By now, everyone should be familiar with creating custom views in SharePoint 2010. It is a great way to speed up the process of finding the items or documents that you need without scrolling through pages of unnecessary content. For instance, I send reports on a weekly basis to several clients with information that I get from many different lists. All of the lists and libraries that I use have custom views that give me the exact content I am looking for.
When I first began to do these reports a few years ago, I was relatively new to SharePoint. I would spend hours filtering and scrolling through pages to find the information that I needed. It did not take me long to figure out that I could create a few simple views that would cut my time spent on these reports in half. I felt as if I had just cracked some secret code in the SharePoint world. These custom views would display my content in exactly the way I wanted, which made my job much easier and put a smile on my manager’s face.
Now I have set up a demo library and filled it with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word documents. Let’s create a custom view that will only display word documents so you can see how easy but beneficial it is to have these custom views. Let’s get started:
1. I will begin by opening my “Testing” library.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers1.jpg)
2. This library has both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word documents.
3. Notice that by default libraries have an “All Documents” view.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers2.jpg)
4. It is now time to clean this up and get organized.
5. At the top in the “Library Tools” section I will click Library.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers3.jpg)
6. Once the ribbon has opened, under “Settings” I will click Library Settings.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers4.jpg)
7. Scroll to the bottom. Again you will notice that under “Views” there is only one view by default, which is the “All Documents” view.
8. I will click Create View.
9. Notice all of the different choices that I can select when creating views. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to click Standard View.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers5.jpg)
10. I will now create a view to show all of the Word documents in my library.
11. Under the name section, I will be descriptive but brief: Word Documents.
12. I can choose whether or not I want this to be my default view, and check this box.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers6.jpg)
13. In the “Columns” section, the only additional column I will click is Document Type.
14. In the “Sort” section, I will sort by Document Type.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers7.jpg)
15. In the Filter section, I am going to check the box that says “Show items only when the following is true:”
16. Under “Show the items when” column, I will click Document Type.
17. I will leave the second drop-down as is equal to.
18. Then, in the last box, I will type Word.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers8.jpg)
19. Take notice of all the other settings I could change, but I will not be changing any of these in this example.
20. I will scroll to the bottom and click OK.
21. I am now taken back to my testing library, and I will be able see that the default view is “Word Documents” and only my Word documents are showing up here.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers9.jpg)
22. Not to worry, the Excel spreadsheets are not gone, they are just in my “All Documents” view.
23. To switch views back to “All Documents,” I will click Word Documents at the top.
24. Then I will click All Documents.
![SharePoint custom view](http://www.sdtimes.com/images/0515.sp-sharepointers10.jpg)
25. All of my Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in this library are being displayed again.
26. I could simply change a few of these steps to create an Excel spreadsheet view just like my Word documents view.
This is just a simple example of what a custom view can do in your SharePoint2010 environment. You can see that within seconds I easily created a view that sorted all of my Word documents from my Excel documents. So now whenever I leave this library and need to come back for any reason, this will be the first view that I see. This could be extremely beneficial to you if you are constantly looking for documents. The best part is that there is no need to filter or sort manually; any word document added to this library from here on out will show in this view. So I advise you to start creating your own custom views to see for yourself.
Jeff Taylor is a consultant with SharePoint911, a Rackspace company.