SharePoint Tips and Tricks

- [Voiceover] One of my favorite features in SharePoint is the ability to take advantage of metadata and create masterful Views. With that said though, it can sometimes take quite a bit of time to do so. As a quick refresher, a View in SharePoint 2013 allows users to reshape a document library or list, almost like Pivot Tables in Excel, changing how your content appears. In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft introduced a new way of creating views, more quickly, if you will, almost on the fly.

Here's what you need to do. The first thing, navigate to the document library or list where you wish to create your custom, on the fly, View. I've done that here with the Marketing Collateral document library for the fictitious company called Explore California. What you see in front of you here are 30, 40 different files in this Marketing Collateral library. What I'd like to do is create a Custom View that shows me the English documents that apply to all regions that are in a final state, and that are only Word documents.

To do that normally, what I would do is click here on these three dots, then click on Create View. From here, I'm given six different View options, and I'm going to go ahead and click on the Standard View, and now here we are in the View Configuration Panel, where I can give the View a name, and then go through all of these different options that you see here. This is the traditional way of creating a View, so I'm going to click Cancel on that. Now let's look at this new feature that Microsoft introduced for SharePoint 2013, so the first thing I need to do is actually manually configure, or make changes to this library, almost like I'm creating the view here within the library instead of in the panel.

I'm going to first go here to this first column, hover over the Column Title, click on the dropdown, and I mentioned earlier, that I only want to see Word files, so here's docx, I'll go ahead and enable that, and click Close. You'll notice the screen refreshed, and now we're only seeing Word files. The next thing that I mentioned earlier is the language. I'd like to only see the English and bilingual files that are in this library, so I'll go ahead and select bilingual, and I'll select English, and then click Close.

Now you can see as well that it's refreshed to only show us bilingual and English. Next we'll go to Region, click on the dropdown, and here I mentioned All Regions, so I'll select that option, and click Close. Again the list is filtered. Last but not least, I mentioned the Status. I wanted that set to Final, and now I'll click Close. You can see by this little funnel icon that I currently have four columns that are being filtered all using these headers, these Column Titles.

Now to create a View from all those changes, I simply click on this new link, that you may not have seen earlier. It appears the moment you start making changes to any of your columns using these different Headers, so I'm going to click on Save This View, and now it's asking me for a name for the View. I'll go ahead and select what's there currently, and I'm just going to type in Final English Copies, and that's going to be the name of the View that appears. From here I click Save, and now, you can see the new View that's been created, and it's available right up here just below the new document link, so now I can toggle between the different Views, the default being all documents, and now if I want to flip to the one I just created, I click on Final English Copies, and there's that View quickly created.

Now there are some limitations that come along with this functionality. For example, you are limited to what you can save to the View. Using this method, we can't save groupings, or control how many files to show. When we use the View Configuration Panel that I showed you at the beginning of this video, you do have a lot more control over your View design, but overall, this is a great time saver, and should be a feature you start using, and sharing with others.