Yesterday I spent some time on my My Site for the first time in a little while and, thinking it might be time to get to know a new-to-me Web Part, I edited the page and clicked the Add a Web Part bar to bring up the Web Part gallery and consider my options. Maybe it's because I haven't spent much time there of late, but one thing that really jumped out at me on the resulting Web Part gallery form was just how cluttered my Lists and Libraries section has become with content that I've created for mostly test purposes. Seeing all of that clutter quickly led to a pair of realizations, and ultimately ended up leading me on a path to learn more about the Web Part gallery itself, which turned into an adventure all its own.
The first of my two realizations was that when looking specifically for Web Parts in the gallery, I can save myself some unnecessary scrolling (past all of my clutter) by collapsing the Lists and Libraries section. This is done by simply clicking the collapse button, which is the minus sign to the immediate left of the Lists and Libraries title in the (default) expanded view on the Web Part gallery form:
(Note: Collapsing this, and indeed any of the sections in the Web Parts gallery, will switch the minus sign into a plus sign, the clicking of which will once again expand that section to show all of its contents.)
The second realization was that I should probably delete the test content of mine that's no longer necessary, especially as it's taking up space on a production server. Which led me to think, boy, wouldn't it be convenient if I could delete those items directly from the Web Part gallery? And then I realized, no, on second thought, that might not be such a swell idea, given that the likelihood of accidentally deleting something of value would increase, which could prove problematic if the deletion were not discovered prior to the expiration of one's ability to Restore Selection.
Anyway, I was going to continue this post with my additional learning regarding the Web Part gallery, such as the mysterious Online Web Part Gallery, how Administrators add new Web Parts to the gallery, and a look at the Advanced Web Part gallery and options, but now that I'm feeling guilty about all that clutter of mine that's taking up valuable server space, I think I'm going to go ahead and get my My Site house in order now and save the rest of that Web Part gallery goodness 'til next time.
Posted
Dec 10 2009, 02:33 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.