Highlighter allows you to easily apply conditional formatting to your SharePoint lists.

A customer recently asked us how to find out where it had been used (which sites, lists and columns).

We wrote this Powershell script to do just that – but it can be adapted to find any custom field type (or even built in fields with certain attributes like name & type).

Note – it’s commonly suggested on the ‘internets to use the SPField.ListFieldUsedIn method but that will only find where a Site Column has been added to a List, not where a custom field has been directly put into a List column. (see an explanation of the difference between Site Columns and List Columns)

You can download the script here – unzip and open in a text editor for instructions.

Run it from the SharePoint Administration Shell with the URL of your site – e.g.

.\FindWhereHighligherUsed.ps1 https://yoursiteurl/

And it will search all sub-sites and lists and return any fields that use Highlighter :-

New versions of PivotPoint (v4.1.2) and TeamTime (v4.1) are available that replace Adobe Flash based charts with HTML5/JavaScript charts using the ChartJS library.

Adobe Flash is set to be discontinued at the end of 2020 and major browsers like Chrome already require permission to enable Flash each time the browser is restarted in an effort to speed up the move away from Flash to alternative technologies.

The JavaScript charts will be used automatically on SharePoint 2013 and above (but you can switch back to Flash if you wish).

Internet Explorer (even IE11) do not support HTML5 when running with SharePoint 2007 and 2010 so they will continue to use Flash on these old versions of SharePoint. If you are using other browsers like Chrome or Firefox with older versions of SharePoint you can override this to force it to use JavaScript charts on these older versions of SharePoint too.

You can upgrade by simply installing over the top – your settings will be saved. (As with all SharePoint installations please do this out of hours)

NOTE – you may need a new license key issuing if you currently have an older major version (e.g. anyting less than v4.x). This is included if you have an active Premium Support and Maintenance agreement in place. If you are unsure please check with us!

Reminder 365 is our add in for SharePoint Online / Office 365 that allows you to add date based (due and overdue) and customisable email alerts.

A number of customers have asked for the ability to hide the “View Item” link in the emails that Reminder 365 sends out :-

You can now choose not to show this column by un-checking the Include a ‘View Item’ link in the email option.

It’s a common problem when IT systems are implemented that we give little thought to End Users and they are expected to just ‘figure it out as you go along’.

I think it’s particularly acute for software like SharePoint as it’s a huge, complex product and can be used in so many different ways.

There is a huge amount of information available for Developers, Administrators and Power Users – but surprisingly little aimed at End Users.

So to help we’ve partnered with ClipTraining.com – one of the leading providers of online training videos for software products – to bring you a totally free training course for SharePoint 2013.

We were particularly impressed with ClipTraining’s approach of breaking down each course into short to-the-point task based videos – this allows you to work through the whole syllabus or jump into specific areas when you ‘just need to get something done’.

Free? What’s the catch?

None!

You have to register by the end of March – you can then use the online training as much as you want until the end of 2016.

Pentalogic and ClipTraining will receive your registration details but we are committed to treating you fairly. We won’t rent, sell or disclose this to anyone else and we will not bombard you with emails!

Register Now!

Help us spread the word!

If you think this is useful then please help us spread the word.

• How about that colleague who is new to SharePoint?
• Tweet to your followers.
• Someone asking a question in a forum who needs a helping hand?

About ClipTraining

ClipTraining’s eLearning library includes training videos for the full Office suite (Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, OneNote, Publisher, Visio) as well as Windows 10, Skype for Business, Yammer and OneDrive.

Everyone is sure to learn something new about the tool they use every day – increasing productivity and saving hours of work.

Included are ClipTraining’s convenient administrative tools to track user activity, and easily organize and manage your entire team’s learning.

Purchase for individuals for just pennies a day – or get access for your whole organisation to slash your training and helpdesk budgets.

We helped a custom recently with an interesting SharePoint question – how to identify if a List item is new or has been modified? In addition they also needed to be able to setup a View to show only New items and another to show Modified items.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our TeamTime application includes some built in Analysis and Report pages and also allows you to create your own custom reports.

For more advanced custom reports then you can always run reports on the raw data to the tool of your choice using the Extensibility lists.

An example of where you may want to do this is if you want assign a different hourly rate per Project or Task (TeamTime only has the option of 1 rate per user).

One option is to use Microsoft Excel and this walkthrough will show you how to do that.

Read the rest of this entry »

A fairly common SharePoint question is how to deal with the Yes/No field type (technically known as Boolean fields) when using Calculated Columns.

Typically you may want to do something like change Yes/No to something else for display purposes – for example if the fields is for Important you could put “VIP” or blank in a View instead.

What does NOT work?

If we assume the Yes/No field is called “Important” then here are some of the formula that WILL NOT work

=IF([Important]="True","VIP","")

The reason is that you’re working with a Boolean field under the hood so TRUE is a special key word and TRUE is not the same as “TRUE” which is a string with the letters T, R, U and E in.

(I show my wife examples like this when she wants to know why computer programmers are so pedantic!)

These also fail :-

=IF([Important]="Yes","VIP","")

=IF([Important]=1,"VIP","")

So what does work?

So what you can use instead is (note NO quotes!)

=IF([Important]=TRUE,"VIP","")

The opposite is of course

=IF([Important]=FALSE,"Not a VIP","A VIP")

You can also use this as a shorthand for =TRUE

=IF([Important],"VIP","")

For more tips on calculated columns be sure to check out our handy Calculated Column Cheat Sheet and other blog posts about SharePoint calculated columns and formulas.

Tip – for View Fitlers still use Yes or No (no quotes) – this is just for calculated column formula.

As with any technology a successfully SharePoint implementation relies just as much on the business and ‘softer’ user adoption skills as the technical aspects. Which is why I’ve always found it strange that there are huge amounts of great technical resources (books, examples, best-practices, blogs, conferences etc) but far less aimed at business and power users.

The free on-line SPBiz conference is going to balance this a little with its focus on the needs of SharePoint Business and Power Users. There is still some great technical content in there but the focus is on empowering the less technical audience with resources to get things done and make SharePoint a success.

Just some of the sessions at SPBiz!

• Create a GTD Dashboard in Office 365 to “Get Things Done”
• Want to use SharePoint for internal communications?
• Secrets of Successful SharePoint Intranets
• How to build a knowledge sharing culture
• Strategies to Deliver Successful Employee Portals
• Leverage SharePoint 2013 for Better Collaborative Project Management
• How to be productive with Office 365
• Change business processes into easy SharePoint workflows
• Find out about the best “no-code” solutions for SharePoint
• SharePoint Governance 101

June 17th and 18th – Free and Online.

Register Today for free or browse the Agenda for Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th.

New versions of Planner, PivotPoint and TeamTime are available that correct an incompatibility with Google Chrome v43+.

This incompatibility can cause the web part to be hidden when using the web part configuration toolpane (edit web part).

As Google Chrome is automatically updated it’s important that any customers who use Chrome update to the latest version.

You can download the latest trial version and upgrade by installing over the top – your existing settings will be saved and the License Key picked up to activate the full version.

• Plannner – v2.8.9
• PivotPoint – v2.4.8
• TeamTime – v2.1.3

Google have controversially removed a feature (showModalDialog) from Chrome v37+ that has been included in most browsers since 1994 and is still part of the HTML5 specification.

This has caused problems with lots of web applications including companies internally developed apps, ‘3rd party apps’ and Microsoft products like Outlook Web Access, Dynamics and of course SharePoint.

TeamTime (our timesheet app for SharePoint) has been effected by this too as we use SharePoints built in People Picker control in the Timesheet to allow you to view other users timesheets (if you’ve got the right permissions).

With Google Chrome v37 and above it will open up the people picker and let you select an individual, but when you click OK it won’t update the main page.

This is actually due to a bug in SharePoint 2010 and you can see the same problem if you edit a normal “Person or Group” field like the Assigned To field in any task list.

Interestingly (to us nerds anyway!) it works fine if the Edit Form opens as a dialog, but won’t work if it opens up full screen (which will happen if you right click Open In New Window, click on an edit link in an email or turn of Launch forms in a dialog in List Settings > Advanced Settings).

Edit Form opens in dialog – people picker will work OK.

Edit Form opened full screen, SharePoint 2010 people picker will not work in Google Chrome v37 or above

This isn’t something we can fix – the problem is a bug in Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 javascript code which has been triggered by Google’s change to Chrome.

Nerd Alert – The bug is in init.js, function commonShowModalDialog. At the end of the function (in the branch that runs if showModalDialog is not available) you have the line

               if (window.frameElement != null)
                              window.fndlgClose = d

Where d is the ‘callback’ function to run when the user selects a person. The test if (window.frameElement != null) means this is only ran if its running in an iFrame – hence it working if the edit form opens up in a ‘popup’ itself.

What are my options?

• Stop using Chrome in favour of another browser.
• Temporarily use a registry hack to turn showModalDialog back on (but this will only work until the end of April 2015)
• Upgrade to SharePoint 2013 (this only happens on SharePoint 2010, not 2007 or 2013)
• Wait until either Microsoft fix this or Google come to their senses.