That was the subject line of the frantic email I received from one of my customers who was in the middle of budget season and was trying to gather input from about 100 users. Against my better judgment she decided to start creating folders to store documents rather than just setting up the right Meta Data structure and have users fill out a slick SharePoint form. Anyway, she was frantic because she had received about 120 documents that were now stored in several folders that she needed to review. Somehow she kept on reviewing the same document over and over again. She was looking for a way to easily keep track of all the documents she had reviewed without getting all discombobulated; yea that means confused.
So here is my 10 minute OOB Swiss army knife fix that I used to help her.
- I created a status column in the document library to help her track items she had already reviewed with values Reviewed and Pending. As she reviewed the documents, she just changed the status to Reviewed or pending. Then I created a couple of views: a Not Yet Reviewed view which excluded all the items she tagged and a view for each of her values (Reviewed and Pending).
- Then I created a flat non-folder view of all her documents. One of the nifty things you can do with SharePoint views is flattening the heck out of that sucker. So even if you're storing your documents all old-skool-like in folders, you can just tell SharePoint to show all documents without folders. Here's how you do it.
Create a new view or modify and existing view. While in the view, scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for Folders.
Click the + sign to expand it if it is collapsed.
- Select Show all items without folder.
- Under Show this view – Select In all folders.
- Hit OK to save your work and that's it- all your documents in one list.
In just 10 minutes I was able to get my user back on track doing what she needed to do; administer the budget process, not SharePoint -with practically no effort at all. Hope this little tip will help in your time of needs.
If you've had similar experiences with SharePoint I'd love to hear your comments about them.
