MS SharePoint Views | Creating And Saving

In this tutorial, we’ll talk about creating and saving views on SharePoint. Filtering and sorting make views useful especially when displaying our data on SharePoint List or Libraries. When creating SharePoint views, we’re only changing how our data or files are being represented without changing the actual files or data itself. There are two ways of creating a view which will also be discussed in this tutorial.

SharePoint views are a simple representation of our data. 

On our document libraries, all our files are displayed by default. However, some people within the organization want to see certain views or data representation right away without them having to do the filtering or grouping the files every time. 

For example, every time the CEO visits this document library, he wants to have a view that already displays the files that are grouped by departments.

First Method Of Creating SharePoint Views

Let’s say for instance an HR wants to have a view where they can also see the files related to the Accounting department. To do that, we just need to click on the Department column, and click Filter by.

Then, just select the Accounting option and click the Apply button.

It’ll then give us a view where we can only see the files under the Accounting department. We can just do that step every time we want to have this view. However, what we want is to save this view so we could just visit it when we need it. 

Saving SharePoint Views

To save our current view, just click the All Documents and click Save view as.

We can now name this view. For this example, we’ll name it as Accounting.

We can create two types of views in terms of audience here. We can make this view public or private depending on what we want. By making this public, everyone in the organization can use this view while making it private only makes this view available to the person who created it.

Don’t forget to click the Save button.

Whenever we want to have a view where only the accounting files are being displayed, we can just click on the All Documents, and click the Accounting view.

Moreover, we can easily have a view where we can only see the accounting expenses related files. And that’s how we can create and save views. 

Second Method Of Creating SharePoint Views

Another way of creating a view is by clicking the All Documents then selecting the Create new view option. 

For this example, we’ll name it TestView. We can make this view displayed as a list, calendar, or gallery. For now, let’s use the List. We can also change the visibility of this view to private or public if we want to. Then, click Create to create this view.

Since we didn’t set any filtering, sorting, or grouping, this view still displays all the files.

To edit this view, just click on the All Documents again and click Edit current view.

It’ll then take us to this page. This is a more advanced version of the view that we’ve made.

Modifying Views

This part of our view allows us to make more advanced changes. For this example, let’s change the name of this view to CEO.

In this Columns section, we can select the columns that we want to display and hide the other columns. For this example, we only want to display the Type, Name, Department, Expense Type, and Expense Amount columns for the CEO.

The next section is for sorting our columns. For this example, we want to sort our columns by Expense Amount and display them in a descending order.

We also have the filter section where we can select between showing all of the items or create a simple conditional filtering. For this example, we’ll create a filter where it’ll only show items if the department column is not equal to HR. 

We have a few other changes that we can make here. For this example, we can make some changes on the Group By options as well. Just click on it to display the options that we can make.

For this example, we only want to group our files by department. 

Let’s also add in Totals. We want to have a total under the Expense Amount column. So, let’s select Sum.

And those are the things that we can do when using this method of creating and saving a view. If we’re done editing this view, just click the OK button to save it.

As a result, we now have a CEO view that looks like this. As we can see, it’s grouped by department and there’s a total under the Expense Amount column. The columns that we have in this view are only those columns that we’ve added earlier as well. 

***** Related Links *****
View Formatting In SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint | An Overview
Adding Metadata In SharePoint Using Columns

Conclusion

All in all, we’ve learned how to create and save SharePoint views. We discussed that we can create views depending on the needs of our organization.  We’ve also talked about the two ways of creating a view and if we want to make a view public or private. Again, creating views are only for representations of our data.

In this tutorial, we’re able to create 3 different views in our sample SharePoint document library. The All Documents view which displays all our files by default, the Accounting view that can be used by the HR where the files are only related to the accounting department, and the CEO view where the files are grouped by department with other few changes on it. 

All the best,

Henry