Posts Tagged ‘filters’

How to Create a SharePoint “Does Not Begin With” Filtered List View

Date:September 9th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: Calculated Columns, Filter Comments:6 ;

Wonderful though SharePoint is most of the time, occasionally it just lets you down at the most unexpected moment.

So, last week, I wanted to look at a list of all of our sales that were not made to organizations in the USA.

Simple I thought, since all our sale reference numbers start with a 3 letter country code I shall just create a view for all records where Reference Number does not begin with “USA”

So, create a new view, off we go:

Oh dear, we have an option for “begins with” and “contains” but nothing for “does not begin with” or “does not contain”. How disappointing!

So, quick call to Ryan, the king of the calculated column, and we have a handy workaround which seemed worth sharing with you.

Create a calculated column using the following formula which will just display the first 3 letters of the reference code – call it something like “First 3 letters”.

=LEFT([Reference Number],3)

Then create a view with a filter:

WHERE “First 3 Letters” “Is not equal to” “USA”

Easy as that!

You can use this method to create a view for:

  • Does not begin with
  • Does not end with (using the RIGHT instead of LEFT function)

“Does not contain” is a tad more complicated but can be achieved by using the SEARCH function. So in our example

SEARCH("USA",[Reference #],1)

Will return the first position of USA in an entry in the Reference Number field, or an error if it can’t be found.

So combining this calculated column:

=ISERR(SEARCH("USA",[Reference #],1))

Which gives “Yes” where it returns an error ( “does not contain”) and “No” where “USA” is found, with a filtered view with shows only “Yes” results, will give you records which do not contain USA.

See our Calculated Column Cheat Sheet for these and other useful formulas.

Hope this helps, and if you have any suggestions for other calculated column ninja moves we would love to hear them.

SharePoint FilterPoint New Version Release; now with personal defaults

Date:February 22nd, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: Filter, FilterPoint Web Part, General Comments:0 ;

We’ve just released a new version (v1.1.3) of our FilterPoint web part for SharePoint. We have had plenty of user feedback over the past few weeks and this new version has some added features and functionality that we hope you will all find useful.

As you know, FilterPoint already gives you the ability to set default values globally, to help get users to the most relevant information quickly.

And now new functionality in v1.1.3 will help each user get to their own individual information more quickly too.

There are 2 ways FilterPoint does this.  First by re-loading the last used filter values when you revisit a page.  And secondly by looking for FilterPoints on different pages that filter on the same fields, and getting them to fetch records with the same values.

So how could this help you?

Well, let’s take the example of 2 national sales account managers.  Freda’s biggest client is Big Corp and Sophie’s most important customer is Enormous Inc.  They each want to know what is going on with their key accounts on a daily basis.

So Freda and Sophie both look at dashboards that show sales activity, financial account status, cases and help tickets etc.  Freda always filters to see the stuff on Big Corp and Sophie always filters to see what’s happening with Enormous Inc.

Because FilterPoint will now save filter values between visits to a page each account manager will see information on her main client account as soon as she opens a page – so long as that was the last thing she looked at when she last visited the page.

Even better, once one FilterPoint is set up to filter for “Client = Big Corp” by Sophie, all other FilterPoints on the site will also look for information on “Client = Big Corp” and display this for Sophie, so long as this field and value exist in the lists and web parts they have been applied to.

These two new features should be a real time saver for many users.

In addition, there are other new features in FilterPoint v1.1.3:

If you’re an existing customer or trial user you can download and upgrade to the latest version.

And if you haven’t yet tried FilterPoint why not download a 30 day free trial now?


FilterPoint Web Part – on sale now!

Date:January 27th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: Filter, General Comments:0 ;

After many months of work we are delighted to announce that FilterPoint is now available to purchase.

Filtering is one of the things that any serious SharePoint user is going to need to do at some point. As you put more data into SharePoint lists become longer and you will need a quick and easy way to get to the items you are looking for.

When you create applications and dashboards, bringing together information from different data sources and displaying it in different ways with Web Parts adding filters will make your applications and dashboards dynamic – giving users the information they need, when they need it.

But when you start filtering you are going to quickly come across things that you wish you could do with SharePoint’s built in filters, but frustratingly just can’t.

So in the same way that we built Reminder to improve on the functionality of SharePoint Alerts, and Planner to improve on Gantt charts and calendars, we have built FilterPoint to give a little more power to your SharePoint filtering.

If you are working with SharePoint 2010 Foundation or WSS your filtering options are limited to static filtered views. Filtered views are great for getting at data sets that you want to see regularly – like “this month’s sales” for example. Set the view up once and it’s there whenever you need it.

But what if you have 100 clients and want to be able to look at “this client’s sales” for any of them? Setting up a filtered view for each client, and navigating to it is going to be quite a drag.

With FilterPoint your filter can be set up in seconds, allowing users to flip between the different data sets they need with just a couple of clicks.

With MOSS and 2010 Enterprise you get more filter power. But we still felt there were some things missing. So for example even with MOSS filters you can’t:

  • Set up several Filters within one filter web part
  • In 2007, send many filters to one filter consumer list or Web Part (e.g. filter on both customer and product).
  • Use different styles of filter, like Free Text, drop down lists or Radio Buttons
  • Clear filters with a single click.

So even though MOSS offers more filtering options, there are still some significant gaps and we believe that FilterPoint goes a long way towards filling these.

Of course FilterPoint isn’t the only 3rd party filtering web part on the market and you can see how we match up to the competition by taking a look at our comparison chart here.

When we were looking at the competition one thing we noticed was that some of the most useful filter Web Parts – the ones offering the most functionality – were incredibly complex to set up. You would need the patience of a saint and a PhD in SharePoint (if such a thing existed!) So we have worked very hard to keep the setup of FilterPoint quick and simple. Take a look at our short on-line demo here, and let us know whether we have succeeded.

We’ve also tried to keep the prices competitive. Our Single Server License is $595.

And of course, like all of our products FilterPoint comes with a 30 day free trial and a no quibble money back guarantee.

And for existing customers we are offering a 25% discount for purchases made by 31st March 2011.  Email [email protected] for your discount code.

So why not give it a try today?

As FilterPoint is our new baby we are very keen to know what you think of it – so please let us have your comments and feedback.

Download free trial

FilterPoint Update

Date:November 30th, 2010 Author: Tags: , , , , ,
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint Development, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

We have spent a lot of time over the past month working on the beta version of FilterPoint. Our team of professional testers have been working hard to check for compatibility with all versions of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and a wide range of browsers, as well as looking for bugs and challenging us on some aspects of the usability of the UI.

And we also owe a huge vote of thanks to our beta volunteers who have been testing out the product in the real world.  Our volunteers and not only uncovered some bugs, but also come up with suggestions for additional things that we could include in the first release.  Some of these we have already added and they include:

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New SharePoint FilterPoint web part – public beta released

Date:November 1st, 2010 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

FilterPoint SharePoint webpartWell finally, after months of hard work we are delighted to be able to let you know that we have just released our new FilterPoint web part for SharePoint in beta.

FilterPoint has been a long time coming so we hope you are going to like it.  It’s a tool that we always knew we wanted to develop. Dynamic filtering  – the ability to flip between filter values at the click of a mouse – is one of the building blocks for the kinds of rich applications that our customers like to build for themselves.  It builds on the power of webpart connections (a much neglected area in SharePoint) and once you have the ability to apply a group of filters to a page with a selection of webparts and lists you have the potential for some really nice dashboards.

But, as I said FilterPoint has been a long time coming, because what started out looking like a straight forward project turned out to be anything but . . . .

It starts off looking ever so simple with plenty of online examples – but when you start delving into the details it quickly becomes the stereotypical “Can of Worms” project.

There are basically two interfaces you can use – one old IFilterProvider interface , and the new ITransformableFilterValues interface. So far sounds easy but how about some wildcards….

With the new ITransformableFilterValues interface – you can’t create filters dynamically,  and you can’t have multiple connections on the consumer side in SP 2007.

On the other hand, with the old IFilterProvider interface you can’t send multiple filter values to List view web parts and you can’t connect more than one provider web part to a consumer web part. And that’s just scratching the surface.

To top it all off you have little control over what the filter consumer web part actually does with the info you give it – want to say “Equals” or “Not Equals” or “Greater Than” etc and thats out of the scope of what a filter provider can do (we’ve got some ideas on how to work around this in a future version of FilterPoint though).

My oh my, enough to make your head spin!

FilterPoint Webpart, filtering optionsAnyway- we’ve worked really hard to make this web part as simple to use as possible whilst still being compatible with any web parts that can accept the standard web part connections.  We have managed to come up with a tool which allows you to apply multiple filters to multiple webparts and lists, and (at least when working with our Planner and PivotPoint) you can have some control over the operator – using “not equal”, “greater than” and “less than” as well as the standard “equals”.  We hope to extend this aspect of the functionality in v2.

So, why might you want to use this thing then?

Well, you might want to use simply it to guide your users to the most relevant data in one list or webpart – giving them the ability to “filter on the fly”, selecting new data sets, and then clearing filters in one click.

Or, at the other extreme, you might want to bring together a collection of lists and web parts on one page, and use FilterPoint to create a truly dynamic dashboard for your users.

In fact, once you start to use filters and webpart connections there are any number of different ways to enhance the functionality of your SharePoint site with a tool like FilterPoint – we already have it set up on our Sales Pipeline and Client lists here, and are finding more possible uses every day.

We are planning to have FilterPoint ready for full public release by the end of the month.  In the meantime, if you pre-register for your free trial, you will qualify for a 25% discount on the product purchase price.

We hope you like it, and as always, we are keen to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Filterpoint Download

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available

Date:June 14th, 2010 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

How annoying is it when you get reminded about something you have already done?  A little email saying:

“Can you please submit your expenses claim form by 12.00 noon today”

is just sooo annoying when actually you have been a good girl and done your expenses yesterday.

We get lots of support calls from SharePoint Reminder webpart users who have annoyed their team members in just this way – by sending our Reminder emails for tasks that have already been completed.

This is easy enough to do.  Reminder will look at the whole of a list unless you tell it to do something else.  So if you ask Reminder to send out an email for everyone who is tasked to complete their expenses claim form by 12.00 today that is exactly what it will do, regardless of whether the status of that task is “Active” or “Completed”.

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How To setup a SharePoint view filter to compare 2 list fields

Date:June 1st, 2010 Author: Tags: ,
Category: Filter, SharePoint Ideas Comments:2 ;

There are many instances where you might want to view a set of SharePoint list records which have been filtered on a comparison between values in 2 columns.  You might want to view a list of all sales reps who have failed to hit their targets: Actual SalesCredit Limit, or employees who have not used their full vacation entitlement: Vacation Entitlement>Days taken.

A customer recently contacted me with just this type of question :-

They use a SharePoint list to keep track of orders waiting to be manufactured and delivered – so amongst other fields they have Scheduled Delivery Date (which they have promised to a customer) and the Estimated Delivery Date which is kept up to date with the latest estimate. Most of the time the two agree but sometimes for various reasons the delivery date slips.

They have been using Reminder to send out automated emails for upcoming orders and ones that had just been missed but they wanted to setup a view that would show only orders where the Estimated delivery date was later than the date they had told the customer. Account managers could then use this list to keep customers up to date – “There is a delay on that order we have scheduled for you for next month, we estimate it will be ready on the 17th”

Sounded pretty simple to me and I confidently told them how they could do it (more…)

Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself

Date:April 19th, 2010 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

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Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

Date:October 16th, 2009 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: Filter, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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.

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Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques

Date:October 26th, 2008 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: Filter, SharePoint Ideas Comments:119 ;

Introduction

We discussed in a previous article how to customise SharePoint’s built in Task List and briefly looked at the power of Views with Filters. In this article we will build upon that by demonstrating some advanced use of Filters.

This article assumes that you are already familiar with Views and Filters – if not please review the previous article.

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