Date and Time Format
With the Date and Time Format configuration
option, you can choose whether the users can choose just a date or a
date and time. This choice changes what the date-choosing control looks
like.
Display Format
You can choose between two ways to display the
value of the column in list views—this option doesn’t change how the
date looks when viewing the item itself, or when editing the item.
However, if you choose the Friendly format then instead of seeing
“1/11/2013” you would see “January 11.”
Default Value
You have the option to choose a specific date
or make the current date the default. Also, you can use the Calculate
Value option and set a default that calculates based on the current date
using the [Today] token. For example, to set the default to be two
weeks from the current date, you type [Today] +14 in
the Calculated Value box. This capability is useful when you want to use
a column as an expiration date, for example, while allowing the users
to change the expiration date. You can set the default value to be two
weeks in the future from creating the list item or file, but the user
can still change the date manually.
Tip
If a user just selects a time and not a date,
SharePoint doesn’t save anything in the column. To avoid this, you
should set a default date value for the column.
Lookup (Information Already on This Site)
Lookup is one of the most useful column types.
It is similar to the Choice column type in that the users get to choose
from a list of values . However, unlike the
Choice column type, the Lookup column type does not store the choices in
the settings of the column. Instead, the choices are in another list or
library.
For example, if you create a SharePoint list
in a site and enter a list of countries in that list, you can use the
Lookup column type to show values from that list. This feature is
helpful when you want other users to be able to manage the list of
choices. The other users do not need permissions to change settings on
the current list; they just need permissions to change items or files in
the list of values (the remote list).
Unlike the Choice column type, though, in the
Lookup column, the values that users choose show up as links to the list
item or file selected. This can help create a complicated system of
lists connected to one another (for example, a list of orders connected
to a list of products). When users create a new order, they can choose a
product or products, and when they view an order, the product name
appears as a link to the product list item.
You can configure a Lookup column to display
additional columns from the list to which it is looking up. For example,
in an orders list, instead of just seeing the name of the product for
an order, you can also see the product ID or when the product expires,
as if these were separate columns in the list to which you added the
lookup column.
Finally, the Lookup column can enforce
relationship behavior. It can control the relationship between the two
lists selected. For example, you might want to restrict deleting
products while there are still orders referring to those products.
Figure 19 shows the configuration options for this column type.
FIGURE 19 The configuration options for a Lookup column type.
Get Information From
In the Get Information From field, you specify
which list has the information you want to display to the user. The
choices here are the available lists in the current site. Referencing a
list from another site is not possible.
In This Column
In the In This Column configuration option,
you specify which column in the list to which you are connecting will be
displayed to the user as the possible values. For example, the most
common choice for this setting is the Title column, which displays the
titles of the list items or files as the options for the user to choose
from.
Allow Multiple Values
As you can do with the Choice column, you can
have the Lookup column enable users to choose more than one value. When
you select the Allow Multiple Values option, the user interface for
selecting values changes, allowing the users to select multiple values,
as shown in Figure 20.
FIGURE 20 The user interface for selecting multiple values in a lookup column type.
Note
Selecting Allow Multiple Values disables the Enforce Unique Values and Enforce Relationship Behavior settings.
Add a Column to Show Each of These Additional Fields
As mentioned earlier, you can configure a Lookup column to display more than just one column . The additional columns are displayed to
users in list views and when viewing the properties of the list items or
files, but they are not displayed to users who are editing the
properties because they are part of the Lookup column.
The additional columns are displayed with the name of the Lookup column before them, as shown in Figure 21.
FIGURE 21 The user interface displaying additional columns from a Lookup column.
Note
Not all columns from the looked-up list are
available to display under this section. This feature supports only
columns from certain column types (for example, date, Number, and Single
Line of Text column types).
Enforce Relationship Behavior
The last option on the lookup column settings
page is to enforce relationships between the item in the current list
and the item or items it is linked to in the looked-up list. This allows
you to specify that items that are used as lookup values cannot be
deleted when there are items linking to them, or that when you delete
them all related items in the current list will also be deleted. For
example, if you have a list of companies and a list of contacts, with a
column called “Company” in the contacts list, you might want to either
restrict deletion of companies while there are contacts that are marked
as belonging to the company using the lookup column, or you might want
to specify you want to cascade the delete—so that if someone deletes a
company SharePoint will automatically delete all the contacts marked as
belonging to the company.
Yes/No (Check Box)
The Yes/No column type is one of the simplest
column types available. It enables the user to select either Yes or No
by selecting or clearing a checkbox. The only configuration option you
can set for this column type is the default value for it: Choose either
Yes or No.
Note
A common problem that a lot of people have
when creating forms in SharePoint is how to add a checkbox for the user
to agree to conditions before saving the form (or a similar
requirement). This requirement can be answered with a Yes/No column,
combined with list validation , or it can be achieved with the Choice column
type: You simply specify just one choice (I Agree, for example) and make
the column mandatory.
Person or Group
The Person or Group column type enables users to choose a value from a list of users or groups (see Figure 22).
FIGURE 22 The user interface for entering data in the Person or Group column type.
You can see an example of this column type in
the tasks list, where users who want to assign a task to other users
choose from the list of users to whom they want to assign the task. The
selected values appear as the names of the users chosen when a user
views a list item or a file’s properties, and the name is a link to the
chosen user’s properties page. As you can do with Lookup columns, you
can configure whether this column type allows multiple selections (see Figure 23).
FIGURE 23 The configuration options for the Person or Group column type.
