It’s all too easy to say that a piece of software is “intuitive” or “Quick and Easy” to use. But what’s quick and easy for me could quite possibly be mind bogglingly slow and tricky for you.

So to show you just how quick and easy it really is to set up dynamic Pivot charts and tables in SharePoint using PivotPoint web part we have produced a 4 minute video demo which walks you through the set up.

The video:

• walks you through setting up a pivot chart from SharePoint list data,
• shows you how the chart or table you have created provides a drill-down to a filtered view of your list data, and
• shows you how your charts and tables update dynamically as you list data changes.

Take a look and if you think you could make use of PivotPoint on your SharePoint site why not try it out with a 30 day free trial.

Eagerly awaited v2 of PivotPoint web part for SharePoint is now available for you to try, or buy.

We think you’re going to like this one.

Some of you will be familiar with PivotPoint already; it lets you summarize complex SharePoint list data by creating Pivot Tables.  These update dynamically, as your list data changes. So they are great to use in dashboards for things like keeping an eye on how sales are going, keeping tabs on how your helpdesk is performing, seeing who’s taking way too much sick leave.

People in the finance sector and statisticians have always been really keen on PivotPoint; they understand how useful Pivot Tables are and feel right at home looking at rows of figures all day.  For the rest of us  a nice colourful chart tends to make things easier to understand at a glance, so that’s what we have added to PivotPoint version 2.

As well as creating Pivot Tables, which are linked directly to your SharePoint list data and therefore update automatically as your list data changes, you can also create Pivot Charts, which are also linked directly to the list.  You can choose bar charts, line charts, column charts, funnels, pies – the world’s your oyster!  Color code as you wish, and if you want the visualisation and the detail you can display a chart and a table together.

Another advantage of having the web part directly connected to the list is that we have been able to include drill down, from the chart or table, to a filtered view of the list.  So for example when I am looking at my “Sales by Product, This Month”, chart, I will be able to hover over the enormous, sky rocketing column which represents this month’s sales for PivotPoint version 2, click on it, and go directly to a list view showing just the sales records for all the people who have bought PivotPoint this month – how cool is that?

The new version also has other handy features, like export to excel, so that you can do more analysis on your figures if needed, and easy printing, because we know SharePoint generally isn’t all that print friendly.

If you are an existing customer you can upgrade to v2 without disrupting any of your existing settings.

If you’re not a customer yet, well what are you waiting for?  Take a free trial and see what your SharePoint deployment is missing!

We have just released v1.3.8 of SharePoint Highlighter.

As well as fixing a couple of little bugs, the main advantage of the new version is improved speed and performance.

When we released Highlighter we had looked at its performance on very long lists, ensuring even with number of Highlighter’s visual enhancements applied long lists still loaded and refreshed quickly.

But when we thought about how people would use Highlighter we envisaged them using maybe 2 or 3 Highlighter columns on a list, certainly no more than 10.

What we have found is that quite a number of customers are using far more Highlighter columns on one list than we had ever expected – over 20 in some cases. Having this many Highlighter columns applied to the list was slowing things down.

So for the new release we have worked on performance, so that now you can use just about as many Highlighter columns as you wish on one list and still maintain good levels of speed and performance.

You can download the new version of Highlighter here.

For those of you who, like use, are wondering how you could possibly use over 20 Highlighter columns on one list, the examples we have seen so far seem to be around multiple status indicators. Next week Stuart will post an example use case, showing the kind of scenario where multiple Highlighter columns might be sueful.

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-nofilter, .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-nofilter, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{
white-space: normal;
text-align:center; 
vertical-align:text-bottom;
color:red;
}
</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”

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!

Calculated columns are a really useful feature of any SharePoint list.

Whether you want to automatically show the profit on a sale, or the financial year that a date falls in to, or tidy up sloppy user input by capitalising names.  There is a lot you can do it with a Calculated Column.

But remembering the formulas and functions needed is not always easy, especially before the first coffee of the morning.  I know there is a way to get rid of the decimal places on a number but is it TRUN, or TRUNC, or TRUNK – oh no, hang on, that last one is just to do with elephants!

So, over the years we’ve gathered together a quick reference of some of the most commonly used functions and formulas – stuck on a wall above the desk it saves a lot of time and head scratching.  We’ve found ourselves sending it to clients from time to time, and they seem to find it quite handy too.

So we decided to tidy it up – clean off the coffee stains and make a nice PDF of it – and make it available to download, free – yes that’s right, FREE!

So why not download our free Calculated Column Cheat Sheet and save yourself some time and headaches?  This easy 3 page reference sheet gives you a selection of commonly used calculated column formulas, along with a pretty thorough reference of most of the functions and operators you are likely to need in your day to day work.

Download, print, stick it on the wall, and we hope you find it as handy as we do!

SharePoint Workflows are one of the magic parts of the solution – the bits when even the most cynical and sceptical end user gets to see the benefit.

Instead of emails and bits of paper flying round your organization, getting lost, forgotten and falling between the cracks, everything is managed and driven centrally by SharePoint.

There are a whole load of scenarios where you could use workflows:

• Vacation approvals
• Expense claims
• Purchase order Authorisation
• Timesheet approvals
• Invoice payment approvals
• Helpdesk escalations

SharePoint can handle all of these processes seamlessly and automatically.  Seeking appropriate approvals, escalating, notifying, referring back and reminding as needed, whilst keeping all documentation secure in one central location.

So, that’s the upside.  The downside is that to create a SharePoint workflow you need to use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.  Whilst SharePoint Designer isn’t all that hard to master it is a very powerful tool and capable of doing serious damage in the wrong hands, for this reason many organizations keep it looked firmly away from most users.  Visual Studio on the other hand really is hard to master – strictly for the mega-brains in your IT department.  So this means that cooking up a bit of Workflow magic out of the box is out of the question for most SharePoint users.

The alternative is to use SharePoint Reminder to create your SharePoint workflows. Using SharePoint Reminder and some clever filtered list views you can easily create multi stage workflows to cover any of the scenarios listed above.

This use case walks you through how to create a 2 stage supplier invoice approval workflow, using SharePoint Reminder and a standard SharePoint document library.

Reminder only drives simple workflow, it doesn’t have the advanced logic of SharePoint OTTB Workflows and it won’t do things like automatically updating lists or other systems.  But for a lot of your day to day processes, you might find that it does just what you need.

If you’ve got a list containing important dates (such as the above example), it’s very useful to be able to easily see how long is left before that date, or how long since it has passed. Unfortunately basing a calculated column on the current date isn’t supported by SharePoint natively, as discussed in my previous article: How to use [Today] in a SharePoint list

So how can we work around this shortcoming without having to wave signs and shout outside Microsoft’s offices? The are a few options available to us:

• JavaScript: Use a Content Editor Web Part.
• Designer: Create a custom view in SharePoint Designer.
• Code: Make your own custom field type from scratch.
• SharePoint Highlighter: Buy our custom field type.

JavaScript

Since SharePoint is so uncooperative about using the current date on the server side (i.e. with a calculated column), we can wait until the information gets to our browser and fix it there with JavaScript.

We can get JavaScript onto a page using a Content Editor Web Part, which is added just like any other web part. Christophe at Path to SharePoint has put together a script that displays the date difference on hover, that can be modified slightly to display just the countdown: Countdowns – A second method

Adding a CEWP to each page your list is displayed on can become quite arduous if it’s displayed in a lot of places. In addition to this, information in a CEWP is quite vulnerable to accidental edits, as they are accessible to any user that can edit page content.

Designer

SharePoint Designer is a free and powerful tool from Microsoft for customizing SharePoint. Unfortunately, because it can do so much, its use is often frowned upon by site administrators (and sometimes even banned).

If you’re lucky enough to be allowed to use it, then (in an unusual twist) Christophe may once again be the person to look to. In a break from his many and various JavaScript solutions he’s put together a Designer solution for this problem too: A countdown for tasks lists

As with the JavaScript solution above, the Designer changes will have to be made on each view web part you want to see the countdown on, but fortunately the changes can only be overridden by someone else using Designer, or an administrator.

Code

If you already have the backbone of a custom field type coded, then adding the XSLT to display this in 2010 should be reasonably straightforward. Alternatively this can be done within the custom field type class.

If you’re using 2007, then CAML rendering unfortunately fails you here, and it’s necessary to use a JavaScript workaround in one form or another.

Creating a custom field type from scratch for this sole purpose is probably going to be remarkably costly (in terms of time). Actually making the foundations of a custom field type is a bit of an investment, but thankfully Microsoft has put together a walkthrough to at least help you get started.

The benefit of using this method is that columns created from a field type are displayed on every page without having to add any additional code to the page itself.

SharePoint Highlighter

Of course, it is possible to get all the benefits of a custom field type with much less pain: Buy a commercial solution.

If you have a glance at out handy product comparison, you can see the wealth of products we managed to find that offer this functionality. So far that grand total is… One: SharePoint Highlighter.

So if you’re looking for a commercial solution it looks like we’re the only option. If you know otherwise then please do tell us; but for the time being we’ll cheerfully carry on being the front-runner in this one horse race.

Whether you call it a KPI, an Indicator, or a Data Visualization Asset, the chances are that you immediately understand the purpose of the icons in the picture above. The beauty of adding icons to a list is harnessing this instant recognition to make your users work more efficiently with their data.

So how do we add icons to our list? This depends very much on how complex and configurable you want he results to be, so let me give you a run down of the options:

Do It Yourself

• JavaScript: Do the work on the client-side with a Content Editor Web Part
• Designer: Customise the list view using SharePoint Designer
• Download: Download an open source Custom Field Type
• Code: Create a custom field type from scratch

Buy It

• Enterprise Edition: Use the Out of The Box Enterprise Edition functionality
• Buy: Buy a pre-made Custom Field Type

JavaScript

By adding a Content Editor Web Part to each page you want the icon to display on, you can add JavaScript that will insert icons once the page has been rendered.

Christophe at Path to SharePoint uses his signature HTML Calculated Column to do most of the hard work in his article: Apply color coding to your SharePoint lists. In this instance JavaScript is used solely to render the HTML correctly, as SharePoint renders the output of calculated columns as text normally.

Designer

If you don’t mind spending a little time dabbling with SharePoint Designer, and you can convince your Site Administrator you’re probably not going to do anything too damaging; then Microsoft’s free tool may be the solution for you.

Toni Frankola has risked the wrath of Microsoft and written an article on how to use Designer reproduce Enterprise edition’s KPI columns without having to upgrade: Visual Indicators for the Masses: KPIs in WSS.

As with the JavaScript solution, you’ll have to make this change on every page you want to see the icons on.

Download

If you’re and end-user looking for a quick solution, or a developer interested in further developing an existing Custom Field Type, then the IconSet CodePlex project may be of interest to you.

I have enormous respect for those that donate their efforts to the community, such as the developers of this project. Unfortunately open source developers often have a day job and other commitments, so expecting rapid free support from them can be a tall order.

Code

It’s entirely possible to create a Custom Field Type yourself. This is by far the most time-consuming of the options listed on this page, and hence also probably one of the most expensive. However, if you want to avoid some of the initial investment, you could use the IconSet CodePlex project mentioned above as a good starting point (or reference guide).

Fortunately, as the icons are directly rendered onto the page you can avoid the majority of the JavaScript rendering problems I mentioned in How to do list highlighting in SharePoint. If you also avoid [Today] then you can avoid some of the related trouble.

A benefit of all three of the Custom Field Type options is that the results are shown wherever the column is shown in a view, avoiding page-by-page additions.

Enterprise Edition

SharePoint Enterprise edition allows you to add KPI information to your site, along with many other additional features. If you’re working with Enterprise edition then take a look at Mark Miller’s article: KPIs for the Masses.

Since use of this functionality is prolific and directly supported by Microsoft it’s very a good option for those that have this version of SharePoint. Unfortunately the functionality isn’t available to those working with Foundation or Standard edition.

Buy

Many companies don’t have Enterprise edition, and feel that upgrading solely to use the KPI functionality is perhaps not the best use of resources. As a result, the functionality has been reproduced by a great many products (not least our own: SharePoint Highlighter).

Because we have our own product in this area, we’ve created a product comparison to demonstrate the available functionality, and associated cost.

Quite frequently we see questions about using the current date to display messages on a list when a date or time is (or will soon be) overdue. Most of these queries are from frustrated users who are trying to use [Today] in a calculated column, but find it missing.

I’ll quickly outline why this option is missing from calculated columns, and hence why the notorious [Today] trick is quite so controversial. But most importantly, I’ll run you through ways to actually display the information you want.

Why is [Today] missing from calculated columns?

When we look at a SharePoint list, the vast majority of us are instantly reminded of Excel (or Grandfather Excel, if you prefer). Because of this we quite reasonably expect it to act like Excel, and hence expect it to reconsider every formula and data item on the page each time we view it.

Unfortunately because of the much larger amount of information SharePoint has to pass back and forth, it takes a different approach to updating the data items. It will only update calculated values when the related item is added or edited.

Consider SharePoint as an overworked secretary; if you ask for a file to be updated they’ll find it in the filing cabinet, update the information, and correct anything else that’s awry on the paperwork while they’re there. If you ask for all the files for people named “Smith” to be put on your desk, unless you specifically say “And update the information on every single one while you’re at it”, it’s not likely they’ll do the extra work for no reason.

Because of this change in records-keeping, Microsoft had to skip functionality that would make this lower-maintenance updating method obvious. Since having a [Today] option would cause unedited items to go out of date every day, they had to leave it out. The [Me] option was another casualty, as it would require checking the current user every time the data was displayed.

So how do we get our files updated without further flustering our imaginary secretary? There are several options:

• JavaScript: Use a Content Editor Web Part. Also known as “Do it yourself.”.
• Designer: Create a custom view in SharePoint Designer. “Ask the secretary really nicely”.
• Code: Make your own custom field type from scratch. “Get your own team to do it”.
• SharePoint Highlighter: Our own solution to the problem. “Hire an extra secretary”.

JavaScript

Of course there’s always a JavaScript solution, and this one in particular from Paul Grenier uses jQuery to help with the process. This will mean adding the jQuery libraries to your site, and it’s also necessary to add a Content Editor Web Part to each page you want the feature to work on.

A little JavaScript knowledge will probably be necessary to make it fit your requirements, and as with any code tweaking, the more you know the better the result will be.

Designer

SharePoint Designer is a free and powerful (and hence often banned) tool from Microsoft for modifying your SharePoint site. Using Designer it’s possible to alter a view so that it uses Today when rendering the data on the page. This done by modifying the view’s XSLT (the template the view uses to decide what data goes where).

If you’d like a dabble to test the water of such changes, MSDN has a nice tutorial on how to get started.

However, if you already have some experience with Designer (or you’d like to just jump straight in), Greg Osimowicz has an article on using Today in XSLT to calculate holidays accrued to date (scroll down to “Below are the steps I followed:”).

Code

There are a number of possible different methods to solving this problem using a custom field type. As always this comes with my standard disclaimer that developing a custom field type from scratch for a single purpose requires a disproportionate investment of time for the results.

In 2010 it’s possible to do the calculations in the custom field type class (with some light persuasion), however this is not possible with 2007 as it does not use the class to render its information on list views.

Unfortunately not even CAML can save us in this instance, as the View Schema doesn’t provide the current date in a usable form. But if you’re using 2010 you may be able to create a workaround with XSLT and Greg’s Designer XSLT solution in the section above.

The last option is to use the field type to get JavaScript onto the page instead of using a CEWP. This has the benefit that you don’t need to put the CEWP on each page, but as I mentioned in my previous article it can be very troublesome to do so: How to do list highlighting in SharePoint

SharePoint Highlighter

Normally this is the section where I’d talk about the benefits of a commercial solution, and try to avoid mentioning SharePoint Highlighter too much (I might even link to our product comparison page). However, it’s very difficult to talk in general terms about commercial products on the market that have this functionality when yours is the only one that does.

So I’m not going to beat around the bush: If you want to buy a commercial solution to change your list view display based on today’s date, then SharePoint Highlighter is the only (and hence best) solution. It does much more than just this, but I’m not going to blow my trumpet too much.

If you want to see a real life problem and its solution using SharePoint Highlighter; have a look at this SharePoint Overflow question.

Lists can often look a little bland, and attempting to impatiently skim read them can often lead to missing important information. This is why a bit of well-placed color can really help users with their day-to-day work.

In my last post How to create a progress bar in SharePoint I covered the various methods of displaying a progress bar on your SharePoint list view. For this article I’m going to do the same for row and cell highlighting, as I’ve spent a rather considerable time wrestling with this particular feature in SharePoint Highlighter:

Client based

• JavaScript: Put some JavaScript code into a Content Editor Web Part
• Designer: Use SharePoint Designer to set up Conditional Formatting

Custom Field Type

• Code it yourself: Make your own custom field type from scratch
• Buy: Purchase a pre-made solution

JavaScript

If you need a free solution that doesn’t require farm administrator permissions, then using JavaScript in a Content Editor Web Part may be the solution for you. As always with this method, Christophe at Path to SharePoint has a great example.

Alternatively, there’s a slightly off-topic walkthrough by Boris Gomiunik which avoids having to use an HTML calculated column. It has a great deal of useful information, and would only require minor tweaking to do cell or row coloring instead of text.

The JavaScript and CEWP method should avoid having to trouble your IT department to make the change, which I’m almost certain you’ll both be happy about.

Although you’ll have to implement the CEWP on every page you want the highlighting to display (which may cause your view drop-down to disappear), you may not have to copy the full JavaScript into every CEWP, as discussed in my previous article’s comments.

Designer

If you’re lucky enough to have a generous (or inattentive) IT department, you may be able to use SharePoint Designer; a free tool from Microsoft. SharePoint Designer allows you to add Conditional Formatting to your list views in a manner very similar to Excel. This has to be added to each of the views you want to see the highlighting on.

You’ll need a little time to become familiar with Designer, and to set it up for your needs, but once you have done so it can be a powerful tool. Unfortunately it is often regarded by administrators as a dangerous tool for this very reason.

There’s a useful step-by-step guide to setting up conditional formatting in SPD 2010 by Frederique Harmsze at Macaw, and a more straight-laced 2007 version on the Microsoft Office site.

Code

Creating a custom field type to perform highlighting on a list view is in many ways like trying to type on a keyboard on the other side of a crowded the room with a pole (which sometimes gets stolen by the janitor if you leave it out overnight). That might be a slight exaggeration, but it is very awkward.

This is mostly because there is no way to programmatically interact with the row and cell color from server-side code (the distance across the room in my analogy). So you’ll need to get JavaScript onto the page in order to do the highlighting (the metaphorical pole).

The crowd represents SharePoint’s own JavaScript (all 0.5MB of it), which may interfere with yours; an example of this would be the use of AJAX to render Group By views.

Finally, SharePoint seems to passive-aggressively object to script elements, and silently removes them from HTML text stored in the database; the metaphorical janitor. This can be worked around by rendering using XSL (in 2010) or CAML (in 2007).

Buy

If you want to avoid the unpredictable cost of time spent creating a solution, then you’re better off paying the money up front for a pre-made solution. As a bonus it won’t be you that has to test it to death or maintain and support it.

By some enormous coincidence, we happen to have recently released a product called SharePoint Highlighter that can do this kind of highlighting very easily. Of course, there are other similar products on the market, which we’ve listed on this handy comparison matrix.