Views

Views are one of the most important things to understand when you are constructing your SharePoint site if you have a significant number of individuals who are attempting to access different libraries for different information. Generally, if you have confidential information, you may consider having that information stored within folders to which people have limited access. Now, imagine that you didn't have to create those folders because people couldn't see that information in general. That is the idea of a view. 

To put it more conceptually, a view is a filter that is applied to applications which shows different items based on the view applied. Though this might be a scant definition, that is how I see it. Instead of hundreds of different folders, have the views be the pseudo-folders which change the information being seen. Not only does this limit the amount of time you spend navigating from folder to folder, you no longer have the task of moving items from folder to folder. All you would have to do is change the view and it is done for you. 

You may have already seen this while working through some of the other tasks which you have been working on and have been curious about how to use it, but here is a general outline on what to do. 

First, we start with a list that we have previously created. The one that I will be using is a simple list that I made in a couple seconds, but in general, you may have your columns be different. 

As you can see, there is a column which I have simply labeled "food type". This allows me to identify the item more specifically then before. When we apply our view, we want to create a view that will only see items which have the "food type" of fruit.

To do this, we click of the three dots next to all items. This will bring up the menu to create or modify the current view. Since we want to make a new view, we are going to create view.

This brings up a list similar to that of SharePoint 2010 where you get to choose which type of view you want to make from a selection given. These include:

• Standard View
• Calendar View
• Access View
• Datasheet View
• Gantt View

And a custom view which you could design yourself in SharePoint designer. Simply, just select Standard view for now and leave the other ones for later. 

For space reasons, I will not make a snap shot of everything which is shown, but I will describe what I am doing. First, I will title my view "Fruit" because I want a view that will show only fruit and it is easy to interpret. Besides that simple task, we scroll down to "Filter" and add the parameters of our view. Because there is only one thing for which we are searching, we only add the one parameter using computer logic and click okay. This is a simple but straightforward view.

After you have done this, your view list will update and it will show this as your current view. 

You can change the current and default view by using this drop down menu and following the same process except by using modify view instead of create view. The output for the view follows as below.

This can be done in any number of web applications in SharePoint and becomes easier as you get used to the process and identifying useful views which you may want to make. This has been a simple example, but I found that simple examples explain clearly and effectively.