Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

4.5. Working with Custom Lists and Libraries

Chapter 2 detailed the various SharePoint 2007 list templates, which are ideal for creating a list that you want to modify or customize to suit your team's or your individual needs. However, you may need to create a list where no existing template can serve as a starting point. This, of course, involves creating a custom list and defining all the columns and views from scratch. This section first introduces all the basic skills you need to create a custom list: how to create a list, how to make that list a template so that you don't have to repeat work, and then how to load that template into a gallery for team use.

Once you have list customization basics under your belt, you learn about versioning items in SharePoint — you can modify either list items or documents, and save each iteration as a specific version. Certain customization options are unique to document library environments and do not apply exactly the same to a list. Next, you learn how to associate a custom document template with a library. This helps standardize the documents that your company uses to create various memos, procedures, and processes.

4.5.1. Custom List Basics

As you create a column within a list or library, think about what information users need about the item or how they may need to view the item. For example, if you are responsible for creating a centralized listing of projects, you may ask users the following questions:

• What are the active projects ...