber -SiteUrl "https://<TENANT-NAME>.sharepoint.com/sites/<YOUR-SITE>" -Library "<YOUR-LIBRARY-NAME>"

Thanks for reading!