I would like to combine different document types (.pdf .doc and .xls) for a particular subject area (e.g. homelessness) and links to websites with relevant subject area information on the same ‘bookshelf’ of my library

Even though I still can’t see Sharepoint as just “a bunch of lists,” nowadays I find a great deal of satisfaction as a list maker.

spreadsheets are the definitive killer app for personal computers and Excel is a great spreadsheet. It’s just that using Excel to keep a list is a bad idea.

Guest Author: Mark Rackley
The SharePoint Hillbilly
Everybody dance now!
Everyone loves a good remix…  So… By far my most popular blog post is my entry Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship – Out of the Box. I am thrilled that so many have found it useful.  However, several questions [...]

The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference.

When we first started our SharePoint development efforts we had a requirement to write an application to track issues and projects as well as log time against them. All of our development had to be Out of the Box because of the development constraints with Custom development and well, because at the time we didn’t really know what we were doing. However, a couple of things came out of this development effort which I think will actually come in handy. One of these was creating a Parent / Child relationship between lists so that we could track hours for a project or issue.

I worked on creating a mailing list for a public facing SharePoint site. I really had some constraints because I was only allowed to use SharePoint Designer and the browser. I’m not used to these situations because I am mainly a software engineer. However, it was a very nice experience. I applied lots of knowledge and I worked around the constraints. I decided to put the experience and workarounds together into an educational series of articles to help SharePoint end users and administrators create their own mailing list without writing a single line of .NET code.

A very common request for changes to SharePoint list views is how to set the column width. This is not possible to do using the ootb “List Settings”, and the common suggested fix is to use SharePoint Designer (SPD) and convert the view into an “XSLT Data View”: How can I manage columns widths in list views? Most large companies do, however, prevent the use of SPD.

When creating data view web parts in SharePoint Designer, and dealing with libraries or lists that contain folders, the Item and Folder Scope setting becomes pretty important. In SharePoint views, it’s always possible to create a new view of the list with no folders, by configuring the “Folders” section in your view settings. Unfortunately, the same functionality is not as obvious in SharePoint Designer. When you create a view with no folders, and then convert it to XSLT in SPD, the folders always reappear.

Since this initial article is really just to show you around in the DVWP, we’re not going to do anything fancy. We’ll just insert a regular SharePoint list as our data view. See, that now on the right side of the screen, there is a “Data Source Library” pane. 8. Now, in the pane on the right side of the screen, instead of the “Data Source Library” tab, you’ll see the “Data Source Details” tab, that shows the details of the source that was just selected. This means, that all of the fields in the list are displayed. There are even some extra fields listed there, that are usually hidden from views