Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Five

Introduction

This article is the 5th part of SharePoint series. You can find previous articles of the series here -

In the previous articles, I have described basic level information about SharePoint Introduction, SharePoint Web Application, Site Collections, and Subsites So, in this article, I am moving one step ahead. I will be talking about SharePoint Custom Lists.

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

Introduction to SharePoint Components
Introduction to SharePoint lists
Types of Lists
Creating List
Editing List
Deleting Lists
Summary

Introduction to SharePoint Components

SharePoint is made up of so many components. A few of them are listed below:

Pages
WebParts
Lists
Libraries
Workflows
Permissions
Users
Groups
Workflows
And many more.

These components together make SharePoint a Collaboration Platform. In this article, I am going to discuss SharePoint Lists.

Introduction to SharePoint Lists

If we compare SharePoint applications with a .NET application or any other web application, then we find that every web application needs to store some data and display it on the web page after processing it. In .NET, we use SQL Server database to store the data and in that, we create an SQL table which stores the data in rows and columns. Similarly, if we need to store the data in SharePoint, then we have to use SharePoint Lists. Here, I am comparing SharePoint List with SQL Tables so that readers can get the exact idea about SharePoint lists.

In .NET application, we create SQL Data Table to hold the data.	In SharePoint, we create Lists to hold the data.
In SQL Table we creates multiple columns to store different types of data such as Text, Integer, Numeric etc	In SharePoint list, we create List columns to store the different types of data such as a single line of text, Numbers, Currency etc.

The above table describes the basic comparison which make to visualise the SharePoint List more in depth.

Microsoft Defines SharePoint Lists as:

“A list is a collection of data that you can share with team members and other site users”

Types of Lists

There are many types of SharePoint lists that are by default available as a template. Template can be defined as a pre-set configuration which we can reuse to create a new components based on existing ones. Microsoft SharePoint provides many types of list templates available using which we can create our own SharePoint lists. Available types of lists are,

Custom Lists
Contact Lists
Discussion Lists
Calendar Lists
Survey Lists
Task Lists
Issue Lists
Announcement Lists
Link Lists
Promoted Lists
External Lists

In this article we will be talking about custom lists. We will explore the custom lists in brief details.

Creating lists

Lists can be created in multiple ways. The simplest way to create the custom list is to follow the below steps:

Step 1

Click on Site Settings icon and then click on Add an app.

Step 2

This will open up Add an app screen. Select any type of list from here and proceed further. In this case I am selecting Custom List

Step 3

Enter the name of your custom list and click on create.

Step-4

This will add one more list to your site contents.

Step 5

Click on the list and add an item and then see how the list is looking.

Editing SharePoint Lists

In order to edit the SharePoint list, you can change the Title and Description only. Let's assume that we have to rename the list Employee to Employee Directory. In order to achieve the given task, we have to follow below given steps.

Step 1

Open the list you want to rename. Click on the Setting icon on the top right bar and click on List Settings.

Step 2

This will open up the List settings page. From this page, click on “List name, description and navigation” link.

Step 3

Change the Title and Description of the list as per your requirement. I have changed the list name from Employees to Employee Directory.

Step 4

You can see that the list title has been updated. So you will get new name in the list title that we have changed.

Here in the above image, you can see that the title of the list has been updated but the URL of the list is still the same. Here, we have a very interesting concept called List URL. Whenever we create a list, the url of the list is created automatically with the name input in the Name section. But when we rename the list title the list URL is not renamed, because SharePoint predicts that this list may have been used for many purposes, so it just changes the list title and not the list URL.

Deleting lists

Step 1

Follow the same steps shown in Step 2 of Editing SharePoint lists. Now from that step, you will see the link “Delete this list”.

Step 2

Once you click on “Delete this list” the following alert will be displayed by SharePoint. If you click Ok then the list Employee Directory will be removed from the site and moved to recycle bin of site collection. If you have accidently clicked on the “Delete this lists” then in that case you can click on Cancel button. Clicking on Cancel button will prevent deletion of the currently selected file.

Summary

So in this article, we learned about SharePoint Lists and types of lists available in SharePoint. Also, we learned how to create the list, edit the lists and delete the lists. In the next article, I will dig more into SharePoint lists and we will learn about various list settings available with each type of list in SharePoint.

If you have any suggestions, querie, or if you think there is something wrong in the article then please mention it in the comment section.