Syvantis SharePoint Blog

SharePoint Users Group Meeting and SharePoint 2010

Shawn Rasmussen — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:32:17 +0000

Greetings again, fellow SharePoint users. I know the blog’s been kind of spotty lately, but I wanted to bring a couple quick things to your attention.

First, we are having our very first SharePoint Users Group meeting on Wednesday, December 9th at 9am in Little Falls. We will be going over some tips and tricks to help you customize your SharePoint site and there will be a chance for you meet fellow SharePoint users and to ask your questions too. If you’d like to attend, you can call the Syvantis office at 218-828-9550 or follow this link to sign up. (There are more details on the sign up site.)

Also, you may or may not have heard, but SharePoint 2010 is just around the corner. For the brave and/or curious among you, check out the SharePoint 2010 website at http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com.

Hope to see you on Wednesday!

Using Views to Customize Displayed Information

Shawn Rasmussen — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:08:57 +0000

Did you know that you can change the columns that you see when you load a list or library? For example, say you have a document library and users are constantly checking documents out, but not checking them back in. Not that that would ever happen, but let’s go with it for argument’s sake. Wouldn’t it be great to easily see who has the document checked out? Here’s how.

Go to the Document Library in question. Over on the right side of the page you will see a View dropdown. Drop it down as shown here and choose Create View.

Now it asks you to choose a view format. You will see here you can create a number of different kinds of views. For our purposes, we’re going to choose Standard View.

Now we’re on to the meat and potatoes of creating our view. First, give your View a name. You’ll want to make it descriptive, but short. I’m going to call my view Shawn’s CheckOut. Now, in the Audience section, choose who you are going to allow to see your view. As it describes clearly, personal views are only seen by you, public views are for everyone. I’m going to create a Personal View, but you choose whatever makes sense for you.

I want to stop here and draw your attention to something. Notice I called my view Shawn’s CheckOut and made it a personal view. Now you can call your views anything you want, but I recommend when you create a personal view you label it with your name. This will help you remember when you are looking at the views whether it is a public or personal view. For Public Views, just give them a short, descriptive name without your name. Otherwise people might start to think you have a big head.

Next, choose the columns for your view. There are 17 columns created by default in a document library. Check the box to the left of the column you want to display and then choose the order you want to display them in using the dropdown numbers on the right. By default four items are checked: Type, Name (linked to document with edit menu), Modified and Modified By. For our purposes today, I’m going to deselect Modified By and select Checked Out To and Version. There are a plenty of choices, so try a few and if you don’t like them you can always go back and take them off. Then go in and change the order you want the columns to appear if you want, I’m happy with the order, so I’m going to leave mine as is.

Next, I’m going to choose the sort order. I want to sort by the name of the document, so drop down to Name and I’ll choose ascending order (A at the top, Z at the bottom).

Finally, scroll down to the bottom and click OK. Here’s what I got with my view:

Whenever you want to use your view, just choose it from the View dropdown. If you want to modify or delete your custom view, switch to the custom view, then choose Modify this View from the View dropdown.

As you saw when we created the view, there are a lot of other options you can choose from. Go ahead and experiment. Create a personal view and have at it. You can’t hurt anything and if you really mess it up, you can just delete the view and start over!

Happy Custom Viewing!

Shawn

Double-spacing after paragraphs in Word 2007

Shawn Rasmussen — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:43:36 +0000

I guess this isn’t technically a SharePoint tip, but we’ve had a number of our SharePoint customers ask about it, since most of them are Office 2007 users. So I thought I’d make a post of it.

In Word 2007, when you press the key on your keyboard, it puts in a carriage-return (starts a new line) and then, by default, leaves a blank line afterwards. This is because the Word 2007 default format (“Normal”) includes a double-space after paragraphs. Turns out, many of you don’t like that extra line space, so here’s how to turn it off.

In MS Word 2007, make sure you are on the Home tab. Then, right-click on the Normal style on the ribbon, as shown here, and click Modify.

In the bottom left corner of this dialog you will see a little Format button, click on it and it drops down a bunch more choices as shown below. Click Paragraph.

Now a Paragraph format dialog will appear. Just over half-way down the page you’ll see a section labeled Spacing. Change the After field to 0 and click OK.

Now, if you want this to apply to just this document, just click OK. However, if you want to apply to every document from here on out click the radio button labeled New documents based on this template near the bottom of the Modify Style dialog, then click OK.

Thanks to Ken Riley and this blog for research on this tip.

Happy Formatting!

Shawn