SharePoint Online reporting is a recurring frustration for SharePoint admins. The platform does not lack data; it lacks a straightforward way to get that data into a usable format without writing PowerShell or paying for a third-party analytics platform. This page compares what Microsoft provides natively across the Microsoft 365 admin center and SharePoint admin center against what ShareMaster's Report Master adds, so you can judge where the built-in tooling is sufficient and where it leaves gaps.
What does native SharePoint reporting cover?
Microsoft 365 admin center usage reports
The Microsoft 365 admin center includes usage reports for all core workloads: SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive for Business, Exchange, and Viva Engage. For SharePoint specifically, these reports show:
- Site counts by activity status (active vs. inactive over a trailing period)
- File counts: total files, active files, shared internally, shared externally
- Storage consumed per site, compared against the site's quota
- User activity counts: files viewed, synced, shared, co-authored
These reports can be exported to CSV from the admin center interface. They are well suited for executive-level summaries of adoption and usage but do not go deeper than site-level granularity. You cannot see which document library holds the most storage, which users have access to which libraries, or how many file versions exist across a specific site.
SharePoint admin center site analytics
Inside the SharePoint admin center, each site has its own usage analytics panel covering page views, unique visitors, and files shared over a trailing 30- or 90-day window. Site owners can also access these metrics from within the site itself via the "Site analytics" option in site settings.
This data is useful for understanding whether a site is being used and by how many people, but it is scoped to a single site at a time and cannot be exported as a cross-site comparison. Generating a report that compares usage across 50 sites requires opening each site's analytics panel individually or scripting against the Microsoft Graph API.
Audit log via Microsoft Purview
For compliance and governance needs, detailed audit log data is available through Microsoft Purview (formerly the Security and Compliance Center). The audit log captures operations at a granular level: who opened a file, who changed a permission, who deleted an item, and when. Audit log data can be exported to CSV or queried via PowerShell.
The audit log is powerful but requires querying against specific operations, users, or date ranges. It is not a reporting surface in the sense of generating a cross-site permission matrix or a library-level storage breakdown; it is an event log that can answer specific questions if you know how to query it. Effective use requires familiarity with PowerShell or the Microsoft Purview UI, and the exported format requires further processing to be useful for most reporting purposes.
What Report Master adds to SharePoint Online reporting
Permission matrix export to Excel
The most common reporting request SharePoint admins receive is some version of: "Who has access to what?" The native SharePoint interface shows permissions on a per-site or per-item basis, but there is no built-in way to generate a cross-site or cross-library permission matrix as a spreadsheet.
Report Master generates this export directly: a structured Excel file that maps users to their effective permission levels across libraries and sites. This is the document most admins spend hours building manually before a compliance review, an access audit, or a security assessment. Having it as a one-click export changes the answer to "how long does that report take?" from "most of a day" to a few minutes.
For context on what SharePoint permission levels mean and how inheritance works, the SharePoint permission levels reference covers the standard levels and their capabilities in detail.
Version counts and storage detail per library
Version history is one of the largest avoidable storage costs in most Microsoft 365 tenants, but neither the Microsoft 365 admin center nor the SharePoint admin center shows a version count breakdown per library. All you can see natively is total storage per site. You cannot tell, from native tooling, whether a site's 200 GB footprint is current working content or mostly accumulated version history spread across a handful of large libraries.
Report Master's version count export breaks this down at the library level, showing how many versions exist per library and how much storage version history accounts for. This data is the prerequisite for any rational decision about where to apply a version trim policy first. For the full picture of how versioning accumulates and why it matters before migrations, the guide to trimming SharePoint version history walks through the mechanics and the options.
Storage utilisation by library
Storage utilisation in Report Master goes to the library level, not just the site level. This means you can identify which specific libraries within a large site collection are consuming the most quota, which is critical when a site is approaching its limit and you need to know where to act first rather than buying additional storage before understanding the breakdown.
Feature comparison: Report Master vs native SharePoint reporting
| Reporting capability | Native SharePoint / M365 | Report Master |
|---|---|---|
| Site-level storage by site collection | Yes (SharePoint admin center) | Yes |
| Storage broken down to library level | No | Yes (per-library breakdown) |
| Version count per library | No | Yes |
| Permission matrix: who has access to what | No (per-site view only) | Yes (cross-site Excel export) |
| Cross-site activity comparison in one file | No (open each site separately) | Yes |
| Export format | CSV (some reports only) | Excel (.xlsx), structured |
| User-level activity counts (views, syncs, shares) | Yes (M365 admin center) | Not in scope |
| Detailed audit log (file open, permission change) | Yes (Microsoft Purview) | Not in scope |
| Page view and visitor analytics per site | Yes (site analytics) | Not in scope |
| Requires PowerShell or scripting | For cross-site data | No (desktop app) |
| Cost | Included with Microsoft 365 | Free (Report Master is a free tool) |
Features reflect SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 admin center, and ShareMaster as of May 2026.
See the full Report Master feature overview
When native reporting is enough
The built-in Microsoft 365 reporting covers most executive-level and operational questions about adoption and platform health. If you need to show leadership how many users are actively using SharePoint, which sites have the most activity, or how storage is trending across the tenant month-over-month, the M365 admin center provides that data without any additional tooling.
Native audit logging through Microsoft Purview also handles compliance scenarios well once you know what operations to query. A compliance team investigating a specific incident (who accessed this file on this date, who changed this permission) can get an authoritative answer from the Purview audit log without needing any supplementary tools.
For one-off site-level questions where a few clicks in the SharePoint admin center suffices, the native tools are appropriate and there is no reason to introduce additional tooling.
When to use Report Master instead
Report Master covers the gap between "what the admin center shows" and "what you need for a quarterly review, compliance audit, or pre-migration data gathering exercise." The scenarios where it makes the most practical difference:
- Access review before a merger or restructure: generating a permission matrix across all relevant sites in an hour rather than a day
- Storage planning before a migration: identifying which libraries hold version history worth trimming before the transfer begins, to avoid quota surprises mid-job
- Version policy enforcement: identifying which libraries have version counts above a threshold before applying a bulk trim
- Compliance evidence: producing a structured Excel report showing current permission state across a set of sites, in a format that a reviewer can read without SharePoint access
Decision matrix
| What you need | Best fit |
|---|---|
| Understand overall Microsoft 365 adoption across the tenant | M365 admin center usage reports |
| Investigate a specific compliance event (file access, permission change) | Microsoft Purview audit log |
| See how many people visit a specific SharePoint site | SharePoint site analytics |
| Export a cross-site permission matrix to Excel for an access review | Report Master |
| Find which libraries within a site are consuming the most storage | Report Master |
| Identify which libraries have the highest version counts before trimming | Report Master |
| Produce a storage and permissions report for a migration pre-check | Report Master |
Frequently Asked Questions
Can SharePoint Online export a permission matrix to Excel?
Not natively. The SharePoint interface and M365 admin center show permissions per site or per item, but there is no built-in export that produces a cross-site permission matrix in a single spreadsheet. Report Master generates this export directly.
Does the SharePoint admin center show storage by library?
The SharePoint admin center shows total storage per site collection. It does not break storage down to the library or folder level. Report Master's storage utilisation report provides per-library detail within each site.
What reporting does Report Master provide?
Report Master exports three main report types to Excel: permission matrices showing who has which access level across libraries and sites, version counts per library, and storage utilisation breakdowns at the library level. All reports are generated from the ShareMaster Windows desktop application without requiring PowerShell.