Keep your spreadsheets off my SharePoint; make your own database in minutes

David M Williams
Friday, 26 June 2009 06:37

Business IT - Technology

Create as many columns as you require. If you have a spreadsheet you’ve made in the past, refer to it and create columns that correspond to the spreadsheet columns.

Once you have finished, return to the home page of your site. You will now see a new option under Lists in the quick launch menu, namely your brand new list.

Click it and you open the default view of the list. Again, there is no data yet but you’ll see all your columns are represented – just like a spreadsheet. Users can click column headings to sort on the fly.

You might wish to suppress some fields, or to change the order in which they appear. This is where views come in. The default view is to list all items, in the order they were entered.

The view menu to the right hand side allows you to select different views, once you have made them, to modify the current view or to create new views.

Whether you modify or create a view the options are similar; you will be able to suppress columns, re-order columns, filter rows based on their contents and change sorting options.

You may add grouping, display summaries of numeric data and change styles. I like the shaded style so alternating rows have a different coloured background.

That’s all there is to it. There’s no excuse now to be storing spreadsheets in SharePoint when you could instead use lists and views to present the data in a more aesthetic way, to reduce network load and to allow much easier editing by more than one person at a time.

So, you there - keep those spreadsheets off my SharePoint!