SharePoint Flexible Sections: Layout Guides, Persistent Grid, and On-the-Fly Conversion

The SharePoint Flexible Sections went into production in 2025, but their adoption faced two concrete obstacles: difficulty in visually structuring a free layout, and impossibility of easily migrating existing pages based on classic columns. Microsoft now responds with three targeted improvements that every content administrator or SharePoint architect should know before deploying their next pages.

What Flexible Sections Are (Quick Reminder)

Flexible Sections replace SharePoint's rigid column model with a free canvas: web parts can be positioned, resized, and overlapped without fixed grid constraints. They offer layout freedom similar to a presentation editor, while remaining within the modern SharePoint experience.

The three new features presented below apply to all flexible sections in SharePoint Online. No specific licensing prerequisites are documented beyond a standard Microsoft 365 license giving access to SharePoint.

Feature 1: Flexible Layout Guides

Flexible Layout Guides are visual reference marks, activatable from the section properties panel, that reproduce the column structure of classic sections (one, two, three columns, etc.). Their role is twofold.

Authoring Help: Automatic Alignment on Addition

Once a guide is activated on a flexible section, any web part dragged from the toolbox is automatically sized to occupy the width of the corresponding column. Concretely, if you select a three-column guide and drag a People web part, it immediately takes up one-third of the available width.

This behavior is a help, not a constraint: after addition, you retain the freedom to resize the web part, make it span multiple columns, or reposition it freely. The guide acts as a smart magnet at the moment of drop, nothing more.

Layout Preservation in Emails

This is the most anticipated improvement on the publishing side. Until now, sending a SharePoint page by email from preview mode stacked all web parts from a Flexible Section one below the other, regardless of the defined layout. Result: an unreadable email.

With Layout Guides, the column structure is now maintained in the email preview. An author who has defined a three-column guide will see exactly this layout in the email preview, and recipients will receive a message faithful to the layout intention.

Feature 2: Guides & Grid Panel in the Command Bar

A new Guides and Grid control appears in the page editor's command bar. It centralizes the visibility of two distinct elements.

Preference Persistence Per Session

The toggle state is persistent between authoring sessions. If an author enables permanent display of the flexible grid, this preference is retained the next time edit mode is opened. This is a real gain for teams who regularly work on complex pages and want to always see their underlying structure.

The toggle also allows quickly switching to "clean preview" mode: by deactivating guides and grid, the author immediately sees what the page will look like once published, without leaving edit mode.

Feature 3: Flexible Transformer (Classic Section Conversion)

This is the most strategic feature for organizations that have existing SharePoint pages built with classic column sections.

How to Identify a Classic Section vs. Flexible

The visual distinction is simple: a classic section displays a + button inside the section to add web parts. A Flexible Section does not have one — positioning is free on the canvas.

One-Click Conversion from Properties Panel

In the properties panel of a classic section (for example a three-column section), a new Convert to flexible section button is now present. One click is enough. The result is immediate and preserves:

• The position and content of each web part
• The spacing between web parts
• The column structure, automatically translated into an equivalent Flexible Layout Guide

A three-column section thus becomes a Flexible Section with a pre-configured three-column guide — authors find their visual reference marks without any manual reconfiguration.

Why This Matters in Production

Customer feedback collected by Microsoft pointed to one clear friction: teams wanted to adopt Flexible Sections, but could not afford to manually rebuild dozens of existing pages. The Flexible Transformer removes this friction.

For organizations maintaining SharePoint intranets with a large number of published pages, this opens the door to progressive migration to Flexible Sections without loss of content or layout.

Implementation

All three features presented are accessible exclusively through the SharePoint Online user interface — there is no documented PowerShell cmdlet or Graph API allowing you to configure Flexible Layout Guides or trigger the Flexible Transformer programmatically at the time of publication of this article.

However, you can audit the state of your SharePoint pages to identify those still using classic sections and prioritize conversions. The following script uses the PnP.PowerShell module to list all pages on a site and inspect their section structure.

Prerequisites:

• Module: PnP.PowerShell (version 2.x recommended)
• Installation: Install-Module PnP.PowerShell -Scope CurrentUser
• Minimum permission: Contribute on the target SharePoint site (page read access)
• Output: CSV file listing pages with their section count and type of each section

1# -------------------------------------------------------
2# Audit of SharePoint Modern Page Sections
3# Identifies pages still using classic sections
4# Required module: PnP.PowerShell
5# Minimum permission: Contribute on target site
6# -------------------------------------------------------
7 
8[CmdletBinding()]
9param(
10    [Parameter(Mandatory)]
11    [string]$SiteUrl,
12 
13    [string]$OutputCsvPath = ".\SharePoint_Sections_Audit.csv"
14)
15 
16# Interactive connection to the SharePoint site
17Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteUrl -Interactive
18 
19# Retrieve all modern pages in the SitePages library
20$pages = Get-PnPListItem -List "SitePages" -Fields "FileLeafRef", "Title", "PromotedState" |
21    Where-Object { $_["FileLeafRef"] -match "\.aspx$" }
22 
23$results = [System.Collections.Generic.List[PSCustomObject]]::new()
24 
25foreach ($pageItem in $pages) {
26    $pageFileName = $pageItem["FileLeafRef"]
27 
28    try {
29        # Load the page to access its sections
30        $page = Get-PnPPage -Identity $pageFileName -ErrorAction Stop
31 
32        foreach ($section in $page.Sections) {
33            # SectionType : 0 = one column, 1 = two columns, etc.
34            # Flexible Sections appear as type 'Flexible' (numeric value varies by PnP version)
35            $results.Add([PSCustomObject]@{
36                PageName      = $pageFileName
37                SectionOrder  = $section.Order
38                SectionType   = $section.Type.ToString()
39                ColumnsCount  = $section.Columns.Count
40                IsFlexible    = ($section.Type.ToString() -eq "Flexible")
41            })
42        }
43    }
44    catch {
45        Write-Warning "Unable to read page: $pageFileName — $($_.Exception.Message)"
46    }
47}
48 
49# CSV export
50$results | Export-Csv -Path $OutputCsvPath -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8
51 
52# Console summary
53$totalPages   = ($results | Select-Object -Property PageName -Unique).Count
54$flexPages    = ($results | Where-Object { $_.IsFlexible } | Select-Object -Property PageName -Unique).Count
55$classicPages = $totalPages - $flexPages
56 
57Write-Host "Audit completed." -ForegroundColor Green
58Write-Host "  Pages analyzed        : $totalPages"
59Write-Host "  Pages with Flex Sections : $flexPages"
60Write-Host "  Pages with classic sections only : $classicPages"
61Write-Host "  Results exported to : $OutputCsvPath"

The CSV produced gives you an actionable list for planning conversions using the Flexible Transformer, section by section, directly from the SharePoint interface.

Availability and Deployment

These three features are part of the continuous deployment of Flexible Sections in SharePoint Online. They activate gradually on Microsoft 365 tenants — no activation action is required on the administrator side. If you don't yet see the Guides and Grid button in the command bar or the Convert to flexible section button in the properties panel, your tenant is in deployment progress.

You can check the deployment status in the Message Center of your Microsoft 365 admin center.

What You Should Do Now

These three improvements require no prior configuration, but they deserve immediate action on your part.

• Audit your existing pages with the script above to identify candidates for conversion via the Flexible Transformer.
• Train your content authors on Flexible Layout Guides: positioning help and email rendering correction are visible benefits from first use.
• Enable permanent grid in the Guides & Grid toggle if your authors regularly work on complex layouts — preference persistence avoids reconfiguring at each session.
• If your organization maintains an intranet with dozens of classic pages, plan a progressive conversion campaign: the Flexible Transformer allows you to migrate section by section without risk of content loss.

Flexible Sections now constitute Microsoft's clear direction for creating modern SharePoint pages. These improvements remove the two last major frictions to their widespread adoption.