Creating and Customizing Views

In Chapters 2 and 3, you read how both lists and libraries can contain views. A view basically displays the information about a list in different ways. Some views display all the items in the list, while others show specific items based on their properties or metadata values. Every list has at least one view, and SharePoint offers five views: Standard, Datasheet, Calendar, Gantt, and Access. You can customize these SharePoint views to quickly find relevant information. Imagine opening the telephone book and having it display only the numbers that are relevant to you. That’s the type of flexibility you have with a custom view. The following examples guide you through the basics of setting up the views available with SharePoint 2007.

This section goes deeper into what views are. You learn the different types of views as well as how to use them effectively:

• You start by setting up the Standard view. The Try It Out that accompanies this section also shows how to select a view, once you create it. The method for displaying a view is the same regardless of the type of view that you create. Therefore, the rest of this chapter assumes that you’ll use one of these methods whenever you select a view for a list.

• Next, you work your way through setting up a Gantt, Calendar, and Datasheet view. You also create a view based on an existing view.

• Finally, you learn how to work with an Access view, which essentially lets you combine the best aspects of SharePoint and Access.

Working with the Standard View

Because the Standard view is the most common view type and because it has so many elements that follow, this section details the various elements of the Standard view. You then get an opportunity to create a Standard view in a Try It Out.

• View Name:   The name that displays in a drop-down menu of views associated with each list. When you create a view name, be specific so that users can clearly identify the unique nature of each view. For example, “Grouped by Status” communicates that all items are grouped together based on their status values.

• Default View Selection:   Defines the default view for a list. This view appears first whenever a user visits the specific list or library.

• View Audience:   When you create a view, you can make it either a personal or public view. A personal view is only available to its creator in the drop-down list of views. However, it does not have any specific security applied to it. Personal views are ideal if your list is for administration purposes and of no value to others. All users can see a shared view in the View selection drop down associated with a list.

• Column Selection:   You must select which column displays in your view and specify their relative position from the left in the view. When you specify the position of a single column, all other columns automatically adjust their position.

• Sort Order:   You can select up to two columns by which items in the list are sorted. Sort order can be either ascending (A to Z) or descending (Z to A).

• Filter:   You can customize a view by defining the items that display based on specific column values or properties. You first select a column from the drop-down list, and specify a rule so that only items that meet your criteria display in the view. You can add up to 10 filter rules for a single view.

• Group By:   Because views can quite often contain a large amount of information, SharePoint allows you to group up to two columns of similar items together. The first column acts as a parent item, and the second as a child of the parent. For example, you can group a task list by “Project” and then by “Assigned To.” This allows users to see a report of all tasks grouped first by the project name and then by each person to which the tasks are assigned.

• Totals:   For numerical columns, it’s beneficial to display total values for all your items. These might be the sum, average, or standard deviation of all items in a view or group. For other columns, the total value is useful to display the number of items in a view or group by selecting Count.

• Style:   Depending on your presentation requirements, you can select a style for your view. For example, you may select “Newsletter, No Lines” for a plain view of items in a list or “Boxed” to display items in a series of rectangular boxes. Take a few minutes to try out each view style so that you can familiarize yourself with the options that are the most appropriate choice for your views.

• Folders:   In a list or library, folders organize items or documents. However, you may not want to show folders for a particular view. Instead, you can show items that meet specific criteria, regardless of their folder location. For example, if you have 10 layers of folders in your document library and you want to view all documents associated with a specific project, rather than manually clicking through the various levels of folders, you can create a custom view that displays items with no folders that gives a complete listing of all documents that meet your criteria in a single level. No additional clicks are required.

• Item Limit:   For performance reasons, you commonly may only want to display a specific number of items; for example, it’s not very efficient to display 10,000 documents in a single view, but groups of 100 may be more beneficial. In fact, the All Items view for most lists display items in groups of 100 by default.

• In other cases, you may want to limit the number of items to a goal number and display them to meet a criterion. For example, you may want to show the last 25 documents that have been added to a library. You first sort the view by either the created or modified date in descending order. You then specify the limit for the view to be 25 items.

• Mobile:   When creating or editing a view, you can select whether it is a Mobile view. A Mobile view is one that is suitable for access from a device such as a cell phone or PDA. Many of the user-interface elements such as tables and images that would typically be seen via a standard browser are left out of these views. Only views that are public views can be created as Mobile views.

Try It Out-Create and Display a Standard View

By sorting, filtering, and grouping the columns of metadata, SharePoint can display the contents of a list in a personalized way, one that is directly relevant to the information you want to see. This is particularly useful when you have lists shared across an organization, or when you have large lists. For this Try It Out, you will sort items in a task list by their due date so that items appear in the order in which they need to be responded. In addition, you create a view for members at the Canadian office, which involves displaying items only where the Corporate Regions column has “Canada” specified.

1. From your Tasks list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears.

2. Select the Standard View option.

3. Give your view a user-friendly name. For this example, type Canadian Tasks.

4. You can make your view the default by selecting the check box directly under your view name.

5. Select a view audience. You may want to make your view personal or share it with other users.

6. Select the columns you want to display in your view from the Columns section.

7. You may choose to sort your items by a particular column by selecting up to two columns to sort by from the Sort section, as shown in Figure 4-18.

   
   Figure 4-18

8. You can also filter the display of items based on the columns meeting a set of conditions, which you can set in the Filter section. In this example, you are filtering where the Corporate Regions column has a value of “Canada,” (also shown in Figure 4-18). This will ensure that only Canadian items are returned in the view.

9. You may choose to group your items by a particular column in ascending or descending order by specifying this in the Group by section. In this situation, you will group items by their status.

10. When tracking things such as numerical data, you may make minor calculations using the Totals section.

11. Select a view style from the Styles section to control how your data will be presented.

12. Select whether you want to display items in folders from the Folders section.

13. You may invoke paging by selecting a maximum number of items to display on one page in the Item Limit section.

14. SharePoint 2007 enables more accessible list views. If you want to make your view a Mobile view, select it from the Mobile option.

How It Works

Once you create a view, you have two ways to display it:

• You can display it within a Web Part using the task pane user interface for modifying Web Part properties. Under Views, select your view from the drop-down list and then click Apply and OK, as shown in Figure 4-19.

  
  Figure 4-19

• You can display it in the Views drop-down menu, which is on the far right of your list toolbar, shown in Figure 4-20. Selecting your view initiates data filtering.

  
  Figure 4-20

  Tip 

  The method for selecting a view is the same regardless of the type of view that you create. Therefore, the rest of this chapter assumes that you use one of these methods whenever you select a view for a list.

Setting up a Gantt, Calendar, or Datasheet view

This section deals with setting up three specialized views that SharePoint has to offer:

• Gantt view:   This view displays a graphical representation of tasks and how they are progressing over time. It gives you a clear picture of how a project or task is evolving at a glance, and helps you easily identify bottlenecks in the process. For many small teams, the Gantt chart view is the ideal solution for managing and reporting a project. This particular view is a big hit with resource managers who need to track how tasks are evolving and give updated status reports to an executive team.

• Calendar view:   Allows you to create a daily, weekly, or monthly view of your data.

• Datasheet view:   This view gives you a spreadsheet-like view of your data, very similar to an Excel spreadsheet. This view is particularly useful when you want to customize multiple columns of data.

In addition to showing you how to set up these views, this section also has a Try It Out that shows you how to create a view based on an existing view. This is particularly useful when you have columns that are similar, but with slightly different requirements.

Try It Out-Create a Gantt View

When configuring a Gantt view, you must select a start and end date. Based on this elapsed time and the percentage of the task completed, SharePoint can calculate a graphical representation of how things are progressing. The following steps enable you to get started using the Gantt view:

1. From your Tasks list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears.

2. Select the Gantt View option.

3. Select your name and other configuration settings as discussed in the “Create and Display a Standard View” Try It Out.

4. For a Gantt view, you must select a start and end date.

5. Click OK.

Try It Out-Create a Calendar View

This view allows you to move back and forth between months, add tasks to your calendar, and even connect your calendar to Outlook, a familiar interface for managing calendars. To connect your Calendar view to Outlook, select Connect to Outlook from the Actions menu of your Lists toolbar. Figure 4-21 shows an example of a Calendar view. The following steps walk you through setting up the Calendar view.

1. From the list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears.

2. Select the Calendar View option.

3. Select your name and other configuration settings as discussed in the “Create and Display a Standard View” Try It Out.

4. For the Calendar view, you must select a default scope to have your calendar default to a daily, weekly, or monthly view as well as a time interval for adding items to your calendar.

5. Click OK.

Figure 4-21

Try It Out-Create a Datasheet View

The Datasheet view gives you a spreadsheet view much like Excel, but allows for much easier and faster mass updates and data customization. Figure 4-22 shows the Datasheet view.

Figure 4-22

The following steps will help guide you through creating the Datasheet view.

1. From your list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears.

2. Select the Datasheet View option.

3. Select your name and other configuration settings as discussed in the “Create and Display a Standard View” Try It Out.

4. Click OK.

How It Works

After creating and selecting your Datasheet view (see the “Create and Display a Standard View” Try It Out to display the view), you are presented with a spreadsheet-like view of your list’s data. With this spreadsheet, an ActiveX control, you can select multiple columns at the same time and subsequently customize them. This is a big timesaver, particularly if you are dealing with large amounts of list data.

Try It Out-Create a View Based on an Existing View

In some situations, a single list or library may contain multiple views that are similar but have slight differences to meet specific information requirements. Instead of creating each new view from scratch, you can use a particular view as a starting point and slightly alter it to meet your needs.

Each time you add a new view to a list, it appears in the Start from an Existing View section in the Create View window. Selecting one of these views generates a view based on the filtering, sorting, and metadata columns of the existing view. This saves you time and helps you efficiently customize views. By creating a starting point, you can reuse this view to minimize your efforts for all remaining views for the list. You can also think of using this method as a way to give structure because it acts as a template for displaying common components.

The following steps guide you through creating new views based on an existing one:

1. From the Tasks list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears, as shown in Figure 4-23.

   
   Figure 4-23

2. Below the listed options is the Start from an Existing View heading with any views currently available for your list. Select a task view from which to start building your custom view. For this example, select the Canadian Tasks view.

3. Select your name and other configuration settings as discussed in the “Create and Display a Standard View” Try It Out.

4. Click OK.

Working with Access Views

SharePoint 2007 introduces some great new functionality for working with Access. As discussed in Chapter 2, you can now link many of the lists in SharePoint to an Access database. This makes offline data available and allows you to synchronize data. In addition, Access provides reports and forms that are not available using a browser. By creating an Access view for a list, you gain all the advantages of Access’s reporting functionality and you also have information stored in a central secured online store such as SharePoint.

Try It Out-Create an Access View for a List

In this example, you give the interface that displays your SharePoint lists more flexibility and options by creating an Access view. To do so, you export data from the list to an Access database, which creates a more advanced view for entering and updating the data. This example uses the Split Form view so that users can see details of selected individual records as well as update items by simply typing into the datasheet.

1. From your Contacts list toolbar, select Settings Create View (the menu path is shown in Figure 4-1). The Create View window appears, as shown previously in Figure 4-23.

2. From the list of view choices, select Access View. A dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 4-24.

   
   Figure 4-24

3. Select a file name, browse to the location where you want to store the Access information, and click Save. The Create Access View window appears, shown in Figure 4-25, requiring information on the type of view that you want to create for your list. You have a variety of options.

   
   Figure 4-25

4. Select a view type. This example uses the Split Form view. Click OK. An Access view opens with a single item list view form and a Datasheet view. You can enter data into the Datasheet view or Form view.

5. When you finish entering or viewing your data, click the Publish to SharePoint Site button just below the top menu bar of the Access application, as shown in Figure 4-26. If this is your first time saving the Access database back to SharePoint, you are requested to identify a save location for the database.

   
   Figure 4-26

How It Works

Once you complete your edits, a copy of your Access database is saved back to the SharePoint site so that other users can access the created views and reports.