I had a challenge tonight. We’ve created somewhat of a ‘Kiosk’ in a SharePoint site that serves as a kiosk for kids. So, we’ve gone through great efforts to restrict where people can click, etc. So, instead of allowing them to view knowledge base content (the list I happen to be working on) directly, I instead have a customized web part page that displays the necessary fields. The problem is, certain fields have ‘paths’ defined, to help guide students where to find stuff and they are in the styling of Click Here -> Then Click Here -> Then Click Here.

Here’s the problem though. The “greater than” > character gets replaced (in presentation) with >. It doesn’t matter that the source column was plain text, rich text or otherwise, defined in your list. And in the end, it looks like the below (which isn’t very attractive or helpful, for students).

The problem is, the Greater Than (>) is an HTML (Special) character that SharePoint is misinterpreting (well okay, the browser is). Here’s a comprehensive list of those characters to watch out for: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/html/special

How Fix/Address This

To address this issue, I fired up SPD (SharePoint Designer), which as a reminder, is now free (www.microsoft.com/spd) but as always, should be used with caution. As I mention above, regardless of what the list column type was (Plain Text, Rich Text, etc.), I can modify how it is displayed, in SharePoint Designer. So, here’s how.

1. Open your display page in SPD.
2. Select the field you want to modify and choose the Common Tasks handle (the box with the less than sign in it), to modify the field type

1. Select ‘Rich Text’ as the Format type

1. Choose ‘Yes’ to confirm changing of the formatting

Cool. Here’s the result already displaying in SPD…

And this is how it looks on our web page now.