A Hidden Gem – the Preview Pane View in SharePoint
Toward the end of my wiki article last week, I showed a web part added to a SharePoint wiki page. While people liked the idea of adding web parts to a wiki, what got even more reaction was the web part itself.
The web part, shown below, contains a list of the pages in my wiki. That’s nothing new, but what got folks excited was the ability to roll-over the titles, and see a preview of the contents of that page. People are looking all over the place for the "Preview Pane" web part, and asking me where to find it.
Well, I have a confession to make – there is no "preview pane web part". Per se.
But wait – don’t run away! I wouldn’t be here very long if I went around faking up web pages to make a point. That view is very much a part of SharePoint – even WSS. I just said it wasn’t a web part. And that’s why people can’t find it.
So how do you get a preview pane? Here’s the secret – although the preview pane isn’t itself a "web part", it is available as a style in almost any list view!
How to do it
The example in the other article was a wiki, but it didn’t need to be. You can use a custom list as well. To show how this works, I’ll start with a site’s home page.
I select Edit Page from the Site Actions menu, and click Add a web part. I’m going to select the Songs list. This is just a custom list that has some content in it on my site. It could have been a wiki, Announcements, or any other list. This list just happens to have some useful content.
Notice that this is starts as simply a standard view of the list.
Now the fun begins! Select Modify Shared Web Part from the web part’s menu:
In the task pane, select "Edit the current view." (Note: I also changed my toolbar type to summary, to make it smaller.)
On the Edit View page, scroll down towards the bottom, and expand the section entitled "Style". There you will see a number of display formats. One of them will be the "Preview pane":
Select it, and Click OK. Click OK in the task pane, and your view will be updated with the rollover and preview!
Other Aspects
Since this is just a view style, you can use it on almost any list or library. In addition, you don’t need to create a web part first. You can just add this as a view on your list’s settings page.
When you create the view, make sure you choose the "Standard" view as the base format:
Once you do that, you will see the same view settings screen described earlier.
Conclusion
SharePoint offers a lot of different ways to look at the information in your sites. One of the most interesting is the Preview Pane view. Although it doesn’t show up as a web part on its own, you can use it in almost any list or library simply by modifying the view settings.
I hope this article has encouraged you to explore this, as well as some of the other view formats available to you!
Author: Woody Windischman
Site: The Sanity Point
Woody Windischman is a technology consultant with over 20 years of experience in a variety of roles, providing a unique perspective which allows him to see problems holistically.
Since getting acquainted with Microsoft IIS and FrontPage in the mid 90’s, Woody has been deeply involved in the community – first having been awarded as a Microsoft SharePoint MVP from October 2005 through September of 2007, and then spending a year working directly with the SharePoint product team.
Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani
ISBN: 978-0-470-28761-3
- Page Sizes and Browser Preview in SharePoint Designer
- Press F1 - SharePoint Help is on the Way
- Book Excerpt: Introduction to "Professional SharePoint Designer 2007"
- On Babies, Bathwater, and SharePoint Designer
- Wiki-in-the-Box - Is SharePoint Wiki Really that Bad?
- A Hidden Gem - the Preview Pane View in SharePoint
- The Office 2010 Synchronization Center
- Binary Free SharePoint Twitter Search Web Part
- SharePoint 2010 - Everything Old is New Again
- SharePoint: On Ends and Means
That’s just too cool for words!
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The preview pane is excellent to use with picture libraries! I simply set the view to show the name and a thumbnail of the picture, so I can rollover the titles quickly to find exactly what I’m looking for. Preview Panes are great for storing information that just needs to be viewed, or in the case of pictures, I use the right click on just the title to grab my shortcuts to paste them around my site. I don’t feel they work very well for lists that contain links within entries, the pane itself can be squirrelly to try to click within. There are other limitations to this view that should be noted as well. Preview Pane only allows the list rollover option on the title column, if you need more information you have to see the whole preview. Forget about tweaking your content settings to get rid of the title column and then using preview pane. So plan ahead. Also, you can’t group with the preview pane, it won’t support grouping.
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Excellent tip thanks.
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Thanks for the expansion, Kerri!
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I often use the preview pane view for list that have lots of fields as its so tidy to see all of the fields without having to scroll across the page.
However when you first select the view all the fields are blank until you mouse over and to the uninitiated it looks like the fields haven’t been populated.
Do you know of any way to overcome this, maybe make it default to the first item? – perhaps do something with code & a CEWP?
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Did anyone ever find a solution to this issue? Is there some way an ‘instruction’ can be incorporated into the view so people will know to mouse over for further details? I don’t think this is intuitive when users first visit the page.
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Put a content editor web part on the page that includes the instructions you’d like to show… “Mouse over any item to view its details”. — Mark
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Now this is very cool. I have used preview panes before, but this really demonstrates an even better use for it.
Stump
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Issy, did you ever have any luck with populating info by default? I have the same issue.
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No Stuart, I was hoping one of those clever people on the panel would have a solution.
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I don’t see just empty fields – I don’t even see my column names!
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Is there a way to hide the drop down in the title field (in the left column) so the edit menu does not display?
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I was able to incorporate instructions for the preview pane style in a CEWP as suggested by Mark and It worked on the page where the list resided. However when I tried to bring the CEWP and list onto the main page of the site in another CEWP under ‘easy tabs’, (using javascript), my instructions showed above the list, but the ‘hover’ functionality disappeared. Has anyone had any experience of doing this? What I am trying to do is display a list in preview pane style (with ‘hover’ instructions), on the front page of my site, but the list needs to display as a tab under the easytabs webpart.
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Gillian,
Christophe is monitoring the Stump the Panel forums. He’s got one to handle questions like this. You might get a quicker response by posting your question there. — Mark
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