Adding a new column to a document library in SharePoint is a fairly straightforward process, presenting a variety of preconfigured choices as to the type of content which will reside in the column. One of those preconfigured choices is, well, choice (i.e., a menu from which users must choose), and that's the one I'm going to look at today.
To begin, from within the document library where you want to create your new column, select the Settings dropdown and choose Create Column:
On the resulting page, you'll see a variety of choices as to the type of information which the column will contain. As you can see from the image below, your choices include such options as single or multiple lines of text, number, currency, and date & time. Since I want to present a range of choices to users in my case, I'm going to select the Choice radio button:
Selecting the Choice radio button will automatically repopulate the SharePoint page with a range of decisions for you to make regarding the presentation of your choices (including the text of the choices themselves). If you recall my post on SharePoint Surveys, the presentation of the decision-making steps may seem familiar (they did to me!). As you can see, among other things, you'll be deciding the manner in which to display your choices, whether or not to allow users to fill in their own choice, and the default value:
Regarding the decisions presented in the image above, there are two best practices tips that I received at the Mindsharp Power End User summit regarding using choice columns in document libraries: 1) Leave the description field blank (for reasons of both space considerations, and the fact that the required user action should be self-explanatory based on the column name you provided), and 2) If you choose Choice as your default value to display in the final input field, delete the defaulted name and leave that field blank (else you run the risk in of users choosing the default first choice in a Drop-Down Menu scenario without even realizing there are additional choices).
As you can see, I decided to have a little fun with the Column Name and Choices in my testing of this process. The image below shows what a user of the document library will see when they upload a new document after the new column has been added. I trust you'll be using your new columns for far more practical purposes than a goofy popularity contest!:
Posted
Sep 24 2008, 06:44 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.