Author Archive

Complete guide to filtering SharePoint lists by the current week.

Date:September 17th, 2012 Author: Category: General Comments:0 ;

A common requirement in SharePoint is to filter lists so you’re only showing the current week, month, quarter etc. If you only want to see the last X number of days (e.g. last 30 days) then it’s simple enough.

If you want setup a SharePoint view to see the current calendar week then its a little more complex – especially if you define your week differently from the standard Sunday to Saturday or Monday to Sunday.

First you must look at and really understand the method for setting up SharePoint views to filter the current calendar month or week as it’s not really obvious.

Long story short – here are the steps :-

  • Use one of the calculated column formula below to find the “Start of week
  • Use a calculated column formula of “End of Week
        = [Start of Week] + 6
  • Setup a View Filter showing items when [Today] is in that range.
        Start of Week <= [Today] AND End Of Week >= [Today]

Again – see this post for showing the method in step-by-step detail.

If your week goes Sunday to Saturday or Monday to Sunday then use :-

Start of week End of week
Sunday to Saturday
 =[Due Date] - WEEKDAY([Due Date]) +1
 =[Start of Week] + 6
Monday to Sunday
 =[Due Date] – WEEKDAY([mydate],2) + 1
 =[Start of Week] + 6

Obviously you will replace [Due Date] with your own particular date field.(Check out the WEEKDAY function to understand what the 2nd argument does)

The other options are a bit more complex to find the start of the week (again end of week = start + 6)

Start of week
Tuesday to Monday
 =[Due Date]-WEEKDAY([Due Date])+IF(WEEKDAY([Due Date])<3,-4,3)
Wednesday to Tuesday
 =[Due Date]-WEEKDAY([Due Date])+IF(WEEKDAY([Due Date])<4,-3,4)
Thursday to Wednesday
 =[Due Date]-WEEKDAY([Due Date])+IF(WEEKDAY([Due Date])<5,-2,5)
Friday to Thursday
 =[Due Date]-WEEKDAY([Due Date])+IF(WEEKDAY([Due Date])<6,-1,6)
Saturday to Friday
 =[Due Date]-WEEKDAY([Due Date])+IF(WEEKDAY([Due Date])<7,0,7)

See this picture for some test data, its in a strange order (Thursday to Wednesday if first) but check it out on your desk calendar if you’re not convinced!

SharePoint Online – options for email enabled document libraries and lists.

Date:August 18th, 2012 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Online / 365 / Cloud Comments:0 ;

“Email enabled document libraries” are a popular feature in SharePoint – you can send email to a specific address and the email gets put into a document library or list.

This feature isn’t supported in the hosted version of SharePoint (SharePoint Online / Office 365 or BPOS) but there are 3rd party apps that enable this.

A SaaS app that allows rules for what happens to the emails based on email address, content, attachments and promote email content to list meta data. Currently in limited beta, pricing not decided.

Runs as an application on a local workstation and moves emails from an Exchange Online mailbox to SharePoint Online list according to user defined rules. Free to use – support provided if you set MessageOps as ‘partner of record’.

SaaS app to to provide email enabled document libraries with options to store attachments away from SharePoint storage. Pricing not disclosed.

Desktop program that runs in the background on a user’s computer and move emails from Outlook 2007/2010 folders into SharePoint online or on-premise. From $165 per profile (folder/incoming email address).

In the Cloud: New web parts for SharePoint Online!

Date:July 23rd, 2012 Author: Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Online / 365 / Cloud Comments:0 ;

We know that some customers are considering moving to SharePoint Online and have been asked if our SharePoint web parts are compatible.

To run on SharePoint Online a web part has run in the Sandbox Model. Quite frankly this is hard and there are many restrictions – which is why there are so few vendors selling cloud compatible web parts. For our own products some features would have to be removed (e.g. web part connections in Planner and PivotPoint) some would have to be radically re-designed (such as TeamTime) and with some (FilterPoint and Highlighter) it’s just not possible to run them in the sandbox model at all.

The strategy we’re adopting is to create SharePoint Online / Cloud specific versions of our web parts to avoid having to ‘dumb down’ our normal on-premise web parts.

Date based email alerts for SharePoint Online

First up is a cloud specific version of Reminder that allows you to add customizable and date based email alerts to SharePoint Online / Office 365.

Date based email alerts for SharePoint online

Email enabled document libraries in SharePoint Online

We’re also developing a service that will allow you to use Email enabled document libraries in SharePoint Online – something that’s provided out of the box in normal on-premise SharePoint installations and many people are surprised to learn is just not available in SharePoint Online.

Email enabled document libraries for SharePoint online / 365

Not in the cloud?

Don’t worry, our feet are still firmly on the ground! We’re not going to forget about those of you who don’t plan to move to SharePoint Online and those of you who appreciate the extra flexibility of traditional on-premise installations that give more power to be able to adapt and enhance the platform your your needs.

As always – get in touch if you have any questions or feedback or would like to let us know which product you would like us to adapt.

Tip – Keyboard shortcut for Paste As Plain Text in SharePoint

Date:June 14th, 2012 Author: Tags: , ,
Category: General Comments:3 ;

If you spend any amount of time copy and pasting stuff into SharePoint’s wiki or rich text fields (or indeed working with web based rich text editors of any kind) then you’ve undoubtedly have been burned by the crAzY FormaAting monster! This is because the formatting that works so beautifully in one place may not work well in another site.

Of course in SharePoint 2010 you’ve got the Paste as plaintext option in the toolbar, but I am a keyboard warrior damn it! I don’t have time for faffing about with a mouse!

If you’re as impatient as I am (or aren’t using SharePoint 2010) you’ve probably got around this with the Notepad dance to remove formatting – Select source, CTRL+C, Open Notepad, CTRL+V, CTRL+A (select All), CTRL+C, switch to destination and finally CTRL+V to paste plain text… but there is an easier way – CTRL + SHIFT + V to Paste As Plain Text!

If you’re using :-

Send email alerts when a document is left checked out

Date:May 28th, 2012 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: SharePoint Reminder Comments:0 ;

A new version of our Reminder web part for SharePoint has been released (v1.7.16) that allows you to send email alerts if a document is left checked out for a long time.

If you have document libraries that require check out before editing then you’ve undoubtedly been faced with the situation where documents have been left checked out – blocking other users from editing the document.

Reminder allows you to send email alerts after a period of time to ensure checked out documents are not forgotten about.

This example shows how to setup Reminder to send email alerts if something in a document library is left checked out for more than 12 hours.

SharePoint - email alerts when a document is left checked out

The manual contains other common scenarios such as email alerts when Task/Due and Overdue, simple helpdesk in SharePoint, enhanced SharePoint alerts and more.

You can download and upgrade to the latest version.

New version of PivotPoint web part for SharePoint – v2.2.3

Date:May 15th, 2012 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

A new version of our PivotPoint web part for SharePoint (v2.2.3) is ready.

This new version improves performance for large lists, corrects bugs when you have angled brackets (“<” and “>”) in your row or columns, adds support for site column lookups and a 2 new features.

Sort by Title or Total

The new version of PivotPoint allows you to sort by both the Title and Total rows, either ascending or descending.

Title and Total cells

For example, instead of sorting alphabetically by product you can sort by their total sales – showing your best performing products at the top of the table or left of the chart.

PivotPoint showing all columns

More details are in the online manual.

Show Top N

In combination with sorting by the Total you can choose to show the Top N columns or rows.

For example given the following data the vast majority of revenue comes from 2 products (Bottle-o-matic and Can-o-Matic) and we have a ‘Long Tail’ of other products.

We can choose to only display the top 2 columns (products) and optionally group all the other sales into “Other”

PivotPoint for SharePoint showing top 2 columns

 More details are in the online manual.

You can download and upgrade to the latest version without losing any settings.

SPrello – an open source UI for SharePoint 2010 inspired by trello.com

Date:February 14th, 2012 Author: Category: General Comments:0 ;

Even with all the fancy project management and collaboration tools available I bet most offices still rely to some extent on the more traditional methods – white boards and post it notes!

Last year Fog Creek Software released very swish app called Trello that aims to move these post-it notes into the 21st century.

“Trello is an online collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.”

As we use SharePoint for much of our day to day collaboration (no surprise there) I wondered if a similar interface could be made for SharePoint?

Hence SPrello was born. It’s pretty basic (at the moment) and will likely never have the real time features of Trello but I hope it can be useful and as it’s an open source project you can adapt and build upon it to fit your requirements.

It’s been released as an open source project on Codeplex http://sprello.codeplex.com

  • SharePoint 2010 sandbox web part
  • EMCAScript Client Object Modell
  • JQuery/JQueryUI libraries

If you find it useful please come back here and let us know how you’re using it!

Date Range filtering with the new version of FilterPoint, PivotPoint and Planner.

Date:December 13th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: Calculated Columns, Filter, FilterPoint Web Part, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

FilterPoint has had the ability to send Date Filters but a common request has been Date Ranges – like showing everything this month, last year or between two arbitrary dates.

FilterPoint - Date Range Filtering

The good news is that we’ve added this in to FilterPoint as of version 1.2

The bad news is that this will only work with our other SharePoint products – Planner and PivotPoint – it won’t work with SharePoints built in List View web part (LVWP).

That’s disappointing!

Yes it is – it’s just a limitation of SharePoints filtering I am afraid, but all is not lost!

This page shows how you can do things like Month filtering using calculated columns and this blog article shows how you can setup “Current Month/Previous Month” views using nothing more than Calculated Columns and View filters.

Upgrading

As always you can upgrade without losing any settings by downloading and running the latest trial version and selecting “Upgrade” when prompted (don’t forget you need the a recent version of Planner (v2.6.9+) and PivotPoint (2.2.0+) to accept date range filters.

Word wrapping SharePoint list column headers

Date:June 23rd, 2011 Author: Category: General Comments:20 ;

A customer for our Highlighter product recently asked us how you could modify SharePoints List View Web Part (LVWP) to word wrap column headers. He had found that as he had replaced lengthy text with status icons he could fit a lot more columns on the page – if only he could shrink the column headers down.

To be clear – this isn’t unique to lists using our Highlighter product, this example shows a basic SharePoint list with a long title that is causing a horizontal toolbar as it won’t word warp even though the column will only ever contain Yes or No.

Of course you could rename the column and shorted the name and put more information in the description – but that only appears on the Edit form so it’s a balancing act between being brief and giving enough info so everyone knows what the columns contains.

Anyway – how to make these columns word wrap?

Inspired by this post on Stack Exchange I looked at using Cascading Style Sheets to do this.

The property we need is white-space : normal

Then we need to figure out which parts of the html to apply it to. This is done by HTML classes, so taking into account SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and different column styles (number/text/filterable/non-filterable) we end up with.

<style type= "text/css">
.ms-vh, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{white-space: normal}
</style>

So the white-space property is applied to html elements with a class of .ms-vh, ms-vh2-nograd and so on.

We could also make the column headers center aligned and red (just for an example) by putting in

<style type="text/css">
.ms-vh, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{white-space: normal;
text-align:center; 
vertical-align:text-bottom;}
</style>

So how do we add these styles to the page?

You can use SharePoint Designer, but perhaps the easiest way is to add it via a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP)

  • Go to your list.
  • Select Site Actions > Edit Page
  • Click “Add a web part”
SharePoint 2007 SharePoint 2010
  • Select Miscellaneous > Content Editor Web Part
  • Click “open tool pane” then “Source Editor”
  • Add in the CSS from above
  • Select Media and Content > Content Editor
  • Select “Click here to add new content”
  • On the ribbon select Html > Edit HTML Source
  • Add in the CSS.

And – word wrapping :-

If this doesn’t work for you then as with all things ‘code’ exact syntax is important so check everything carefully – a “ is not the same as a ” for example. Also be sure that you’ve put the CSS in the HTML Source area, not just directly into the rich text editor.

You can add lots more effects (Red, bold etc) but sometimes its hard figuring out exactly what html elements and classes to target (e.g. you can’t apply a colour to the .ms-vh table header, you’ve got to apply it to an anchor element inside this – so “.ms-vh a”) – Firebug, the IE developer tools or the Chrome equivalent are invaluable for this – they will save your sanity!

ViewRescue for SharePoint 2010 – Updated!

Date:March 30th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Free Tools, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

View Rescue

We’ve recently updated our free ViewRescue tool for SharePoint 2010 to version 1.1.2

This latest version will now work with customized Master Page templates, as long as you have an “AdditionalPageHead” control in your template.

See our website for the latest version (you can install this over the top of the existing version to upgrade) and details about this free tool  that fixes a common annoyance in SharePoint 2010.