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Changing the Left Pane Width

When using the treeview navigation in SharePoint, the width is generally too small to see everything easily. We figured out how to change this.

The minimum width of the left pane is set by a graphic in the default.master file. The default.master is located in the following folder:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\ GLOBAL

Look for the following line and change the value of 138 to whatever you want.

<tr><td colspan=2><asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderNavSpacer" runat="server"><IMG SRC="/_layouts/images/blank.gif" width=138 height=1 alt=""></asp:ContentPlaceholder></td></tr>

It appears that the left pane could get bigger if you had something inside it that was wider, but this sets the minimum width.

In our case we were trying to make the left pane wider in order to make the treeview more usable. However, the treeview is by default 150 pixels wide, and it did not get wider when the left pane got wider, so we had to change it also. Look for the following line and change the width attribute:

<SharePoint:SPRememberScroll runat="server" id="TreeViewRememberScroll" onscroll="javascript:_spRecordScrollPositions(this);" Style="overflow: auto;height: 400px;width: 150px; ">

250px works well in most cases.

The first line also exists in a number of other .master files, so it is possible that some of them might also need to be changed, but so far we haven't seen any problems.

Figuring this out was a bit of a pain! The heavy use of CSS combined with a very dense HTML page made this a challenge.

Good luck! 

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