Beginning SharePoint® 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint

Chapter 2. Working with SharePoint Lists

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• What a SharePoint list is

• How you can use lists

• The type of information that you can store in lists

• The primary activities available within the Ribbon for interacting with lists

• A breakdown of the various default list templates that SharePoint offers

• A hands-on discussion on how you can work with lists to create and view information

This chapter reviews a very important concept in SharePoint, lists, which you use throughout SharePoint to store and display information. By gaining a solid understanding of how they work early in this book, you can construct highly effective business applications and solutions in later chapters of the book by combining multiple lists with other important SharePoint components.

This chapter focuses mainly on working with the basic features and functionality of lists. In Chapter 4, you learn how to customize and manage lists to create working environments that suit your specific business requirements and needs.

UNDERSTANDING LIST ELEMENTS

Lists have items, columns, and views. Items and columns correspond to the rows and columns that you see on a grid layout in a spreadsheet. Views present list data in a friendlier format that acts very similarly to a report.

• Items: An item is a row in a list. For example, for a list that stores information on customers, each customer may have a unique item in the list, which is also called the customer row or customer record.

• Columns: A column is a field ...