Using the Datasheet View

If you have installed Microsoft Office Access 2007, you can use an optional Datasheet view of the list that can be a tremendous productivity boost. Creating one item at a time requires several clicks and can become tedious. Datasheet view presents all of the list items in a list within a grid, which facilitates editing across the entire table. Drop-down lists, check boxes, and column edits are all still maintained. Therefore, using Datasheet View is a lot like editing a table in Office Access. You can use your cursor keys or your mouse to move from cell to cell to make changes to any row in the list. When you move off of a row, the changes are saved automatically. The last row in Datasheet view is used to add additional list items to the list. Change from Standard view to Datasheet view by choosing Edit In Datasheet from the Actions menu.

An entire task pane on the right edge of the Datasheet view enables powerful integration between Windows SharePoint Services, Office Excel, and Access.

Datasheet view is covered in depth in Chapter 12, “Using Windows SharePoint Services with Excel 2007.”