Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Eleven - Form Settings In List Settings

Introduction

This article is the 11th part of my SharePoint series. Here is my previous article,

1. Learn SharePoint In Series - Part One - Introduction
2. Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Two - Web Application
3. Learn SharePoint Series - Part Three - Site Collections
4. Learn SharePoint Series - Part Four - Subsites
5. Learn SharePoint Series – Part Five – SharePoint Lists
6. Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Six - Power Of Versioning
7. Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Seven - Lists Advanced Settings
8. Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Eight - Validation Settings in List Settings
9. Learn SharePoint Series - Part Nine - Audience Targeting
10. Learn SharePoint Series - Part 10 - Rating Settings

In the previous article, I explained about rating settings available in SharePoint lists and libraries. Now in this article, I am going to explain form settings available in SharePoint lists and how form settings can help us in customizing the list forms.

In this article, I am going to cover the following topics.

• Background
• Introduction to Form Settings in SharePoint
• Using InfoPath Forms to customize the list item forms
• Summary

Background

We all know that SharePoint has captured a big amount of the global market in organizations. In today’s time, many big organizations use SharePoint to manage their business processes. Many organizations use SharePoint lists and libraries to store its contents. When we are entering data into lists and libraries we have to use SharePoint default form. The default list item form looks like

Classic list item form.

While the modern experience list form looks like this.

These are SharePoint default list items forms. This does not contain any kind of custom validations as, if we want to hide several fields based on some other fields selection then it is not possible by default in SharePoint. For that, we need to inject some custom codes and override the default functionality, but Microsoft doesn't recommend it as there may be security breach chances. So what’s the alternative? Microsoft provides a default way to override the list’s default form with our custom forms. Every list and library has a setting called Form Settings.

Introduction to Form Settings in SharePoint Lists and Libraries

SharePoint allows users to customize the default list and library forms using some of the available tools such as PowerApps and InfoPath. However Microsoft PowerApp is replacing InfoPath slowly, but still many organizations use Microsoft InfoPath to customize the list forms. Apart from these PowerApps and InfoPath tools, there are many other third-party tools available that allow us to customize the list and library forms such as SPForm, Nintex Forms, etc.

Using InfoPath Forms to customize the list item forms

In order to customize the list items form using InfoPath there are many ways. But one way is from Form Settings in SharePoint List. Let's see how we can customize the form using InfoPath to customize the list form.

Step 1. Open the list that you want to customize and then click on the settings icon and then click on List Settings.

Step 2. From the list setting page, locate and click on Form Settings.

Step 3. Once you click Form Settings, you will see the following screen.

Here we have three options.

• Use the default SharePoint forms: This means the default custom list form provided by SharePoint.
• Use a custom form created in PowerApps: By default the radio button will be disabled but you can still click on the link given. This is a new option available in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2016. In previous versions of SharePoint, the PowerApps version may not be available. PowerApp is the new tool introduced by Microsoft that allows us to build custom list item forms. This option provides a link using which we can navigate to PowerApps and create our own custom form. I will cover how to create forms using PowerApps in a different set of articles, for now, here is the reference link from where you can learn how to create and customize the list item forms using PowerApps.
• Use a custom form created in InfoPath: This option will be also disabled by default. Microsoft InfoPath was one of the great tools that allowed us to customize the list to library forms. This is still in use. Microsoft PowerApp is just an alternative to InfoPath, it is not a replacement. In order to learn how to customize the list or library forms using InfoPath you can visit Customize SharePoint List Form using InfoPath.

Note. Creating InfoPath form from Form Setting is available in SharePoint On-Premises. I have taken reference from SharePoint Online and in SharePoint Online it's not available.

Summary

So, in this article, we have explored the Form Settings available in SharePoint lists and libraries. All of the above-specified steps will work the same for libraries too. If you have any suggestions or confusion please feel free to mention them in the comments section.

My next article will be on “Save list as template”, in which I will be explaining everything related to Saving a list as a template, what are the advantages, what are limitations, when it will work well and when it won’t work at all, etc. These topics will be covered in the next article.