Sean Wallbridge
It’s time to turn on the meditation music, take off your shoes, take some deep breaths, channel the positive energy and unlock the power of you. Or more specifically me. While this self-help article may not make you feel better, eat healthier or lose weight it just might teach you something new, and give you a little trick to help your organization embrace sites on Office 365 (otherwise known as SharePoint Online).
When we talk SharePoint we often talk dashboarding. At its simplest dashboarding is the concept of giving your users a bird’s eye view of some kind of business data that’s important to them. A good first step towards this is setting up the homepage of your site with some “app parts” (also known as Web Parts) that show your users information that relates to them. An app part is a little widget that sits on a page in SharePoint and displays some kind of data or functionality. For example in the default Team Site template you see when you create your first SharePoint site Microsoft has pre-setup the homepage with some app parts they think you will find useful.
We can customize these App Parts to show meaningful data for our users so that they feel the site is tailored for their needs.
Consider the following scenario…
As a first step with SharePoint you are getting your users to use the Shared Document library to store documents they need to collaborate on – instead of using the ever cluttered and unwieldy (and evil) Company Share Drive [shivers]. This is the very same Share Drive that still has detailed information about the 1993 company picnic, because there is no way to implement effective information governance to archive data.
On the homepage of the team site you want to give users a quick view of the documents that they have created, uploaded or worked on in the Shared Documents Library. This allows users to easily see their documents and it’s a good “value added” piece. It will start to show your “SharePoint weary” users the power of libraries and why storing their documents here is better than alongside Bob’s 1998 Sales PowerPoint in the dreaded Share Drive. (Bob having left the company in the first quarter of 1999 after the scandal at the company holiday party).
Using the power of Me we can customize the Shared Document App Part to filter for files that the currently logged in user created or modified.
If the Shared Documents App Part is not on the page, or if you want to add an App Part for a different list or library follow the first set of steps. Otherwise if you already have an App Part like the screen shot above you can skip this part.
Step 1: Add an App Part to your Page
- Place your page in edit mode:
- Once the page opens in edit mode place your cursor where you want to insert the App Part:
- Go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and choose App Part:
- When the App Part panel opens choose the Library where your documents are stored. In this example we will use the default Shared Documents library (called Documents). Click Add.
- The App Part appears on the page in its default view showing all documents.
- Press the Save button to exit edit mode.
Step 2: Customize the App Part
- Put the page back into edit mode (see Step 1 above). On the Documents App Part click the little black downward pointing arrow in the top right hand corner of the App Part.
- From the resulting menu select Edit Web Part (yes you select Edit Web Part even though it’s an App Part):
- A panel will appear on the right hand side of your browser window. Click the “Edit Current View” button.
- On the resulting page scroll down to the Filters section (about three quarters of the way down):
- Set the values as shown above. We are saying show the document when the column Created By or Modified By is equal to (the two most important letters in the English language) … Me. (oh and two extra characters make sure you surround Me with the two square braces as shown above)
- Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click Ok
- You will be returned to the previous page and your App Part will have been reconfigured.
| Before: | After: |
Play around with it and you’ll notice that in the App Part you will only see documents that you created or that you were the last one to modify. This technique works on any list of library with a column that contains “People” information. For example a task list with the Assigned To column.
Now that you’ve unlocked the power of [Me], time to turn off the meditation music, put your shoes back on and get back to work.