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In this post I will provide instructions on working with Libraries. The prerequisites for this lab are:

The logic is that the trainee will practice the skills they learned in the prior lessons by navigating through SharePoint and creating a site.  The trainees will practice new skills by creating a library, some columns, and then views to organize the sample content that you provide.   

Lab 3 Working with Libraries

 Lab Objectives:

1. Setup a site for lab exercises
2. Create new document library
3. Migrate Content from File Share to SharePoint
4. Create Columns
5. Create Views

Upload and Organize Files in a Document Library

Exercise 1 – Create a site to explore different list types and settings

Task 1- Create a new site called “Daily Work”.

Figure 1 - Navigate to your personal Training Site

2. Select Site Actions | New Site
3. Select the Blank Site template
4. Click More Options
5. On the Create page. Enter the following information:

a. Title:  Daily Work
b. Description:  I am going to use this site to practice working with lists.
c. URL Name: DailyWork
d. Select, Use same permissions as parent site
e. Select,  Use the Top Link bar from the parent site
f. Click Create – The blank site template will create an empty SharePoint site.  It is not very useful yet since there are no lists or libraries to store and manage information. To verify this, use the All Site Content page.

Figure 2 - Daily Work Site

6. Under the Quick Launch area of your page, click All Site Content

Figure 3 - All Site Content is below the Quick Launch menu

Figure 4 - All Site Content - No Lists or Libraries in a blank site

7. Review the All Site Content Page and notice how there are no lists or libraries included with the Blank Site Template (if you see any lists or libraries, you didn’t select the Blank Site Template).

Figure 5 - Navigate up the bread crumb

8. Use the Navigate Up control to navigate up to your Daily Work site.

Task 2 – Create the “Every Day Documents” document library

Figure 6 - Library Settings on the ribbon

6. On the Document Library Settings Page, click Title, description and navigation.

After creating the library without spaces in the name so the URL is easier to read and a little shorter, we will use the Library Settings page to add spaces in the name so it displays with spaces.  This way our URL is friendly and the library name in our Navigation displays with spaces, which looks nicer. If we initially created our library with spaces then our URL would fill those spaces with “%20” which is not nice to read.

Figure 7 - Add spaces to the Title of the library

7.  In the Name field, add a space between Every Day Documents.
8.  In the Description field type,  Upload and organize files that I work with every day.
9.  Confirm that Yes is selected for Display this document library on the Quick Launch.
10. Click Save.
11. Navigate back to your Daily Work site homepage.
 

Exercise 2 – Adding and organizing documents in SharePoint

Task 1- Download and unzip sample content from the Training site

For the purposes of this exercise, I zipped up some sample files and put them on the training site for the trainees to work with.  The trainees are going to download them, unzip them and upload them to their Every Day Documents library. Depending on your audience, it may be better to store the sample files on a network drive that they all have access to. This was not possible in my environment so I uploaded them to the training site as a single zip file.

Explain to the trainees that these are sample files for this exercise, but they should think about the files that they actually work with on a regular basis.  

7. Review the Document-Classification-Worksheet.xlsx . Notice how it is a simple list of ten files with a column that labels them with different categories.  In SharePoint we can add columns to our libraries that we can use to classify and organize our information.  Once we classify our information SharePoint provides some pretty incredible tools that we can use to organize and manage our content.  Let’s keep it simple for now and create a choice column in our Every Day Documents library that we can use to organize our files. 

Task 2 – Create Choice Columns to organize your content and upload documents

 
Figure 9 - Create Choice Column

7. Once you select Choice as the type of column the page updates and displays options that apply to Choice columns.

Figure 10 - Choice column options

8. In the box labled "Type each choice on a separate line:" Replace “Enter Choice #1, Enter Choice #2, Enter Choice #3” with the Document categories from your worksheet:

Meetings
Policy
Onboarding
Practice File
Accounting
Staff Development
Planning

9. Select the radio button to display your choice values using a drop-down menu.
10. Select No for Allow Fill-in Choices.
11. Notice the default value option.  When you upload multiple files at once, the default value will be used. This is a handy way to move files from your shared drive to SharePoint.
12. Click OK
13. On the Library page, click Add  Document.
14. On the Upload Document dialog box, click Browse.
15. Browse to your sample content and select Conf_Room_List_Sept11.xlsx.
16. Click Open.
17. Click OK.

 
Figure 11 - File Uploaded to SharePoint

18. Make sure the Title is descriptive, this one looks OK.  An inaccurate title can confuse people that find the document through search.
19. Since this file falls into the Meetings category, make sure Meeting is selected.
20. Click Save.
21. Repeat steps 13 – 20 to upload the rest of your sample documents. Refer to the Document-Classification-Worksheet.xlsx to select the Document Category for each document you upload. 

You could upload multiple files, and if you did, you wouldn't be able to choose the Document Category for each document. Instead the column default document category would be added to all the files uploaded at once.

22. After uploading the sample content and selecting the correct categories,  your library should look similar to the screen shot below.

Figure 11 - Sample Content Uploaded to SharePoint

Exercise 3 - Create library views to display your newly uploaded content

Task 1 – Create a Grouped View

The "Every Day Documents"  library now is now populated with ten files. Let’s create a Grouped View to display the files in Groups by Document Category.  In our practice we are working with a small number of files.  When you are doing the exercise think how useful this would be if you were working with 50 or more files.

1. On the Ribbon, select the Library tab.
2. On the Ribbon, select Create View.
3. On the Create View page, select Standard View.
1. In the View Name field, type Grouped by Category.
2. Scroll down the page and expand Group By.
3. Under First group by the column:, select Document Category.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click OK.
5. Explore your new grouped view.

Figure 13 - Grouped View

Lab Summary

Now that your users have some sample files and the Every Day Documents library, you can create addtional exercises.  For example you could have them set the choice column default value to "Policy," and then have them upload multiple policy files so they see how each newly uploaded file has Policy as the document category. You could also build on this and create folders and set the default column values by folder.

Next month I will build on this lesson and cover:

• Creating an filtered view
• Configuring versioning
• Configure and check library permissions
• Co-Authoring a word document

Remember, keep the lab exercises short and support your SharePoint project by delivering brown bag sessions.

--Gregory