Learn SharePoint In A Series - Part Ten - Rating Settings In List Settings

Introduction

This article is the 10th part of my SharePoint series. Here are my previous articles,

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
   

In the previous article, I have explained about audience targeting settings available in SharePoint lists and libraries. Now, in this article, I am going to explain rating settings available in SharePoint and how a rating can help us to organize our contents.

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

• Background
• Introduction to Rating in SharePoint
• Enabling Rating in SharePoint
• Disabling the Rating Setting in SharePoint
• Advantages of Rating Settings
• Summary

Background

We live in an era where we upload content on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. Even, we upload the contents on blogspot sites; or we also have C# Corner to post articles. While someone writes the article to earn money and someone writes the articles to contribute towards the communities, one thing is common in, every author wants to know whether the article is useful to the reader and how reader liked the contents. For this, every social media site and blogging site have come up with the new concept called as “Like”. They provide “Like” button below every articles and post. The readers express their feedback toward the post by liking the contents. And the author can analysis how his contents are liked by the reader. Even when an E-commerce company uploads new product, it expects the user to rate their products by rating or liking.

Now, let’s come back to SharePoint, the question is, when we create an item in SharePoint, can we expect that reader can Like our items and contents? The answer is Yes, SharePoint also provides a facility for Liking the contents. It's just a matter of knowing how we can use this facility and implement in our scenario. This concept in SharePoint is called as Rating.

Introduction to Rating in SharePoint

Every content in the SharePoint is saved in the lists and libraries. SharePoint lists and library provide a facility using which user can like or rate the items in SharePoint. By default, this setting is available with all lists and libraries, but it is disabled. We have to enable it manually. With the help of rating setting SharePoint user can rate or like the SharePoint List items or documents.

Enabling Rating Setting in SharePoint

Follow the below steps to enable the rating functionality in the SharePoint lists.

Step 1

Open the list for which you want to enable the rating. Click on settings icon and then click on List Settings.

Step 2

From list settings page, click on Rating Settings.

Step 3

This will open up the rating setting page. There you will have 2 options. One for enabling and disabling the rating and another one to select the type of rating you want to enable like “Likes” or “Star Ratings”.

When you have successfully enabled the Rating option in the list, 3 new columns will be automatically enabled in the list. The columns are shown in the below figure.

While enabling rating settings, you have 2 options to enable, Likes and Star Rating. Let’s see each one of them and try to understand both.

Likes: Enable the rating and select Likes from the option. Now add items to the list. Here, we have already added an item. There will be an extra column which will be displaying the list view and will also display the numbers of the likes to the items. For more reference please see below figure.

Here a single user can Like the item only once. If the user again clicks on Like button it will remove the like and count will be decreased. This works same as other like features works on social media.

Star Ratings: Another option is to enable the Star Ratings. As we know that the global range of liking any contents is from 0 to 5. Although some of the sites provide a rating from 0 to 10 but 0 to 5 is the standard one. SharePoint also allows us to rate the list items from 0 to 5. Once we have enabled the Star Ratings in the list and view the list items, it will look as shown in below figure.

Here, also the rating count will be displayed and the black filled star represents that how many rating stars reader has rated. We can even sort the items by highest or lowest ratings. This will help to find which contents are most liked by the readers and which contents are most disliked by the users.

Disabling the Rating

1. Click on the list settings.
2. Step-2: Click on “Rating Settings”.
3. Step-3: Select “No” to Rating Settings.
4. Step-4: Save.

The advantage of Rating Settings

There are several advantages of enabling the rating settings into SharePoint. Following are the rating benefits,

1. It helps to analysis the contents which are most liked by the users.
2. We can sort the items by rating or liking.
3. The easy way to collect the feedback on the list items in terms of like and dislikes.

Summary

In this article, we have learned what is Rating Settings available in lists and libraries, how to use the rating settings, how to enable and disable the rating settings and advantages of the rating settings.

If you guys have any questions or feedback please let me know in the comment section. Also if you want to experience a live demo of the liking then you can like this article using C# Corner like system (:-P)