Working With Announcements List In SharePoint

In the previous article, we have seen SharePoint contact lists in detail. In this article, we will explore SharePoint Announcement Lists in detail and try to understand the importance of an Announcement List and its usage. In this article, we will see the below points.

• What is the Announcement List
• Why not use a custom list instead of Announcement lists
• How to create Announcement lists

What is the Announcement list?

SharePoint provides an Announcement list template to maintain announcements related to any news or events in an organization. If we define an announcement, it always comes with an expiration date, like we have holiday news that expires once the holiday has passed. Similarly, if the announcement is for some events, it will also expire once the event has passed. SharePoint provides the special types of list templates known as Announcement List. You can create an Announcement List from this template.

Announcement list templates come with some predefined columns, such as TITLE, BODY, EXPIRES and other default columns.

• TITLE
  This column can be used to define the title of the announcement.
  
  
• BODY
  This is "Multiple Lines of Text" column type. It can contain the description of the announcement. As this is "Multiple Lines of Text" column type, it can be used to store the information in plain text, HTML tags, images, and many more.
  
  
• EXPIRES
  This is a date type column which can be used to store the expiration date of the announcement.

Apart from these columns, we can still create more columns to this announcement list based on the requirement.

Why not use a custom list instead of an announcement list?

If we take a look at the custom list and announcement list, there might arise a question of why should we use an announcement list. We can create a custom list and add these columns to that custom list and our announcement list is ready; so why should we use an announcement lists template?

Although, it is correct that we can use a custom list instead of the announcement list, but using announcement list, we have several non-functional benefits associated with it.

Here, you can see that we can easily distinguish between Announcement lists and Custom lists just by looking at the icons.

• When we open the custom list, it has an option to add a new item, while in the case of Announcement list, we will have the link text as “new announcement”. This creates an impression on the users who use it.
• Apart from this, we have some useful predefined columns, such as BODY and EXPIRES. So, we do not have to create these columns manually again, to maintain the announcement list.

How to create an announcement list?

In order to create an announcement list, please follow the below-given steps.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Once you click on the “Create” button, it will add the announcement list to the Site Contents with the given name.

Step 5

This will open the entry form. Just enter the details and click on the “Save” button.

Once you hit the “Save” button, the announcement will be added.

Following is the view form for the announcement list.

You can close the view announcement page and go back to the previous page by clicking on the “Close” button.

Summary

So, in this article, we have seen what announcement lists are, how we can create an announcement list, why it is better to use an announcement list for making an announcement over custom lists in our day to day life. Announcement lists also allow us to attach the attachments in items of the announcement lists.

If you have any question related to this article or any of the articles, do comment below.