Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By : Adrian Colquhoun
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By: Adrian Colquhoun

Overview of this book

The power of Microsoft SharePoint as the Enterprise collaboration platform is ever-growing; due to the wide range of capabilities it offers, SharePoint 2010 can help transform your business so you can quickly respond to the changes and challenges that you face. For End Users, SharePoint helps you and your team work "better, faster, and smarter". This book will take your SharePoint knowledge further, showing you how to use your skills to solve real business problems. While many other titles might be characterized as "SharePoint Explained", this cookbook contains advanced content that goes beyond that found in other SharePoint End User offerings: it is "SharePoint Applied". It provides recipes walking Power Users through a range of collaboration, data integration, business intelligence, electronic form, and workflow scenarios, as well as offering three invaluable business scenarios for building composite applications. The cookbook begins by providing a comprehensive treatment of SharePoint essentials, while quickly moving forward to topics like Data Integration, Business Intelligence, and automating business processes. At the end of the book, the information presented in the earlier recipes is combined to create three example SharePoint 2010 "composite applications" for Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Project Management. Composite applications are the "unique selling point" of SharePoint 2010 and understanding how to create them is the key to unlocking the business value of the product.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a site column


We can add custom columns to our SharePoint lists. However, having to recreate the same column over and over again quickly becomes a pain. Site columns, which are shared between all the sites in your site collection, are the answer.

Getting ready

This recipe works for:

  • SharePoint 2010 Foundation

  • SharePoint 2010 Standard Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Online (Office 365 Edition)

You require either the Design or Full Control permission level to create a site column.

How to do it...

  1. In the top-level site of your site collection, open the Site Actions menu and select the Site Settings option.

  2. From the Site Settings page, select the Site Columns link from the Galleries heading.

  3. The Site Columns page is displayed. Existing site columns are listed on this page. To create a new site column, click on the Create link at the top of the page.

  4. Enter a name for your site column, select its data type, and click on OK.

  5. Your new column is created and added to the list of site columns.

How it works...

SharePoint lists are made up of different columns. These columns can be defined locally (on each list as they are needed) or as site columns, which can be shared by lists throughout the site collection.

If you think that you will need a column more than once, then you should once consider creating it as a site column rather than just adding it to your list directly.

Site columns are particularly useful for columns that contain lookup data or a set of choices (for example, your company's departments or its locations). Using site columns helps you get more consistency in the information that you store within SharePoint.

Site columns are a necessary first step to creating content types, as described in the next recipe.

See also

  • Creating a content type

  • Creating a list column based on a term set, Chapter 3

  • Creating an external content type, Chapter 3