How to show a Classic SharePoint page in dialog mode (without SharePoint's full-blown chrome)

This post was most recently updated on July 31st, 2022.

< 1 min read.

Classic SharePoint actually has a very handy piece of functionality, using which you can hide most of the SharePoint chrome (like header and navigation), and hence make the page a lot sleeker. This is especially useful for showing the contents in a dialog window – which SharePoint also supports natively through JavaScript! This post describes how.

How to show any (classic) SharePoint page in dialog mode?

Table of Contents

Pretty easy – it’s handled via a URL parameter!

Yeah, weirdly enough at least once something’s easy with SharePoint. Just grab the address of whatever page you’re on, and append a URL parameter “IsDlg=1” in the end. So, an example!

Todd Klindt has a great SharePoint blog, which he also hosts on SharePoint (everyone loves the built-in CMS after all, right?) and this makes his site a great example here. His post about SharePoint 2013 build numbers, is located at an address like this:

https://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=346

If you want to see it without navigation or header, you can instead go to the address like this:

https://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=346&IsDlg=1

What can you use it for?

Well, just like the parameter name implies, a good example would be to use this version of the page in a dialog window. See below for an example!

SharePoint publishing page in a dialog window with ?IsDlg=1

A full-blown SharePoint Publishing page should look ridiculous in a very small dialog window, but with ?IsDlg=1 actually looks ok. Still not fabulous (for that, we’ve got Modern SharePoint!), but definitely usable and useful.

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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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