Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION Keep your spreadsheets off my SharePoint; make your own database in minutes
VIRTUALISATION Keep your spreadsheets off my SharePoint; make your own database in minutes | Keep your spreadsheets off my SharePoint; make your own database in minutes |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Friday, 26 June 2009 | |
|
Page 1 of 3   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Yet, this isn’t the best way to do things. Your spreadsheet is going to grow and grow and grow. Every time someone opens it they have to drag that file across the network. Every time they save it the whole spreadsheet is being written back. Worse, if you have more than one person wanting to use the spreadsheet at the same time you begin hitting concurrency problems. Out of the box, SharePoint offers something besides document libraries which you can use straight away and without any programming expertise needed at all. I’m talking about lists, the often overlooked companion to document libraries. A list is, well, a list. It’s a collection of items. A bunch of records. Like rows in a spreadsheet, you might say. Aha! By default, SharePoint’s lists contain just one field – a title. Make a new list under a SharePoint site and that’s what you get. Make new list items and you can enter titles. Open the list view to see your records and they show as a grid of information – remarkably like a spreadsheet, except more lightweight on the network. Plus, anybody can be reading and writing at the same time. So don’t make a new spreadsheet; make a list. Your users will thank you for it. Not only does it save time and resolve concurrency matters but it also removes a step because once you open SharePoint you’re there; there is no need to then click on a document link that opens Excel. Here is how to do it. Best of all it doesn't matter your level of SharePoint expertise, and there is no programming or database knowledge required whatsoever. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
