Chapter 13

Organizing and Viewing Content

IN THIS CHAPTER

Working with content metadata

Understanding views

Creating and managing views

Displaying views with Web Parts

You may remember Bill Gates proclaiming that “content is king” back in the mid-1990s. Nearly two decades since, it still couldn’t be more true. The rate at which modern organizations are generating digital content is staggering. One of SharePoint’s sweet spots is managing content, which is why many organizations adopt the platform in the first place.

In Chapter 7 you learn how to get documents into SharePoint. In this chapter, you delve into organizing and viewing those documents. You discover how to customize SharePoint apps based on libraries (library apps are covered initially in Chapter 7 and are covered in more detail in Chapter 11) and how these apps are used to manage documents. Finally, you learn how to create views into your content so that your content is easily accessible, filterable, and readily available for you and others to consume.

Working with Documents

After you upload your documents to an app (which we do in Chapter 7), you need to be able to work with them. This includes adding descriptive properties and letting other teammates know where the documents are stored.

SharePoint provides two methods for working with documents: actions on the ribbon and actions on the ellipsis menu. Each document has a set of actions contained in the ribbon that can be targeted to the document. The ribbon actions appear when you select the radio button next to the document, as shown in Figure 13-1. In addition, you can click the ellipsis next to the document (see Figure 13-2) to see a menu of actions for the document. For example, you can check out a document, edit it, and check it back in.

FIGURE 13-1: Selecting a document and viewing the ribbon.

FIGURE 13-2: Using the ellipsis context menu for a specific document.

Using the ellipsis

Accessing the menu for a specific document is accomplished by clicking the ellipsis next to the document, as shown in Figure 13-2.

With the ellipsis menu, you have quick access to common things you might want to do with the document. You can open the document with either your Office programs installed on your computer or using an online version using your browser. You can preview, share, or copy a link to the document so that you can share it with others. In addition, you can download a copy of the document, delete it, create a workflow using Flow (covered in Chapter 14), and many other things.

To see the details for this particular document, click the Details button at the bottom of the list. The details pane opens on the right side of the screen, as shown in Figure 13-3.

FIGURE 13-3: Viewing the details of a particular document.

The details pane shows key information about the document such as who has access to it, the document properties, the activity on the document, and even a small preview.

Using the More menu item, you can view and edit properties, interact with workflows for the document, view compliance details, and check out the document.

Some options in the ellipsis menu depend on how your app has been configured. For example, if versioning is enabled for the app, you see a Version History option in the menu. If versioning is not enabled, then you won’t see the Version History option. All items and documents in apps follow this same paradigm. The actual options depend on the type of app you’re using and how you configured it.

Your organization can add custom menu items to the menus, so don’t be surprised if your menus look different than the one shown earlier in Figure 13-2. The point is that you can use the ellipsis menu to access a list of actions that you can take on the selected document.

Editing a document’s properties

You can edit a document’s properties in a number of ways. By default, SharePoint asks only for these two properties:

• Name: This is the filename. For example, if you upload the file, myspreadsheet.xlsx, that's the value you see as the filename.
• Title: A caption that describes the document. If a title already exists in the document, SharePoint uses that. Otherwise, you can enter your own descriptive title.

The app owner can add more properties to describe the document. For example, the owner might add a Category property that allows you to apply a category to the document. Properties are actually just new columns that you add to your app.

The easiest way to view a document’s properties is to use the ellipsis menu:

1. Click the ellipsis next to a document.

2. Click the More item from the menu and then click Properties.

   The document’s properties are displayed.

Figure 13-4 shows the properties page for a document. This window includes its own View tab on the ribbon. The View tab includes buttons for managing the document and actions for working with the document. Note that in this example we have already added two new properties: Some Metadata and Rating.

FIGURE 13-4: The properties page for a document.

The properties of a document also go by a couple of other names. You will often hear the term “metadata” to refer to properties. Metadata just means data about data. The document itself contains data in the text in a Word document or the values in the cells of an Excel document. The properties are separate from what is inside of the actual document; thus, the properties are metadata. In SharePoint, you see the properties as columns in a list, so you may also hear people refer to properties as columns.

Viewing documents in the browser

Office 365 also includes web-based versions of Office that you can use to view and edit documents in the browser. The experience happens automatically, so you just have to click the filename in the app to open the file. Figure 13-5 shows a Word document displayed using an online version of Word in the web browser.

FIGURE 13-5: Office Online displays Office files in the browser.

Using your web browser to create and edit Office documents is especially useful when you don’t want to install the Office clients on your local computer. It also makes quickly browsing document contents a breeze because the file opens right in the browser.

Office Online is also available in the consumer version of OneDrive as well as Dropbox. Using OneDrive or Dropbox, you can open your Office documents right in the browser. And each has a free version available!

Sharing Your Documents

You’re probably familiar with network file shares: the file systems that enable people to upload files to a shared network drive so that other people can access and use them. File shares, when they were invented, revolutionized the ability of organizations to keep files in relatively secure locations and manage who had access. But SharePoint has done the file sharing one (okay, a whole bunch) better.

SharePoint apps based on libraries let you store and share files securely, and they also add features that help you manage things such as document workflow (the processes that let people edit, comment on, and approve documents) and version histories (what happened to a file, and who did what). And although file shares give you one path through folders to your document, SharePoint Library apps give you other paths to expose content. You can access documents directly through the browser, you can display them in Web Parts, and you can sort and filter them by their metadata and content types. And with Library apps, you can expose files by their title, not just their filename.

To share your document with others, they must know where to find the document. One way to do so is to send them the web address of the SharePoint site. You can also send them a link directly to the document itself.

To obtain the URL to a document in SharePoint, follow these steps:

1. Click the ellipsis next to the document to view the pop-up menu.

   The document information is displayed, including the URL.

2. Click the Share option and provide the person’s email address or name.

   Alternatively, click the Copy Link option to copy a direct link to the document into your clipboard. You can then paste it into an email or chat so the person receives it. As long as your team members have network access and permissions to the document, they can click the link and open the file.

Recovering Deleted Documents

It is often said that SharePoint delivers on the promise of making people more productive through software. Although that’s not always true, one feature of SharePoint that truly delivers is the Recycle Bin. When you delete a document from an app, it isn’t gone forever. Nope. The document just moves to a holding place in your site — the Recycle Bin.

Go ahead and try it. Go to an app and delete a document. You can use the ellipsis menu to access the Delete command. You can also select the document and then use the Delete button in the ribbon. Either way, you’re prompted to confirm the deletion, and then your document appears in the Recycle Bin.

The Recycle Bin works for items in apps that use the Custom List app template as well.

Follow these steps to restore a document from the Recycle Bin to its original location:

1. Go to the Recycle Bin by clicking the Settings gear icon and choosing Site Contents.

   The Site Contents page is displayed.

2. Click the Recycle Bin button in the upper-right corner to display the Recycle Bin.
3. Select the deleted document, and then click the Restore link, as shown in Figure 13-6.

4. Click OK to confirm the restoration.

   The file is restored to the app.

FIGURE 13-6: Restoring a document from the Recycle Bin.

You can click the Delete link in the Recycle Bin to remove the file from your Recycle Bin. Doing so, however, doesn’t permanently delete the file. Instead, the file is moved to another Recycle Bin that can be accessed by the site collection administrator.

If you are a site collection administrator, you will see a link at the bottom of the Recycle Bin called Second-Stage Recycle Bin. If you click that you will see the Recycle Bin for all the SharePoint sites in the collection. This is a feature of SharePoint that gives additional power to site collection administrators. So if a regular user accidentally deletes something and then goes into the Recycle Bin and accidentally deletes it from the Recycle Bin, a site collection administrator can still get the content back.

Files remain in the Second-Stage Recycle Bin for a period of 30 days or until they’re deleted by the administrator, whichever comes first. When removed from the Recycle Bin, the fate of your documents depends on your company’s business continuity management plan. That’s a fancy way to say, how does your IT team back up data? SharePoint stores your documents in databases. An administrator can connect to a backed-up copy of the database and select individual documents to restore.

Uploading Documents into a Folder

You can use folders within your apps as a means to organize your documents. We show you how to create a folder and upload files into it, but we urge you to first read the sidebar, “Why folders in SharePoint are evil.”

WHY FOLDERS IN SHAREPOINT ARE EVIL

Resist the urge to use folders in your apps; this file-share paradigm generally causes nothing but problems. One reason to use SharePoint instead of a file share to begin with is so that you can add properties to describe your documents. Properties allow you to view your documents in different ways. If you dump your files into folders just like they were arranged on the file share, ignoring properties, you probably won’t be very satisfied with your SharePoint experience.

As well, nested folders in SharePoint are just as hard to navigate as nested folders in file shares (and nested URLs in folders inside apps get unwieldy quickly). Instead of replicating your file structure in SharePoint, we recommend you flatten the folder hierarchies by replacing them with views. If you decide to use folders and find yourself going more than two layers deep, stop and ask yourself if you should create another app instead.

The only reason to use a folder in an app is to separate a group of documents to give them separate permissions. For pretty much everything else, we recommend you use properties to organize your documents.

Perhaps you have an app and you have a subset of files that only supervisors should see. You could put those files in a separate app and set the permissions on it. But say you already have one app set up the way you like and it seems silly to create another one. Instead, you can use a folder to separate the restricted files from the rest of the files in the app.

To create a folder within an app:

1. Browse to the app where you want to create the folder.

2. Click the New button in the ribbon and click the Folder option.

   The New Folder dialog box appears. If you don’t see the New Folder button, folders are disabled for the library. Use the Advanced Settings option in Library Settings to enable or disable folders in your app.

3. Type the name of the folder in the Name text box and click the Save button.

   The folder appears in the app.

To upload files into the folder, follow these steps:

1. Click the folder name to navigate inside it and click the Upload button on the ribbon.

   The Upload Document window appears. You can also just drag files from your computer into your browser when your browser has the folder open.

2. Browse to the document you want to upload to the folder.

3. Make sure the Destination Folder text box lists the folder where you want to upload the document.

   If the folder is incorrect, click the Choose Folder button to select the right folder.

4. Click OK to upload your document to the folder.

You can work with folders the same way as you work with documents. That is, the rules about working with properties and the ribbon also apply to folders.

Follow these steps to restrict access to your folder so that only certain groups can access it:

1. Click the ellipsis next to the folder and choose Share, as shown in Figure 13-7.

   The Share page appears. Note that the ability to share folders must be enabled. If it is not enabled, then you must manually disable the limited access lockdown mode feature for the site.

2. Enter the names of the people you want to share the folder with in the text box.
3. Click the Permission Level drop-down list to set whether they can only view or can also edit the documents.

4. Click the Share button to share the folder.

   We discuss permissions management in detail in Chapter 20.

FIGURE 13-7: Sharing a folder in an app.

SharePoint apps are discussed in Chapter 11. When these apps are based on the Library template, you can refer to them as Library apps. In addition to uploading documents direct, as you saw earlier in this chapter, Library apps give you multiple choices about how the documents get into them, too. You can save a document to a Library app using a Microsoft Office client such as Word or Excel, or you can email documents to Library apps or drag and drop from Windows Explorer. And you can create documents directly in the app. You can even use other Office 365 apps such as Teams to get files into SharePoint as is discussed in Chapter 8.

Every Teams channel has a SharePoint site behind it, which also includes a Library app. If you see someone storing files in Teams (the tab at the top that says Files) then they are actually using SharePoint. They might not even know that is the case, but you will!

No matter how you get your documents into SharePoint’s Library apps, just get them there — it’s so much easier to share documents with your coworkers in an app than it is to use file shares or email attachments.

SharePoint apps can be confusing. An app based on a list is designed to store data in columns. An app based on a library is designed to store documents and data about those documents in columns. SharePoint tries to simplify the whole discussion of list and library and just calls everything an app. When you create the app, you give it a name and choose an app template. From that point on, you just call your app by its name. For example, you might create the Sales Pitch app. The app is designed to hold sales pitch documents. Because the app holds documents, it uses the Document Library app template. After your app is created, you wouldn’t call it the “Sales Pitch app based on the Document Library App template.” That would be a mouthful! If you’re a seasoned SharePoint user, this new app stuff might take you a while to get your head around. It did us! But when you realize that most users don’t think in terms of lists and libraries, and instead think about what a list or library does, it really is much easier to just call everything an app.

An app can also be built from scratch by a web developer as a standalone app, so such an app isn’t based on a list or a library.

Discovering SharePoint Views

A number of apps ship with SharePoint, and you can also create custom apps (as we discuss in Chapter 11). SharePoint also lets you create additional pages, or views, that you can use to customize the display of the information in apps. In Excel, you might hide rows and/or columns to create a new view of the data. In a database, you may query only certain fields and use criteria to create a specific snapshot of data. The concept is similar with views.

Common reasons for creating new views include showing only active items, only tasks associated with a certain person, only documents in a certain category, and so on. These views help users find or focus on certain data in the app without having to see everything, all the time.

Next, you discover how to manually create new views and how to modify existing views.

Switching the view

Each SharePoint app comes with at least one view, the All Items (or Documents) view, which is a public view available to app users. Document Library apps start with the All Documents view. Certain apps come with several more predefined views, such as the Discussion Board app, which has special views for showing threaded discussions.

You use the SharePoint ribbon to access the options for changing an app’s views. Figure 13-8 shows the drop-down menu for working with views. You can see the commands available for changing the current views or creating new views.

FIGURE 13-8: Working with views.

You can easily switch among views in an app. The current view is displayed as selected in the drop-down menu, and additional views are available to select as well. You can see that for documents you can switch to a compact list or tiles. The tiles view is shown in Figure 13-9.

FIGURE 13-9: Switching to a tile-based view.

We prefer the full List view since it provides the most information and functionality but others may prefer the tiles or compact list view to keep things simple and clean.

Anyone with Design and Full Control permissions (Designers and Owners) can make Public and Personal views for the app. However, site members (contributors) can create only Personal views for their own use.

Use a view instead of folders. When you organize files on your network, folders are the predominant method of subdividing your content. In SharePoint, you gain great power in using columns in combination with views to hide or show what users need to see. Folders take extra effort for the user to drill down and then navigate back up to look for other content. Views coupled with built-in sorting and filtering header options enable the user to easily and quickly find different content by toggling back and forth between views.

Getting to know view formats

SharePoint provides four predefined formats for creating new views. These formats jump-start your view creation experience by determining how information appears on the web page:

• Standard: This is the default view when you first access an app. The document or title item is in hyperlink format with an Edit menu for accessing properties and other options. The rest of the list resembles a table without borders.
• Datasheet: This is an editable spreadsheet format. Although any app has the option to edit information in a datasheet format using the Quick Edit button on the List or Library tab, certain views may make sense to be created in this format if users will edit multiple items at a time.
• Calendar: As you would expect, this view displays as a calendar. You need at least one date field in your app to create a Calendar view.
• Gantt: If you are familiar with project management charts, you recognize the Gantt view as showing tasks along a timeline. This view makes it possible to do simple project-management tracking using a SharePoint app.

In the rest of the chapter, we walk you through creating a view using each of these view formats.

Creating a Standard View

The most common kind of view you create in a SharePoint app is a public, Standard view. A public view can be used by anyone to view the contents of an app.

Standard views have the following traits:

• They’re accessible by all browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
• They have the most configuration options, such as filtering, grouping, and editing options.
• They’re available for all apps.
• They don’t require any special columns for configuring the view. Other view formats, such as a Calendar view, require date columns.

To create a new Standard view:

1. Browse to the app where you want to create the new view.
2. Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the page and click List Settings or Library Settings to open the settings page.

3. Scroll down to the Views section and click the Create View button.

   A list of view format options appears.

4. Click the Standard View link to create a view that looks like a web page.

   After you select your view format, the Create View page displays your options for creating the new view.

5. In the View Name field, type the name you want to call this view.

   The View Name field has two purposes:

   • It provides the friendly name that can be selected to display the view.
   • It provides the filename for the web page, which is part of the web address.

   We suggest giving the page a name that’s easy to remember. For example, if your view will group products by department, entering the name GroupByDepartment creates a web page named GroupByDepartment.aspx. You can change the friendly name after the filename has been created.

6. To set this view as the default view for the app, select the Make This the Default View check box.

   If this isn’t the default view, users can select the view from a drop-down list on the ribbon.

7. In the View Audience field, select the Create a Public View radio button.

   Optionally, you can create a private view that only you can see. You must have at least Designer or Owner permissions to create a public view.

8. In the Columns section of the page, select the Display check box next to each column you want to display, as shown in Figure 13-10.

   You can also indicate the relative order that columns appear on the screen by selecting the appropriate number in the Position from Left drop-down lists. See more on choosing columns in the “Choosing columns for your view” section, later in this chapter.

9. (Optional) In the Sort section, use the drop-down lists to select the first column you want to sort by and then select the second column to sort by.

   The default sort option is ID, which means that items will be sorted by the order they were entered in the list.

10. Select the remaining options to configure your view, such as the columns you want to filter or group on.

    Some of the options you can choose from are

    • Select Tabular View to include check boxes next to items for bulk operations.
    • Select the style that the view will take. For example, Boxed, Shaded, Newsletter, Preview Pane, or Basic style.
    • In the Totals section, select which columns to aggregate using Count, Average, Minimum, and Maximum functions.
    • In the Folders section, specify whether items should appear inside folders or flat as if the folders don’t exist.
    • Item Limit allows you to limit the items displayed on a single page. This can improve the performance of the view.

    We discuss additional options in more detail in the “Filtering apps with views” and “Grouping results” sections, later in this chapter.

11. Click OK to create the view.

    The new view appears in the browser.

    If you created a public view, SharePoint creates a new web page using the name you specified in Step 5. Users can select this view from the drop-down list in the Manage Views section of the ribbon.

FIGURE 13-10: Create a new view and select the columns you want to show.

Experimenting with all these options is the best way to discover what works for your site. Item Limits, for example, is great for when you want to control the amount of space a Web Part takes up on a page.

Choosing columns for your view

When you choose the columns to display in your view, you see many columns that are usually behind the scenes, including Edit menu options. For a List-based app, these options include

• Edit (Linked to Edit Item): Displays an icon that a user can click to edit the item. This column is useful when you don’t want to display the Title column.
• Title (Linked to Item): Displays the Title column with a hyperlink to the list item or document. When a user clicks the hyperlinked title, a web page opens and displays the app item or opens the document.
• Title (Linked to Edit with Edit Menu): When a user hovers his mouse over this column, the Edit menu appears.

We may want Edit menu columns on our app page for a member to modify items, but we generally don’t want them in our app Web Parts on home pages and publishing pages (in that case, we just want users to click a link to open a document or only view the app data as a table).

Other columns you may have available to add to your view include

• ID: Displays the identity number of the item. The ID number is used to display the item’s values in a form.
• Version: Displays the version number of the item or document. This allows you to easily see what the latest version of a document is.
• Checked Out: Shows who has the document checked out. Document Library based apps will have this column by default.
• Folder Child Count: Displays the number of folders contained within a folder.
• Item Child Count: Displays the number of items contained within a folder.
• Content Type: Displays the content type associated with the item or document.

When you create a view, you often realize that you want to display a column that’s based on a value calculated from another column. For example, if your app displays an anniversary date, you may want to calculate years of service. You can do that by creating a new column and then displaying it in your view.

Filtering apps with views

You can use the filtering options of views to limit the items displayed. You can choose which columns to filter on and how to apply the filter. You can use filters to display app data where a certain column is equal to some value or not equal to some value, or where an item was created between certain date ranges.

You can create filters using columns that are based on String, Number, Currency, or Choice data types. However, you can’t filter on lookup columns or multiline text fields.

Building a filter is like writing an equation; for example, x > y. In this case, x is the column you want to filter on, and y is the value you want to test the column contents against. The operator in between determines what the test evaluates. This test gives the system a TRUE or FALSE response to your equation.

Available operators are

• Equality: Is Equal To or Is Not Equal To
• Comparison: Is Greater Than or Is Less Than
• Substring: Contains or Begins With

The filtering equation is evaluated for each item in your app. If the equation is TRUE, the item is included in the view; if the equation is FALSE, the item is excluded.

If you don't see the results you expect to see in your view, your filter is probably evaluating to FALSE.

For numerical values, you usually use the Equality or Comparison operators. When you create filtered views based on string (text) values, you want to be familiar with your data before trying to create the filter. For example, if you want to filter a Contacts app to display only those contacts in the U.K., you have to ask how the value for the U.K. has been entered in the app. Is it U.K., United Kingdom, or both? You can use a Datasheet view to quickly scan the data to determine the range of possible values.

One way to get around this problem is by validating your data when it’s being entered. You can use Choice columns to do that or use SharePoint’s validation features.

Say you discover that your data include both values — U.K. and United Kingdom. You could go through and make all the data consistent. Or you could filter for both values using the Or option, as shown in Figure 13-11.

FIGURE 13-11: Select the column to filter the view.

You can also use the constants Today and Me to filter your columns.

Grouping results

You can configure your view to group together items based on a common value in a column. For example, you can group a listing of contacts that all share the same department or company.

Figure 13-12 shows the grouping options. You can indicate whether to automatically collapse or expand grouped items and how many items to display per page. When you group based on a column you can then see all items with the same column value and use the toggle arrows to the left of each group header to expand or contract the grouped items.

FIGURE 13-12: You can group items based on a shared value.

Don’t forget the Totals option! Often when grouping data, you want to create totals. For example, grouping on Inventory by Category and totaling the Quantity creates subtotals for the Category grouping as well as an overall total for the app.

Quickly edit app data with Quick Edit

In past versions of SharePoint, you had to create special views if you wanted to do things like inline editing and multiple item selection. In SharePoint, this functionality is baked right into every app in the form of Quick Edit. Quick Edit is available on every app based on a list or library. The Quick Edit functionality takes the form of a button on the List or Library tab of the ribbon, as shown in Figure 13-13.

FIGURE 13-13: The Quick Edit button in the ribbon.

When you click the Quick Edit button, you’re presented with the data in the app in an easily editable form. You can make changes right on the pages and with multiple items. An app displaying data in Quick Edit is shown in Figure 13-14.

FIGURE 13-14: Using Quick Edit in an app.

Choosing a display style

SharePoint provides several preformatted view styles that you can use to control the display of your view. The default view style displays your app data in rows. You can use several additional styles. Many of these are especially helpful in configuring app Web Parts:

• Basic Table displays app data in a simple table.
• Boxed and Boxed, No Labels display items as a series of cards, with or without column labels. This display is similar to the Address Card view in Outlook.
• Newsletter and Newsletter, No Lines display a table with a streamlined format.
• Shaded displays items in rows, with each alternate row shaded.
• Preview Pane displays items on the left and previews the details on the right. This is a great way to display a lot of information in a compact display.

Many users overlook these effective display styles. Again, experimenting is the best way to find out how a display style can improve a user’s experience with the data.

Figure 13-15 shows the style options you can choose from when configuring your view.

FIGURE 13-15: You can change the format of the view.

Managing App Data in a Datasheet View

Datasheet views are great for performing bulk updates on items and document properties. A Datasheet view displays app data in a web-based spreadsheet.

With Datasheet views, you can

• Support most column types including Text, Choice, Date, Number, and Lookup columns. Not all column features work as expected in a Datasheet view. In short, when Datasheet views work, they work great. You just have to test your column types before getting overly ambitious.
• Use the arrow keys to move around in the view like a spreadsheet.
• Copy and paste values, which is another great way to make bulk updates to an app. We often use this approach instead of importing a spreadsheet as a custom app.
• Choose View App Data in a Datasheet view on the fly from any Standard view by clicking the Quick Edit button on the List tab of the ribbon.

You create a Datasheet view just like you create a Standard view, although you have fewer configuration options. You can sort, filter, display totals, and set the item limit on Datasheet views.

Think of the Datasheet view as a configurable launcher for the Quick Edit functionality (described previously). When you create a Datasheet view you are creating a view that will launch you into the Quick Edit functionality but you can adjust all of the properties on the view when you create it.

Using Ad Hoc Views

Users can make Ad Hoc views in any Standard or Datasheet views by using the headers of the columns to sort and filter the data on the fly. These ad hoc changes aren’t saved with the app the way defined views are. Helping your users be productive by using these ad hoc options may involve training tips or help support.

Follow these steps to create an Ad Hoc view:

1. Hover over a column heading and click the down-arrow that appears on the right of the header.

   This can be done in Standard or Datasheet view.

   A drop-down list appears on the column header cell.

2. From the drop-down list, select whether you want to sort ascending or descending, or to filter the list based on data in that column.

   Clicking the column header also toggles the sort order between ascending and descending.

   Filtering options appear as distinct data from the values in the column (for example, if Marketing appears ten times in the column, it appears only once as a filter choice).

3. Select a value from the Filter list.

   Filtering hides rows that don't contain that value.

   A Filter icon appears in the column header to indicate a filter is applied.

4. To remove the filter, click the drop-down list again and select Clear Filter from [Column Name].

If you want to access your Ad Hoc view again, simply click the View drop-down and select Save View As and then give it a name. Your personal view is now saved and you can return to it anytime you want by selecting it from the View drop-down.

Creating a Calendar View

To create a Calendar view, you must have at least one Date field in your app. The predefined SharePoint Calendar app, not surprisingly, uses this view as its default. A Calendar view helps users visually organize their date-driven work and events.

To create a Calendar view, start as you’d begin to create a Standard view (refer to the earlier section, “Creating a Standard View”), but in Step 4, click the Calendar View link. Like the Gantt view (which we describe in the following section), you see new options on the Create View page. You have a section for Time Interval, where you select the date column to use as the Begin and End fields for the view.

You also have selections to make for Calendar columns, including Month/Week/Day Titles and Week/Day Sub Heading Titles (optional). Choose the column of data you want visible on those days in the different calendar layouts.

There is also a scope option for the default display — Month, Day, or Week. As expected, several options aren't available for Calendar views including sorting, totals, item limits, and styles; however, filtering choices are important and are often used with Calendar views.

Calendar views can also be used with Calendar overlays, which allow you to display more than one calendar view in a calendar.

Displaying Tasks in a Gantt View

To create a Gantt view, your app needs to contain task/project management information relative to that view format. The predefined SharePoint Tasks app contains these default types of columns, including Task Name, Due Date, and Assigned To.

The Create View page includes Gantt view options not seen in other views based on the five columns mentioned previously.

The Gantt view is a split view (see Figure 13-16), where you see a spreadsheet of data on the left and the Gantt chart on the right. A split bar between the two views can be moved by users to see more or less of one side. You can create a custom list or modify the Tasks list to add more columns for this spreadsheet side if you want.

FIGURE 13-16: The Gantt chart columns available in Gantt view.

You can synchronize tasks with project plans in Microsoft Project. In Project, choose Save & Send ⇒ Sync with Tasks List and enter the URL for your tasks list.

Managing Existing Views

Chances are you’ll want to modify your views over time. In the following sections, we explain how to modify your views and set one as the default view that users see when they browse to an app. SharePoint also provides a couple of built-in views that you may want to customize.

Modifying your views

After creating your new view, you may find you need to change it. Maybe you forgot a column, it doesn’t sort the way you want it to, or the grouping is just all wrong.

To modify a view, follow these steps:

1. Browse to the app where you want to modify the view.

2. Display the view you want to modify.

   Select the view from the Views drop-down menu.

3. Click Edit Current View from the Views drop-down menu.

   A View Properties page similar to the Create View page appears, enabling you to edit the view’s properties.

4. Make your desired changes to the view, such as selecting or removing columns or setting sorting or filtering options as described earlier in this chapter.
5. Click OK to save your changes to the view.

Public views are visible to everyone, but private views can only be used by the person who creates them.

Setting the default view

To change the default view, select the Make This the Default View check box when you create or modify a view. If you are modifying the current default view, you don’t see the Make This the Default View check box.

Most apps have only one default view; the exception is the Discussion Board list, which has both subjects and replies as default views. Keep in mind that if you make a view a default view, it must be a Public view.

Other SharePoint built-in views

In addition to the other view formats we discuss earlier in this chapter, you should also be aware of the Mobile views. Mobile views are simplified, text-only views of your apps for use on a mobile device. Mobile is actually a section on the Create View page. You can enable a view to be a Mobile view or set it as the default Mobile view. (Mobile views must be public.) You can also set the number of items to display for Mobile views. If you don’t see the Mobile section in your Create View page, this type of view can’t be displayed in Mobile format.

Displaying Views via Web Parts

Throughout this chapter, we make references to app Web Parts to point out what view properties are helpful and applicable to a view displayed in a Web Part. You want to display your app data with other text and Web Parts in multiple locations, such as team site home pages, Web Part pages, or publishing pages. In these situations, you don’t want your users to interact with the app itself with all the editing options. You just want them to see several columns to access a document or view an item.

Chapter 6 goes into detail about using Web Parts, including linked Web Parts, connections, and master/detail settings. However, you need to know that each app generates a Web Part that can be used on SharePoint pages. Each of these Web Parts has a Properties panel that allows you to change the view in that instance of the Web Part.

Predefined SharePoint apps may have specific views that are defaults for Web Parts (for example, the Announcements app has a special default view that can’t be re-created in the browser for other apps). Custom apps generally show all columns when first generated.

After selecting the Edit Web Part command on the Web Part, you can use the Selected View drop-down list in the Web Part Properties panel to apply another view (Current View is selected by default), or you can also click the Edit the Current View hyperlink to modify the view on the fly. Depending on the complexity of your choices, creating a view first to apply to the Web Part(s) may be a better long-term maintenance strategy.