Chapter 4: Managing and Customizing Lists and Libraries

Overview

The previous two chapters discussed how to use lists and libraries in their most basic format, and SharePoint has some great templates you can use. However, your information and sharing needs may require something different, in which case, you can customize specific components so that they better address those needs. When you customize SharePoint elements to more closely reflect business practices and processes, users can focus on their jobs instead of working harder or around an ill-fitting tool. This chapter shows you how to customize both lists and libraries. Many of the examples use the term list to describe both lists and libraries because anything that you can do to a list, you can also apply to a document library.

This chapter reviews the following:

• Specific reasons for customizing a SharePoint list or library

• Best practices for creating business elements

• Examples of working with list-centric columns and site columns

• The various types of views available in SharePoint and best practices related to creating them

• Working with list and document templates

After reading this chapter, you should feel comfortable taking a specific list or library template and customizing it to suit your specific needs. You should also understand the steps and value associated with adding your custom list to the central list of templates so that teams and users can benefit from your customization efforts.