This is one of the most common questions posed in SharePoint forums.
SharePoint built in Alerts are one of the best used features of the system – but also one of the most problematic. There are just so many different ways they can go wrong! And when they do go wrong the internet advice available on how to put them right is very fragmented and often confusing. All manner of suggestions come up – many of then not appropriate to the particular problem the user is having.
Its very easy using the Filter feature of SharePoint views to show only items completed in the last 30 days or items due in the next X days; for example :-
Completed >= [Today]-30
On the Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques post Ed asked how you could filter for the current calendar month rather than a rolling 30 day period (for example all tasks due this calendar month).
Like all great questions it seemed simple enough – something like only showing items where the Month and Year of the due date = the Month and Year of the current date.
Victor from New York asked
Is there a way to configure a Reminder webpart to send an email when task item status in the task list is set to “completed”?
Sure there is!
In this case the trick is to use a SharePoint Views to filter out the tasks you are interested in.
There are some scenarios where you could setup Reminder to generate emails alerts in a simple workflow scenario such as such as when a Task is completed, a helpdesk ticket is closed, a company announcement is made, a vacation request or expenses claim is approved and so on.
When you first set up this kind of reminder, an email alert for any records already in this state (e.g. completed tasks) will also be sent and some of these could be quite old, so you could end up sending quite a lot of “old” reminder emails.
If you want to avoid sending emails for these old records you have 2 options:
This also gives you the opportunity to double check that everything is setup correctly.
For example you could filter to show only records with an ID > a recent ID.
Or you could add filter to show only records Created after a certain date.
Tip – All records in SharePoint have an ID and its sequential and automatically generated. To find the id you can show the ID column in your view or see the ID in the URL in your browser address bar.
There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.
With Planner you can show multiple columns in the Category or on the Timeline of a Gantt chart by using a calculated column to merge fields together.
For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-
=[Priority] & " : " & [Title]
You can merge multiple columns together, for example :-
=[Priority] & " : " & [Title] & " - " & [Assigned To]
You can also use SharePoint standard functions and formula (many similar to excel) such as :-
=Text([Start Time],"mmm-yyyy") " : " & [Title]
Which would prefix the Title with Month and year, like so October-2009 : Your title here
To display the the duration in days you could use
=DATEDIF([Start Time],[End Time],"d") & " Days"
Tristan asked in another post
“When a calendar event is being created, I want the end date/time to automatically populate to 1.5 hours after the start date/time. Seems simple, but haven’t found a formula for this yet”
Sounds like a pretty reasonable suggestion and the Calendar lists NewForm.asx already sets the Start time to the current time – shouldn’t be too hard, right?…
