From the course: SharePoint Advanced: Document Creation and Automation

What is a column? - SharePoint Tutorial

From the course: SharePoint Advanced: Document Creation and Automation

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What is a column?

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- [Instructor] Have you ever been overwhelmed trying to navigate a huge document library? Maybe you need to find a document created by a certain person or in a date range. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody handed you an inventory of your documents in an Excel spreadsheet so that you could sort and filter however you wished? What if I told you that when you store documents within SharePoint, that's exactly what you get. The information about your files is called metadata and whether you see it or not in your libraries, SharePoint stores certain information behind the scenes. In a SharePoint list, these are called columns. So let's take a look at the columns that we have that are automatically created and maintained for you. I've created a couple of views in this document library just to speed things up. Right now we're looking at the standard view of all documents and what we see displayed here is just the name, the modified date, and who last modified the document. But let's look at the other fields that SharePoint creates for you. In addition to those properties, we also have a name, a title field which is very important and everybody skips. We have the created date, who created the document, and then we also have the modified and modified by. These are additional information that SharePoint automatically creates and timestamps for you. What if I told you you could create additional columns in your libraries that would allow you to quickly sort and filter your documents and locate them even if there's hundreds of them in a library? How would that look? In this view, not only do we see those standard columns, but there's two additional ones here for department and document type. How did those get in there? You can create them yourself and although this is not a SharePoint library basics course, I want you to know what types of information you can store because in this course, these custom columns become useful when we begin building our document repository. If we needed to add a custom column, we simply need to click the add column option on the right. And these are the different types of data that you can store. This is a combination of text, numbers, yes/no which are kind of like checkboxes, what we call the people picker or the person option lets you choose from your address book, dates, choices that populate dropdown lists, and then other things like hyperlinks and pictures. Now that you know a little bit about columns in SharePoint libraries, we are going to use this knowledge to help you to automate the document creation process. There are some great courses here in our library so be sure to check those out if you'd like to know more about custom columns.

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