Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 for Office 2007 Users

Chapter 3. Lists and Libraries

In this chapter, you will look in more detail at the range of lists and libraries available with SharePoint. You will examine each library's structure, what it is used for, and how it can be customized. In addition, you will investigate creating custom lists to match your own business requirements. After you become familiar with lists, libraries will be discussed — especially the SharePoint document library, which is the place you will save your documents. You will try your hand at creating new document libraries, adding columns to the library list, and creating different views of the information contained within the library. You will also see how you can use workflows to automate some processes and how you can customize SharePoint's built-in workflows to meet your own needs.

In SharePoint, your data is held in a list, and everything in SharePoint is a list no matter how it looks visually. From lists of Word documents, Excel files, and event calendars, all of your data is held in lists. In the background, all of your data is actually stored in a large database: Microsoft SQL Server. As users we don't need to worry about SQL Server other than knowing it's there and it works. Those of you who are familiar with databases like Microsoft Access and applications like Microsoft Excel will find lists very familiar in structure and should find working with default lists, and creating your own custom lists, very similar to creating tables in Access and spreadsheets ...