Thursday, November 13, 2008

Understanding Calendar Columns in a SharePoint List Calendar View


Last week, one of my students asked me about the Calendar Columns when creating a Calendar View on a SharePoint list. In the particular exercise we were doing, all the columns were set exactly the same. Although this was a good choice for the task at hand, it didn't demonstrate how the different options show up differently in the monthly, weekly, and daily views. To understand this, you really need to see it with screenshots, so here is an example.







On my SharePoint site, I've created a custom list named Vehicle Reservations. This list has columns named Purpose, Vehicle, Reservation Date, Driver, and Vehicle and Driver.
  • The Title column was renamed to Purpose.
  • The Vehicle column is of type Choice with options of: Car 1, Car 2, Car3, and Car 4.
  • The Reservation Date column is of type Date and Time and uses the Date Only format.
  • The Driver column is of type Text. I was going to make it of type Person or Group, but that type isn't available for calculations.
  • The Vehicle and Driver column is of type Calculated. I use the formula =CONCATENATE([Vehicle]," - ",[Driver]) to create a single string with the vehicle name and the driver name with a hyphen and spaces between them.
I created a new view using the Calendar View format.


In my new view, I set the following parameters:
  • In this scenario, vehicles are reserved on a daily basis. So I selected the Reservaton Date column for both the Begin and End dates.
  • In the Month view, I only want users to see which cars are reserved on particular days. So for the Month View Title, I selected the Vehicle column.
  • In the Week view, I want users to be able to easily see who will be driving each vehicle. So for the Week View Title, I selected the Vehicle column, and for the Week View Sub Heading, I selected the Driver column.
  • In the Day View, I want users to easily see who is driving which vehicle and also the purpose of the trip. So for the Day View Title, I selected the Vehicle and Driver calculated column, and for the Day View Sub Heading, I selected the Purpose column.

In my list, I have one row of information as shown here. Note: Although my last name is Spears, I'm not related to Britney. I just thought that Britney Spears probably doesn't get mentioned in SharePoint blog posts very much so I thought I'd mention her in this one. :-)


Now, let's see how those this information shows up in the Month, Week, and Day views:
In the Month view, you only see the name of the car.


In the Week view, you see the car and the driver's name.


In the Day view, you see the car, the driver, and purpose.


I hope this clears up a few things for some of you who have wondered about how the calendar view options and settings work.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

cool post but- images not showing up.

Ricky Spears said...

Anonymous - I think we've fixed the problems with the images. Let us know if you continue to experience problems viewing them.

Unknown said...

When I do this the sub headings don't display in the week or day views. Any ideas??

Ricky Spears said...

Pepper - Sorry, but I haven't seen these not show up before. The only thing I can think of would be to make sure your CSS or theme isn't hiding them. If you can view the source of the page and see them there, then this is probably the problem. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

This doesn't restrict overlapping reservations, does it?

Ricky Spears said...

Anonymous - No, this doesn't restrict overlapping appointments at all. To do that, you will probably need to do some custom development by writing an event receiver to check for them. There may be a product that does this too, but I'm not aware of it. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

Is that possible to have a multicolums view for this calendar, for ex. in weekly view to show columns for all choice options.

Thanks a lot for the information.

Ricky Spears said...

Anonymous - You can create a calculated column that concatenates those fields exactly as I have done in this example. Good luck!

Unknown said...

Hey, I just noticed that if you could reserve the cars for multiple days, the "To" date is NOT included in the Calendar view of the list!

Have you noticed this too? Any solutions possible for this??

Great blog btw, saved my behind mutliple times :)

Anonymous said...

This works fine, but when I connect the calendar view in Outlook, the TITLE field is still shown and not the VEHICLE field. Any suggestion ?
Thanks in advance

Anonymous said...

This works for single day events only. For a list of events that have a start and end date, that span more than one day, the calender view only shows the "Title:" field in month, week, and day views!

I'm not at all surprised, most of Sharepoint has this kind of inconsistent and confusing behavior :(

Unknown said...

Referring back to the overlapping appointments. I think I've found a way of achieving this using standard SharePoint workflow.

Currently filling out details on my site 2and7.co.uk if anyone wants to try it out when completed. Currently in the testing phase.

robolance said...

I am working on a Sharepoint site to allow nurses to be scheduled for client visits. There are rules that must be adhered fot the visits. Do you mind helping me understand what you did to prevent ovverlaps?

T Raman said...

Let me know, if I can sync a Calendar view with Outlook 2010.

Here goes the details. I have created a custom library with due date and documents uploaded.. now I need to sync the calendar view with Outlook 2010.

Is that possible..pls help. Thanking you in adavance..

wbr,
T Raman

Ricky Spears said...

T Raman - It is possible to connect a SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 calendar to either Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010. This connects the entire Calendar, not just a particular view.

It sounds like you want to connect a Library to Outlook. This too is possible. Just select the Connect to Outlook menu option and follow the prompts. When you do this, all the documents will be downloaded to your local machine for offline access. All the metadata is also available, so you can create filtered views in Outlook to see what you need.

Good luck!

Unknown said...

I would like to post events to a calendar using calculated dates. I get an error message and I assume that Sharepoint doesn't recognize a calculated value as a date. Is it possible to post a calculated date?

Ricky Spears said...

Debbie - It is possible to have SharePoint calculate dates.

Steve said...

Great Tutorial!

How can I avoid double bookings/entires for the same caar?

Unknown said...

How to display the current year evens in the new view using calendar list?? Kindly let me know if anyone has done before.

PrashanthSpark said...

Is it possible to display coloumn Attachment in Calender view instead of Title?

Pls let me know