Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 for Office 2007 Users

Chapter 4. Web Parts

In this chapter, you will investigate another of the core features of SharePoint, Web Parts. A Web Part provides a discrete function or a set of functionality to you via a web page. Web Parts are an integral feature of SharePoint, and they are one of those areas you need to be comfortable with to get full use of the software. There are many SharePoint Web Parts provided for you, and with a team of skilled developers, any company can create and customize its own Web Part. In this chapter, you will review each of the available parts, add and remove Web Parts from the page, and modify them to meet your own requirements. Of course, no programming skills are required for much of this, but again the true power of Web Parts lies in the flexibility of the technology in the hands of skilled developers.

In Chapter 3, you learned that everything in SharePoint was a list that contained your data. The same is true of Web Parts. Almost everything you see in front of you on a SharePoint page is a Web Part, and one of the neat features is that, when you create document libraries and other lists, they become available in your team sites as Web Parts and you can then add them to other pages as distinct objects, removing the need for your colleagues to navigate directly to a document library, for example. If you don't like a Web Part, you can remove it from the page; if you want additional Web Parts, you add them yourself. However, as with everything else in SharePoint, you will ...