My thanks are due yet again to EricJ for a great suggestion. In response to my column last week on how to Multi-Select and Delete Items in a SharePoint List, he commented in response to my suggestion of using the Multi-Delete feature of the motion10 SharePoint Solution Pack: "Or you could just use the Datasheet view."
Oh, sure, you could do it the easy way, employing out-of-the-box functionality to accomplish the desired task, but where's the fun in that? I'm kidding, of course. The truth is that using the Datasheet view hadn't even occurred to me. I had briefly considered views as a possible solution, but kind of figured the closest they were likely to get me would be in providing the ability to hide (but not actually delete) the undesired items. Also, my only previous exposure to the Datasheet view occurred over a year ago, when I wrote the post, Displaying Spreadsheets in SharePoint, in which I limited my scope to the fact that spreadsheet lovers could display the contents of their Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint by employing the Datasheet view.
The manner in which I limited my scope in that earlier post was kind of silly in retrospect, particularly seeing as the button which renders a SharePoint list in spreadsheet form is called EDIT in Datasheet (emphasis mine). With EricJ's helpful prompting, however, I have now revisited the topic and his advice is spot-on as ever. Cheers, Eric!
To display a SharePoint list in the (editable) Datasheet view, select the Edit in Datasheet button which appears at the top of the Actions drop down menu:
Doing so will present what was formerly a standard list view as a Datasheet view (and render it by in edit mode by default), like so:
(Don't ask why there is a list of types of oranges in our test environment.)
With the Datasheet view displayed, rows and columns (and their contents) are editable, and deleting an entire row is as easy as highlighting the row(s) you wish to remove, right-clicking, and choosing the Delete Rows option on the resulting menu.
Conveniently, there is also a great deal of assistive information available via the "For assistance with Access Web Datasheet, see Help" hyperlinked message which appears at the bottom of the Dataview.
Posted
Sep 09 2009, 04:36 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. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.