Sharepoint 2013 : Tag a Document, List Item, or Page

Scenario/Problem: You find that a specific document, list item, or page is useful to you, and you want to be able to mark it so that you can easily find it in the future. You might also want to share this mark with other people.

Solution: Tagging is a useful mechanism that helps you find content quickly. This mechanism is available only in SharePoint 2013 Server, not in SPF.

When tagging an item, you can write basically anything that you want that will help you find that item later on. Then, when you go to your personal site, you can see the phrases that you used, and the documents you tagged with those phrases. You will also be able to use the tags when searching for documents, items, and pages. Tagging can target a document, a list item, a page, or even sites—including external sites.

For example, if you tag two documents in different sites with the phrase “my important presentations,” and another document with the phrase “a template for invoices,” when you go to your personal site, you will have a page showing you the two phrases, and when you click on one of them, you see links to the documents you tagged with that phrase.

To tag an item or a file with a different phrase, you select the row for that document or item and switch to the Files ribbon. In the ribbon, you will see the Tags & Notes button, as shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1 After selecting a single document, you can click on the Tags & Notes button.

After you click the Tags & Notes button, a window appears, showing the tags that you and other users have attached to the document or item (see Figure 2).

FIGURE 2. The tagging dialog, showing the Tags tab.

To write a tag, you type the tag’s text in the text box and click Save. Alternatively, you can click on a tag from the Suggested Tags list at the bottom of the dialog to quickly add tags that you or others have used in the site most frequently. You can add separate tags by using the semicolon character to separate them. For example, writing “Important; Exciting” tags the item with the two separate words Important and Exciting. The My Tags box at the top shows the tags that are already set on the file or item. You can choose to make a tag private so other people will not see it.

When you click Save, the tags you added become underlined to signify that they have been added. You can close the dialog by clicking the X button in the top-right corner. When you open the dialog again, you see the same tags, and the Recent Activities list on the bottom of the dialog shows the date you added the tags.