Part 1 of this series of blog posts looked at sites and Part 2 went into more details about Document Libraries which are one of the core building blocks for a SharePoint site. In Part 3, we are going to look at ~/blog/july-2015/sharepoint-terminology-part-2-document-libraries/Views for Document Libraries.
SharePoint Views
A View is simply a different way of looking at the information in a Document Library. By default, all Document Libraries have a View called All Items, which, unsurprising, shows you everything in that Document Library!
But different Views can be setup to show different columns of Metadata, to sort the documents in a particular order or to only show particular documents by filtering out the ones your aren’t interested in.
Again, using the previous example, the Invoices Document Library could have a view called “Overdue Invoices”. This would only show Documents where the “Due Date” Metadata was less than today’s date and the “Paid/Unpaid” Metadata was set to “Unpaid”.
This is shown in the example below. This is the exact same Document Library shown in the previous blog post but just showing a different view of the same Invoice documents.
Or we could have another view that shows all invoices for last year. Or a view that shows all invoices that are unpaid. Or a view that groups all the invoices by Company. And all this is possible because we are storing Metadata for each document.
Again, the example below is the same Invoices documents library, this time showing the invoices grouped by Year and Month.
For a given Document Library the chances are that the person who built the Library has already set up some useful standard views for you to use. But it is also possible for you to create your own “personal” views that are just for you and contain the information you need to carry out a specific task.
The final blog post will briefly look at Lists and other functionality for Document Libraries that you might find useful.
