SharePoint Articles

Article / Updated 10-03-2022

The most common kind of view you create in a SharePoint app is a public, Standard view. A public view can be used by anyone to view the contents of an app. Standard views have the following traits: They’re accessible by all browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. They have the most configuration options, such as filtering, grouping, and editing options. They’re available for all apps. They don’t require any special columns for configuring the view. Other view formats, such as a Calendar view, require date columns. To create a new Standard view: Browse to the app where you want to create the new view. Click the List or Library tab of the Ribbon to access options for managing views. In a Calendar app, click the Calendar tab to manage the app’s views. Click the Create View button. A list of view format options appears. Click the Standard View link to create a view that looks like a web page. After selecting your view format, the Create View page displays your options for creating the new view. In the View Name field, type the name you want to call this view. Give the page a name that's easy to remember. For example, if your view will group products by department, entering the name GroupByDepartment creates a web page named GroupByDepartment.aspx. You can change the friendly name after the filename has been created. The View Name field has two purposes: It provides the friendly name that can be selected to display the view. It provides the filename for the web page, which is part of the web address. To set this view as the default view for the app, select the Make This the Default View check box. If this isn’t the default view, users can select the view from a drop-down list on the Ribbon. In the View Audience field, select the Create a Public View radio button. Optionally, you can create a private view that only you can see. You must have at least Designer or Owner permissions to create a public view. In the Columns section of the page, select the Display check box next to any columns you want to display. You can also indicate the relative order that columns appear on the screen by selecting the appropriate number in the Position from Left drop-down lists. (Optional) In the Sort section, use the drop-down lists to select the first column you want to sort by and then select the second column to sort by. The default sort option is ID, which means that items will be sorted by the order they were entered in the list. Select the remaining options to configure your view, such as the columns you want to filter or group on. Some of the options you can choose from are Select Tabular View to include check boxes next to items for bulk operations. Select the style that the view will take. For example, Boxed, Shaded, Newsletter, Preview Pane, or Basic style. In the Totals section, select which columns to aggregate using Count, Average, Minimum and Maximum functions. In the Folders section, specify whether items should appear inside folders or flat as if the folders don’t exist. Item Limit allows you to limit the items displayed on a single page. This can improve the performance of the view. Click OK to create the view. The new view appears in the browser. If you created a public view, SharePoint creates a new web page using the name you specified in Step 5. Users can select this view from the drop-down list in the Manage Views section of the Ribbon. Experimenting with all these options is the best way to discover what works for your site. Item Limits, for example, is great for when you want to control the amount of space a web Part takes up on a page.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-26-2022

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 provides a web-based platform that your organization can leverage to be more productive and more competitive. With SharePoint 2016, you can manage content, publish information, track processes, and manage your overall business activities. In addition, SharePoint 2016 provides social features, such as microblogging, feeds, likes, mentions, and hash tags, to get everyone in your organization on the same page and communicating effectively.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 10-15-2021

Microsoft SharePoint provides a web-based platform that your organization can leverage to be more productive and more competitive. With SharePoint, you can manage content, publish information, track processes, and manage your overall business activities. In addition, SharePoint provides deep integration with the rest of the Office 365 applications, such as Teams, PowerApps, Flow, Forms, OneDrive, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This integration gets everyone in your organization on the same page and communicating effectively across Office 365 apps.

Step by Step / Updated 09-25-2019

A very simple, but incredibly powerful, use for PowerApps is to let users work with a custom SharePoint List-based app using their mobile phones or tablets. Just about everyone has a smartphone now, and building an app that lets your users interact with a SharePoint list brings your intranet to their mobile devices. To build a PowerApp for working with a SharePoint list, open your web browser and navigate to the SharePoint list. This example uses an already-created For Dummies Support List-based app.

Article / Updated 09-25-2019

It is easy to follow a SharePoint site and receive updates about what happens on that site. With the latest release of SharePoint, the option is as simple as clicking a star icon on the main page of a SharePoint website, as shown. If you are using the SharePoint Mobile App, the star is just a tap away, as shown in the following figure. Once you follow a SharePoint site it will show up on your main SharePoint dashboard — the main dashboard you see when you sign into Microsoft Office 365 and click the SharePoint app. You can always get back to the dashboard by clicking the app menu (the waffle icon in top-left corner of your screen) and clicking SharePoint. When you follow a site, you will receive all the news and updates and activity on your main SharePoint dashboard. In the following figure, you can see that we are following the SharePoint For Dummies site, and under “News From Sites,” we see a new news article was posted. If you are using the SharePoint Mobile App, you will see a News tab on the main screen. This tab shows all of the news and activity from the sites you are following. The News tab is shown here. The same news article that was shown in the web browser previously is also shown here in the SharePoint Mobile App. This is a recurring theme. The SharePoint Mobile App displays the same content you will find when using SharePoint in your web browser. It is just a mobile version designed to be easier to use on small devices. The Office 365 SharePoint dashboard will only be available if you are using SharePoint as part of Office 365. If you are using SharePoint On-Premises, check with your IT department to find out if there is a consolidated site they have for notifications and activity. How to set up alerts for SharePoint In addition to following a site, you can also set up alerts for other areas of SharePoint. For example, documents are stored in a special SharePoint container app called a Library. The Documents app that shows up on the left navigation of your default Team site is an example. Alerts are a great way to keep track of the changes your teammates make to documents and items. You must have an email address configured in your SharePoint profile in order to receive alerts. If your SharePoint server is located in your network, that’s usually not an issue. However, Office 365 may not be integrated with your network and email information. In those situations, your administrator can either manually configure your email address or grant you permission to do so. To set up an alert for content in the Documents app, follow these steps: Open your web browser and navigate to the Microsoft Office website. Sign in if you are requested. Select your SharePoint site to open the site. Select the Documents app that appears in the left navigation pane. At the top of the Documents app click the ellipsis and then click Alert Me, as shown. The Alert Me When Items Change dialog box opens. If you are using SharePoint On-Premises and you don't see the Alert Me button, chances are your administrator has not configured outgoing email settings. If outgoing email settings are not configured in Central Administration, the Alert Me button simply will not appear to users. If you are using SharePoint Online, however, then outgoing email has already been configured by Microsoft and you are good to go. In the Alert Title text box, enter a name for the alert. We suggest making the name something meaningful to you in your inbox, such as Documents Modified Today – Budget Team Site. Otherwise, you have no meaningful way to tell one alert from another. In the Send Alerts To text box, enter the names of people in addition to you who should receive the alert. That’s right, you can subscribe other people to an alert! You must have the Manage Alerts permission, which is granted by default to Site Owners. Organizations and site owners may want to subscribe multiple users to an alert to make sure they get important updates, as well as encourage them to contribute to a discussion board, blog, or wiki. Users can still opt out by modifying settings in their Alert settings. In the Delivery Method section, select whether to receive alerts via email or text message to your cellular phone. Text messaging requires that your SharePoint administrator configures this service through a third party, so you may not be able to send alerts to your phone. In the Change Type section, select the option that matches the type of notifications you want to receive — All Changes, New Items Are Added, Existing Items Are Modified, or Items Are Deleted. If you’re responsible for managing an app, we recommend receiving an alert any time items are deleted. In the Send Alerts for These Changes section, choose when to receive alerts. The options you see here vary based on the kind of app you’re working with. For example, a Tasks app allows you to receive an alert when a task is marked Complete or any time the status of a high-priority task changes. In the When to Send Alerts section, choose the frequency of your alert delivery. You can receive them immediately, once a day, or once a week. We like to receive a daily summary; otherwise, we get too many emails. Click OK to create your alert, as shown. You need the Create Alerts permission to create alerts. This permission is granted usually with the out-of-the-box configuration of the Site Members SharePoint group. Any time users say they need a workflow to receive notification of changes made to project files, try an alert first. You’d be surprised at how often alerts provide the options that are needed. If your app has a personal or public view that includes a filter, you can subscribe to changes to just that view. For example, say you want to be notified via text message when an item in an Issue Tracking app has its priority set to High. You would create a view that filters the app for high-priority issues. Select the filtered view in the Send Alerts for These Changes section when you create your alert, and you will receive alerts when items meet the filter criteria. How to manage alerts for SharePoint sites You can always go back and adjust alerts. When you click on the ellipsis (shown earlier in Figure 10-5) you can choose Manage Alerts and edit any alerts you have already created. This button takes you to a single page instead of navigating to each app where you have set an alert. The following figure shows the My Alerts page. To manage all the alerts you have on a given site and modify or delete them, follow these steps: Browse to an app where you currently subscribe to an alert. On the ellipsis drop-down choose Manage My Alerts. The My Alerts on this Site page appears. Select the proper alert name link. The Edit Alert on this Site page appears with all the options you viewed when you first created the alert. Change the settings as desired. Didn’t set the alert to begin with? You can still read through the settings and change the choices (see the preceding steps). Your changes don’t affect the alert settings for others if the alert was created for multiple users at the same time. Click OK to modify the alert with your new settings or Delete to delete the alert. Deleting an alert that was created for you doesn’t delete the alert from other users who are in the group the alert was created for. If you’re the site administrator, you can manage the alerts of everyone on the site by clicking the User Alerts link on the Site Administration section of the Site Settings page. When the event occurs that matches your alert — for example, the time or location of a calendar event change — you receive an email in your inbox. The email notification you receive is based on a template. These templates can be modified by your administrator, so they can provide for more detail.

Article / Updated 09-25-2019

Microsoft Power BI (pronounced “bee-eye” as an acronym for Business Intelligence) is a cloud-based business analytics service. Here, the focus is on how you can integrate SharePoint with Power BI. You learn how to connect your reports to SharePoint so that people can use them without ever needing to leave a SharePoint site. You don’t need to have an Office 365 subscription in order to use Power BI; there is a free version available to get you started, and a more advanced version (called Power BI Pro) for which you pay a small monthly subscription fee (around $10 a month). If you purchase an Office 365 E5 subscription, you get the Pro version of Power BI included. You can use countless data sources for your Power BI reports. One option is to pull data directly from SharePoint’s Library app and List app. How to pull data from a SharePoint Library app into Power BI A SharePoint Library app includes content and also metadata about that content in the form of columns. You can pull this data into Power BI so that you can include it in your reports. To pull SharePoint Library app data into your Power BI report: In the Power BI Desktop app, click the Get Data drop-down menu located in the External Data section of the ribbon and select More. The Get Data dialog appears. Scroll down and choose SharePoint Folder, as shown in the following figure. Click Connect. Enter the URL for your SharePoint site. In this example we enter https://sp2019fd.sharepoint.com/sites/SharePoint2019ForDummies. Click OK to connect. Enter the credentials the report will use to allow access to the SharePoint site. In this example we choose Microsoft Account, and we click Sign In so that we can use our Office 365 credentials. Click Connect to connect the Power BI Desktop with your SharePoint site. Data from your SharePoint site will be displayed so you can preview it, as shown here. Click Load to load the data into the Power BI Desktop. Once your SharePoint data has finished loading, you can use it to build a report with Power BI. Some of the types of data you can include for content include Date Accessed, Date Created, Date Modified, File Extension, Folder Path, and Name. How to pull data from a SharePoint List app A SharePoint List app is similar to a spreadsheet. Your app contains columns and rows of data. These apps are central to SharePoint and you can import the data in them into your Power BI reports. Importing SharePoint List app data is the same process previously outlined for importing SharePoint Library app data; however, instead of selecting SharePoint Folder as a data source, select SharePoint List. The Get Data dialog includes many different sources of data including all of the popular third-party sites such as GitHub, Google Analytics, Adobe, Facebook, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Stripe, Twilio, Zendesk, Webtrends, and SurveyMonkey, just to name a few. If you have data you want to report on, chances are you can use Power BI to connect and report on it. How to display a Power BI report on a SharePoint page After you publish a Power BI report to the Power BI workspace website, people can view that report by opening their web browsers and entering a shareable link you provide to them. You can also embed a report directly into a SharePoint page on a SharePoint site. To embed a report on a SharePoint page, you must use a special Web Part for Power BI. To add a Power BI report, choose the Power BI Web Part, as shown in the following figure. Once you add the Web Part to a page, you need to configure it. The configuration is very simple. You just provide the link to the Power BI report, and SharePoint takes care of rendering it for you right inside the SharePoint page, as shown here. Rendering a Power BI report in SharePoint.People using SharePoint can now view your Power BI reports without ever realizing it. All a regular user knows is that a report shows up on the SharePoint page. In order to share reports directly from your Power BI workspace, you will need the Power BI Pro license. This license comes with an Office 365 E5 subscription. You can also obtain a license for a stand-alone fee of approximately $10 per month.

Article / Updated 09-24-2019

Over the years, SharePoint has become the dominant product for company intranet sites. Remember, an intranet site is a website for only your organization and includes things like human resources information, company policies, time entry, and so on. Microsoft recognized that more and more people are using mobile devices; thus, it created a SharePoint Mobile App. Think of the SharePoint Mobile App as SharePoint running on your mobile phone. Microsoft likes to claim that the app provides your organization’s intranet right in your pocket. Here, you get the SharePoint Mobile App installed and learn how to use the app, including how to navigate and access some of the most common elements of SharePoint. Before diving into the functionality of the SharePoint Mobile App, you first need to install it on your smartphone and/or device. How to install the SharePoint Mobile App on iOS To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your iPhone or iPad: Open the Apple App Store on your iOS device. Search for “SharePoint” in the search bar. Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown. Tap the download button to install the app on your device. Once the app has finished installing, tap the Open button. How to install the SharePoint Mobile App on Android To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your Android phone or tablet: Open the Google Play store on your Android device. Search for “SharePoint” in the search bar. Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown. Tap the download button to install the app on your device. Once the app has finished downloading and installing, tap the Open button. How to sign into the SharePoint Mobile App When you first open the SharePoint Mobile App after installing it, you are presented with a sign-in screen where you can choose to sign into SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server (the on-premises version of SharePoint run by your local IT team), as shown. To keep things simple, we will sign into SharePoint Online using a previously created trial account. If your organization is using SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises, then you will need to get the sign-in information from your IT department. To sign into SharePoint Online: Tap the Sign in to SharePoint Online button. Enter your username. In this example, a previously created is used account with the account name sp2019fd. This gives you the domain: sp2019fd.onmicrosoft.com. We also chose the username as rosemarie. So, our sign in username is [email protected]. Enter your password and tap Sign In. You will be asked if you want to let the app give you notifications. For our example, we do. Tap Yes. The first-run experience for the SharePoint Mobile App appears and provides you guidance on the Find tab at the bottom of the screen, as shown. Congratulations! You are up and running with SharePoint on your mobile device. How to find your SharePoint stuff with the Find tab When you first sign into the SharePoint Mobile App, the screen opens with the Find tab already selected, as shown. The other tabs you will notice at the bottom of the screen include a News tab and a Me tab. The Find tab is critical to the SharePoint Mobile App for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that SharePoint has a lot of stuff, and your mobile device has a small screen. Finding the stuff you need can be a challenge. The Find tab includes sections for your Frequent SharePoint sites, People, Recent files, and Featured links. Under the Frequent sites, People, and Recent files sections, you can expand the search even further beyond your frequently visited sites. For example, you can browse for more files or search for a file in the Recent files section, and search for more people in the People section. Exploring a SharePoint site Since we have only created one SharePoint site at this point, that site is prominently displayed as our frequent site on the Find tab, as shown. To open the site, called “SharePoint 2019 For Dummies” in this example, just tap the site name. The app opens the site and we are in the same SharePoint site we would be in if we opened the site in a web browser. The following figure shows the SharePoint 2019 For Dummies site open in the mobile app. We can swipe the screen with our thumb and move down the screen. The first section we see is called News. The next section is called Quick links, which is followed by an Activity section and a Documents section. The reason we are seeing these sections is because we created the site using the Team Site template. You can customize the sections that show up on the default page of a SharePoint site. For example, if you want to add a particular SharePoint Library or List app you have created, you are free to do so. Opening navigation The site navigation menu is located in the upper-left corner of the screen in the form of three horizontal lines. This is often called a “hamburger menu” because some have said it looks similar to a hamburger. If you tap the hamburger menu the navigation for the SharePoint site slides out from the left side of the screen, as shown in the following figure. The SharePoint site you view in the SharePoint Mobile App is the exact same SharePoint site you can view in your web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. If you change a SharePoint site, you are changing the site for both the users of the SharePoint Mobile App and for those who access the site through a traditional web browser. As you develop your SharePoint sites, it is a good idea to keep in mind the experience users will have on the site when they are using their web browsers or their phones or tablets. You can open a SharePoint component from the navigation menu by tapping that item. If you don’t want to navigate away from the screen you are currently on, you can slide the navigation back to the left and it will close for you. Get the latest news with the News tab The News tab is a one-stop location for all the news coming in from across the various parts of SharePoint that you have access to. This includes news from different sites as well as announcements and other social news posts. The News tab is shown in the following figure, although we don’t yet have any news because this is a brand-new SharePoint site. All about you with the Me tab The Me tab shows you your profile, let’s you edit your profile, and shows a listing of all of your recent and saved content. The Me tab is shown in the following figure. You will notice a listing of a couple of pages we recently worked on: “MyWeb-PartPage” and “A cool new SharePoint page.” These pages show up because SharePoint thinks that since we recently worked on these, we might want to view our latest work. This is a recurring theme throughout SharePoint. One of the recurring complaints of SharePoint in the past was that there was just too much content “stuff” everywhere, and it was hard to find anything. This problem becomes bigger when you are working on a small smartphone screen or tablet because you don’t have as much screen real estate to view things. The solution Microsoft came up with is to show your recent content first, since it is likely that what you were recently working on, say before lunch, you will want to continue working on after lunch. Also, on the Me tab is a settings icon that looks like a gear. It is located in the top-right corner of the screen. When you tap the gear icon, the Settings screen appears, as shown. From the Settings screen you can edit your profile, clear your account cache on this device, switch the account you are using, sign out, send feedback, toggle push notifications, learn about what’s new in the app, see the version of the app you are currently using, send feedback, view help, set privacy and cookies, and review third-party notices.

Article / Updated 09-24-2019

It is human nature to learn things by exploring and it is no different with software. You could read a hundred books about SharePoint and still barely understand what exactly it is and what it does. Our thinking is that there is no better way to get to know SharePoint than to get up and running with it, clicking buttons to see what they do. With SharePoint Online you can get up and running with a trial in minutes. SharePoint Online comes bundled with Office 365. The easiest way to get started is to sign up for a free trial of Office 365. Here’s how: Open your favorite web browser and go to the Microsoft Office 365 website. The Office 365 Home page appears. Click the red button that says “Get Office.” To get SharePoint, you will need a business plan subscription. Click the For Business tab to see the available business plans. In the table that appears, you will see that the Office 365 Business Essentials plan comes with the SharePoint service and is $5 per month. We prefer using the latest Office clients like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, so we will choose the Office 365 Business Premium plan. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Try for free” link. A welcome screen appears that asks for your information. Walk through the wizard, providing your information as needed, in order to get up and running with Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Note that as a business name you can just use your own name and choose that your business size is 1 person. You will then choose a domain name, which is <your choice>.onmicrosoft.com. This is your Office 365 domain. In our example, we chose sp2019fd.onmicrosoft.com for our domain. You can always add a custom domain later if you prefer. For example, we might connect sharepoint2019fordummies.com to our Office 365 account and get emails there, too. Once you have filled out the information, your free trial will be created, as shown here. This can take a few minutes. Once it is created, you will be given a link to go to your Office 365 dashboard. When you first land on your Office 365 dashboard, you will see a quick tutorial and then be presented with the Office 365 main landing page, as shown. If you want to learn more about Office 365, we recommend checking out Office 365 For Dummies, 3rd Edition. In this case we are focused on SharePoint, so let's crack it open and get started. Click the SharePoint icon in the Apps section of your dashboard. Because this is the first time you are opening SharePoint Online, you will be presented with a quick tutorial. After you finish the tutorial, you will be presented with a welcome screen for SharePoint and an easy way to create your first site, create a post, or install the SharePoint Mobile App. Right now, we just want to create our very own SharePoint site. Click the “Create site” link at the top of the page, as shown. You will be given a choice: create a team site or create a Communications site. Choose team site and give the new site a name. The dialog box that appears provides a group email alias for the site and shows you the URL you will use to access the SharePoint team site. You can also provide a description and set basic privacy settings. Click Finish in the next dialog box that appears. In this dialog box, you are able to add any additional owners or members of the team site. In our case, we are the only user of our new Office 365 subscription right now. Congratulations! Just like that you are up and running with your very own SharePoint site (see the following figure). Feel free to start clicking around and exploring it. You can always get back to your Office 365 dashboard and your SharePoint site by opening your web browser and going to www.office.com and logging in with the user you created. If you are using SharePoint Server 2019, your IT team has likely installed SharePoint at your office location. Since the installation is at your local company premises instead of in a Microsoft data center somewhere, the term for this version is aptly called on-premises. If your organization is using SharePoint on-premises, your IT team will have likely created your SharePoint site for you and sent you a link to access it.

Step by Step / Updated 03-29-2017

Most SharePoint 2013 apps are based on lists. Creating your very own SharePoint app may sound a little daunting, but creating and customizing an app couldn’t be easier. The easiest way to create your own app is to start with a Custom List app and then customize it for your particular need.

Step by Step / Updated 02-21-2017

Microsoft maintains a community forum for SharePoint 2013. You can access the forum for SharePoint 2013 and post questions and interact with other SharePoint users.