SharePoint 2013 cheat sheet

Although many organizations are making their way to SharePoint 2016, a large number are still using SharePoint 2013 as their major corporate collaboration tool. This story is for you.

SharePoint is embedded in almost all medium and large organizations in some fashion or form, and SharePoint 2013 is now part of the Office 365 subscription service, meaning that hundreds of thousands of users pay monthly to access software that is available to them at the click of a mouse. And as part of the subscription, you automatically get the latest version of the software, so more and more users are seeing SharePoint 2013 in their daily lives.

But SharePoint is as complex as ever, and in the 2013 and Office 365 releases, Microsoft definitely moved the cheese from where it was in SharePoint 2010. The interface is different. Some ways you interact with the software have changed. You might be lost. Or perhaps you are new to SharePoint, even if you have heard about it before, or maybe you are interested in really teasing out the power of SharePoint 2013 as you work with your team.

That’s what this cheat sheet is for. In here, you’ll learn all of the basics of navigating and using a SharePoint site, and where to go to hit some of the customization options as well.

Note: There are a couple of different versions of on-premises SharePoint 2013. One is freely available and is called SharePoint Foundation 2013; the other is a licensed, enterprise-ready product called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. While they both look the same and have the same feel for users, some functions are available only in the Server 2013 product. (There’s also the Office 365 version of SharePoint 2013, called SharePoint Online, which will be covered in an upcoming separate Cheat Sheet.) In this piece, we’ll focus on the very commonly used SharePoint Foundation 2013 interface, which has 100% of what you need as a user anyway.

If you are just starting out. . .

SharePoint 2013 refreshes the default look of the site as compared to SharePoint 2010. It looks cleaner and more modern, but that means some of the features you are used to might not reside where they did. Many of the same parts are there — just in a different place. (Some of these might look familiar to you from other Microsoft Office apps, which use many of them.) Take a look.

• The Settings menu. This is where much of the action happens. On the Settings menu, you can adjust who else can see a page, edit parts of the current page, add a page to the current library or site, add a SharePoint app — a new feature in the 2013 release — or change the settings of a site.
• The Credentials area. This menu, accessed when you click on your display name in the top right corner of the web page, is where you can sign into or out of a site, and where you can change any user-modifiable sections of the web page (known as web ‘parts,’ which are little bits of code that are sometimes installed on SharePoint pages to do specific functions).
• The Ribbon. SharePoint 2013 includes the Ribbon, a panel at the top of the window where almost all of the functions possible on a given page are grouped and displayed. Most SharePoint pages have the Browse tab on by default, which gives you a breadcrumb-style hierarchy — helping you to navigate among pages on the site and see how you arrived at the current page. If you’re in a document library, the Library Tools ribbon panel will appear; if you’re in different types of lists, the tools will differ in the ribbon.
• The Quick Launch bar. Running along the left side of your SharePoint web page, this bar helps you jump among the various parts of your site, including different lists, libraries, discussion areas, picture collections, the site Recycle Bin (which works exactly like the Windows recycle bin except it holds items from the SharePoint site only), and a full tree-like view of all the places on your site.

• Under the ribbon, you will find the Search box, where you can type in any sort of search query, click the magnifying glass icon to the right, and then take advantage of the indexing engine on the site to get comprehensive results from any file that includes your search term.

Types of SharePoint site content

The whole point of SharePoint is to be a place where things can be shared, everything from documents to calendars to lists to pictures to discussion boards and more. All of it can be a part of a SharePoint site, and any user you allow within your organization’s network — and in some cases, even users outside of your network, such as partners or vendors — can then access those pieces and collaborate with you. SharePoint 2013 has a defined list of content types that you can create on a given site. They include:

• A page. A page is exactly what it sounds like — a page that is edited within the browser using the editor functionality in SharePoint. These pages primarily contain text, but you can embed images, links, lists, and web parts (those little bits of code I mentioned earlier) within them.

• A document library. You can create a document library that lets you upload Word files and other files to share. These document libraries offer the ability to check files out to make sure that only one person edits them at any given time, to keep versions on file so that you can see the revision history and activity of a given document, and to create folders to structure documents logically within the library.

• Other kinds of libraries. There are form libraries that store XML forms your business can use to route information through Microsoft InfoPath; picture libraries that just store image files; and wiki page libraries, which basically create a quick way to edit text and have it remain on the web as well as link that text to other pages — a poor person’s shareable text editor, you might say.

• A site itself. Sites are basically collections of content, so you can create sites underneath your main SharePoint site (kind of like large folders on your file system) to collect related materials that deserve their own focus. Meetings, blogs, documents and teams might have their own sites. If the hierarchy is confusing, think of it like this: a site is a file drawer in a file cabinet, and the libraries, lists and other types of content are the individual folders within that file drawer.

• A list. Lists are collections of like items. You can choose from a list of links, announcements, calendars and contacts. You can also select a suggested site of links, a custom list in both traditional list form or as an editable datasheet, a discussion board, an issue tracking list, a list of links, a list of project tasks (with a Gantt-like chart), a survey, a task list, or an imported spreadsheet.

Uploading and managing documents

The most common use for SharePoint is as a document repository. You and other team members and colleagues can put documents and files all in one specific place, accessible to everyone, thus avoiding the all-too-familiar email blasts with Word documents attached. (I would wager that if you never saw another “Please disregard the previous message, I’ve attached the correct newest version of the file here” message pass through your inbox, it would probably not be too soon.)

You can then simply email hyperlinks to documents on the SharePoint site when collaboration needs to happen. As users modify and update files, the latest version — as well as previous versions, and the history of who revised what and when — is stored in a single place.

To get started, you will probably need to create your own document library. This is fairly straightforward.

• Open SharePoint in your web browser.
• From the Site Settings menu (remember, this is at the top right of your window), click Add an app.
• On the Site Contents – Your Apps screen, click Document Library under either the Noteworthy section or the Apps You Can Add section. They both point to the same place.

• At that point you will see a new screen that reads Site Contents — New.

• Enter a friendly name and a useful description of your new library.
• Choose whether or not a version of the file is created each time someone edits a file in this library. When in doubt, choose yes; you would be amazed how often this versioning history comes in handy.
• Select a type of template that will become the default template for the library if someone chooses the New File option on the ribbon. This is not an important choice, as a document library can hold just about any type of file.
• Click Create to close out and be taken directly to your new library.

Uploading and interacting with documents

Once you’re in the document library, you can very easily upload new content to the library by clicking the + New Document link at the top of the page.

When you do, the Upload Document window appears.

Here, you can select the single document you would like to upload by clicking the browse button. If you have multiple files you want to upload, click the link that says “Upload files using Windows Explorer instead” and a new Explorer window will open. You can drag and drop files into this window just like any other file share, and the documents will automatically be copied up to SharePoint without any further action on your part. Click OK to finish out, and you’ll see the newly uploaded file(s) in the list with the green “new” symbol.

If you click the three dots (the ellipsis) beside the file, you get a little box that gives you some options, including edit and share capabilities, as well as another ellipsis under which lie many more options.

Edit. Clicking Edit opens the document on your computer, typically in Microsoft Word for word processing documents or Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets. PowerPoint also works here. This is just a convenient way to access files for editing.

Share. Sharing lets you add other people to a document. You can add their usernames or type their full names. In the dropdown box to the right, you can choose permissions for the people to whom you are granting access. In some cases, your administrator may have disabled this option to prevent data leakage or to comply with a corporate information protection policy.

The fuller set of commonly used options (under that other ellipsis) includes:

• View Properties. Selecting this option opens the document properties page, where you can adjust the name and title of the document. You can also get a smaller ribbon of options on this page, allowing you to view the version history of the document, delete it, check it out (to prevent others from editing it at the same time), set an alert to notify you when actions are performed on the item, and manage alternate copies of this document. (This last option exists in case other copies are located in other places on the SharePoint site, so you can get notified when updates are made on every copy.) Here, you can also see who created the document and when, and who the last editor of the document was and also when that last edit occurred.

• Edit Properties. This option brings up the same page as View Properties, but actions are enabled on this page by default so you can actually edit the settings instead of just seeing what they are.
• Check Out. The Check Out option locks a file for editing by a single user. If other users attempt to save back to the file, they’ll be notified that they can’t until the user who has the file checked out currently then checks it back in and makes it available for editing.

• Download a copy. This simply gives you a prompt to save a copy of the document to your local computer.
• Shared With. This gives you a screen listing all people with access to the document. You can also invite people and send a group e-mail to everyone with access to the document.

• Delete. This simply deletes the file, after a confirmation prompt, from the document library. A copy is stored in the site’s Recycle Bin (accessible by default, unless your administrator has turned this feature off) in case you delete something by mistake.

Customizing the document library

You can use the Ribbon to manage and further interact with documents in your libraries. On the Files tab, you can perform operations grouped as follows:

• The New group: You can create a new document, upload a single document or multiple files at the same time, or create a new folder within the library.
• The Open & Check Out group: You can begin editing a document in its native application, check out a document to lock it for further editing, check it back in, or discard a check-out if you made no changes and have no revisions to check back in.
• The Manage group: You can view and edit the properties of a document, as well as view its version history, the permissions on the document (if your administrator has enabled such a feature), and delete a document from the library.
• The Share & Track group: You can access the share screen mentioned previously.
• The Copies group: You can download a copy of a document, send a copy to either another location or a new document workspace, manage copies in other SharePoint locations, or go to the source of a copied document in this group.
• The Workflows tab: You can manage workflows, publishing, and approvals.

Creating and customizing calendars

Arguably the second most common activity users head to SharePoint for is to create, view, and edit team calendars. SharePoint is a reasonably flexible solution for sharing calendars that multiple people need to see and that pertain to a specific project — they’re better suited than just sharing out peoples’ Exchange calendars, since those are mostly locked down and contain a lot of extraneous information as well.

For tracking due dates, events, and project meetings, SharePoint calendars are great.

To create a new calendar on a SharePoint site, head to the Settings menu and then click Add an app. From there, you can click Calendar, and then type in a friendly name for the new calendar and click the Create button.

Once your calendar is created, you can add events by clicking the Events tab in the Calendar Tools group on the ribbon, and then click the New Event button.

From there, you can enter the name of the event, the location, the duration and times, a description, a category (if you are using them), whether or not this event is a recurring or all-day event, and what category this meeting should be in. Hit Save when you have completed the form.

After your calendar has been populated, you can experiment with the various views that are available specifically for calendar lists in SharePoint. On the calendar’s SharePoint page, click the Calendar tab in the Calendar Tools ribbon group. Then, in the Manage Views group, click the drop-down list under Current View.

You will see a few options from which you can choose:

• Calendar: The default and popular grid we are all accustomed to seeing.
• All Events: A tabular listing of all events on the calendar — past, present, and future.
• Upcoming Events: Also a tabular list, but only of forthcoming events.

These different views are helpful if you need to edit a batch of events in bulk and don’t want to click through the monthly views of the calendar to get to each event.

Integrating SharePoint content with Outlook

If you’re like many SharePoint-using organizations, your IT department has also deployed Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, so you are using a mail client that integrates very well with SharePoint. In particular, Outlook has a variety of features that help you combine information within SharePoint with information that you already store in Outlook. Here are some examples.

Putting SharePoint calendars into Outlook

If you have a team with deadlines, deliverable due dates, and events you need to keep track of, a SharePoint calendar is a convenient way for all members to add, update, and maintain a single record of dates. But sometimes it can be inconvenient to have to track multiple calendars, especially when your personal calendar lives within the Outlook client and the team calendars live on the SharePoint site.

Conveniently, however, you can bring SharePoint 2013 calendar information into Outlook and either look at the contents of that calendar next to your own, or even use the very nice overlay feature to see a single calendar at once with all of your pertinent information. Here’s how:

• Open the SharePoint calendar in your web browser. (Frankly, despite Microsoft saying SharePoint 2013 works well in other browsers, this feature works well in Microsoft’s own browsers, and poorly in other browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.)
• In the Calendar Tools ribbon group, click the Calendar tab, and then click Connect to Outlook from within the Actions subgroup.

• You’ll get an Internet Explorer security warning. Click Allow here to let the process work.
• Outlook will then open, if it’s not, and present a dialog box asking you if you are sure that you want to open that SharePoint calendar within Outlook. You can either click Yes here to accept the default configuration, or click the Advanced button to customize the name the calendar will take in Outlook as well as its description.
• Outlook will display the SharePoint calendar in the left pane under the “Other Calendars” heading. Click the check box to make sure it is displayed in the right-hand pane.

Of particular interest here is the fact that these calendars are linked between Outlook and SharePoint — if another member of your team updates the web version of the SharePoint calendar, those changes will migrate directly down to the Outlook display of that calendar. And if you adjust a date or otherwise make a change to the linked SharePoint calendar from within Outlook, that change will migrate back up to SharePoint automatically — and likewise back down into any other users’ Outlook clients if they have chosen to link the calendar as well. It is all seamlessly synchronized.

Synchronizing task lists from SharePoint into Outlook

Your project team might also store lists of tasks within a SharePoint site. This is particularly interesting in a scenario where other users of SharePoint directly assign tasks to you within the user interface. If you do not have SharePoint alerts set up to notify you of new activities on your site, and you fail to check the website often enough to keep updated and fresh on new developments, then you might miss a deadline or not complete a task the right way.

By synchronizing task content between SharePoint and Outlook, you can use Outlook as a single place to collect all of the information on what tasks you have on your plate. Here’s how:

• Open the SharePoint task list in your web browser. Again, Microsoft’s own browsers work best in these scenarios.
• Click the List tab in the ribbon, and then click Connect to Outlook from within the Connect & Export subgroup.

• You’ll get an Internet Explorer security warning. Click Allow to let the process work.
• Outlook will then open, if it’s not, and present a dialog box asking you if you are sure that you want to open that SharePoint task list within Outlook. Click Yes.
• Outlook will display the SharePoint task list in the left pane under the “Other Tasks” heading if you have selected the Tasks view. Click the check box next to the listing to make sure it is displayed in the right-hand pane.

The two-way synchronization for tasks works exactly the same way as it does with integrated calendars — changes in one place automatically make their way to other linked places with no muss and no fuss.

Sharing contact details with SharePoint

Your team might also store important contact details and information in a SharePoint site. You can synchronize this to Outlook very similarly as you do with calendars and task lists.

• Open the SharePoint contact list in your web browser. You probably know by now that Microsoft’s own wares work best for these synchronization activities.
• Click the List tab, and then click Connect to Outlook from within the Connect & Export subgroup.
• You’ll get an Internet Explorer security warning. Click Allow here to continue.
• Outlook will then open, if it’s not, and present a dialog box asking you if you are sure that you want to open that SharePoint contact list within Outlook. Click Yes.
• Outlook will display the SharePoint contact list in the left pane under the “Other Contacts” heading if you have selected the Contacts view. Click the check box beside the listing to make sure it is displayed in the right-hand pane.

Now for a technicality: SharePoint stores contacts in its database a little bit differently from Outlook. Some of the fields are named differently. This could affect how your mail merges perform, for example, if you’re trying to blast out a piece of e-mail or snail mail to a group of contacts that is represented within Outlook but linked from SharePoint. Luckily, the differences are minor, but they still exist nonetheless.

[[And on the next page — some advanced SharePoint 2013 tips!]]

Here is a quick reference of what field in Outlook maps to which field in SharePoint:

Five advanced SharePoint 2013 tips

Now that you have a good feel for what is possible in SharePoint 2013 and how to do common tasks, here are some tips for taking advantage of more advanced functionality and getting the most out of your SharePoint site.

Set up alerts. SharePoint can be configured to send you an email or an SMS text message whenever things are changed — either a specific item in a library or if anything in a library as a whole. This is useful since you won’t then have to go back and manually check each SharePoint site for changes. You can set up alerts using the Alert Me button in the ribbon on any given SharePoint content area.

Clicking Alert Me brings up the New Alert window, where you add a title to the alert and the delivery method — as mentioned, either an email to a specified address or a phone number for an SMS text message. You can also specify the context of the alert (whether an alert is sent for any change, if new items are added, if existing items are modified, or if items are deleted), the scope of an alert (if anything changes, if a document changes, if a document you created or last modified changes), and how quickly the alert is sent after a change (you can set up an immediate alert, a daily summary, or a weekly summary and you can customize the time for this).

Customize your views and add columns when necessary. Sometimes you might need to track a little more information about items in a library than SharePoint comes pre-configured out of the box to track. For example, you might want to add a drop-down list that has choices about an item’s status that users can select at various points during the lifecycle of that item. It’s easy to add these choices to SharePoint list views.

In a document library, for example, select the Library tab and then click Create Column.

You can give the column a name, and then select the type of information this column will contain — in this example, we’ll select Choice, which will prompt SharePoint to display a menu of choices. You can then add a friendly description of the column, make its completion mandatory and enforce whether more than one item in a library can have the same status, and then you can type each status choice on separate lines in the next box. You can then select how the choices will be displayed, allow users to write in choices, and pick a default value. Finally, you can add this new column to the default view of the site so that it becomes immediately visible to users. Now you have a consistent set of choices to track additional information.

When you upload a document to this library with the new column’s presence enforced, after upload you get a window asking you to choose from the selections you defined when creating the column. That choice, after you confirm it by clicking OK, is then populated in SharePoint’s database and displayed in the column in the default view. You can change it by editing the item’s properties. If you are working on a Microsoft Office document in a library, and choose to save it back to the library, you’ll also be prompted for the status within the individual Office application — in other words, all of the ways you interact with documents will now have that new column selection required.

Use the Explorer view when doing more than simple file maintenance. If you are uploading a big group of files to SharePoint, it can be cumbersome to try to fit them all into the drag-and-drop window. Or maybe you want to copy a lot of files out of SharePoint onto, say, a thumb drive for transport. Luckily there’s a way to make your SharePoint site’s document libraries appear just like any other disk in your file system.

Open a document library within your web browser, and then click the Library tab and, from the Connect & Export ribbon group, click Open with Explorer. You may get a security warning you need to acknowledge — click OK or Yes on this, depending on how your system is configured — and then you’ll get a standard Windows Explorer or File Explorer window just like you’re used to. Copy, paste, cut, and move to your heart’s content from here.

Do note that for this to work, you need to either be within your corporation’s campus network, have DirectAccess enabled or be connected to your company VPN, or be accessing an external version of your SharePoint site. So if you’re at home with no VPN and you try to access any internal URL your company may have, this Explorer view will not work. Also, some corporate administrators turn this feature off for security and information protection reasons, so check it out first before you depend on it, just to make sure it works in your organization.

Edit lists with Microsoft Excel in a familiar datasheet-style view. Chances are, you have a spreadsheet or two with a list of things — maybe it is contact information, or a list of dates, or a summary of various projects and their statuses. No matter what it is, if you are using Microsoft Excel 2010 or later, there is a really simple way to export that data out of Excel and into a SharePoint list. There you can then edit it natively within the SharePoint web experience, either in standard view or in datasheet view.

From within SharePoint, select Add an app from the Settings menu, and then from the “Apps you can add” section, click Import Spreadsheet.

Type in a new name for this list and a friendly description of this spreadsheet if you wish, and then browse to where the spreadsheet is located in your file system by clicking the Browse button and selecting the file. Once you are finished, click the Import button.

In the background, Excel will open the file and the “Import to Windows SharePoint Services” list will appear. You can select the range of cells for your list, and then click the Import button in that dialog box.

You’ll be returned to the SharePoint window and you’ll find your list, directly imported into the SharePoint database. You can then adjust the view and change the order of the columns, their names, and more from the List tab — just click List Settings to the far right of the window.

Overlay multiple calendars in SharePoint to create a master calendar. Your team can now have a “master calendar” that includes calendar rollup information from calendars that are nestled deeper into the SharePoint site hierarchy. You can overlay up to 10 calendars over one another to create this master calendar, and each calendar is displayed in a different color code (kind of like what happens when you link a SharePoint calendar to Outlook and then overlay the two calendars within the Outlook client).

At the main SharePoint site where you want the master calendar to live, either create a new calendar list from the Site Actions menu, or use an existing calendar that already is configured at the level you want. On the Calendar tab in the ribbon, click Calendars Overlay, and then click the New Calendar link to add a new calendar to the overlay view.

This next part is a bit trickier: You have to give SharePoint some information about the calendar that you are adding, such as a name and its friendly description, and you need to have the URL of the site that houses the calendar. This is the link to the site itself, not a link directly to the calendar. SharePoint will use that URL to crawl the site and find the calendar lists and views once you click the Resolve button after putting in the web URL.

If the site you provided is lucky enough to have many calendar lists or views, SharePoint will ask you to choose the ones you want to overlay — just select the box next to Always Show, and when you’re done, click OK. Lather, rinse, repeat for each calendar (again, up to 10) that you want to overlay, and then click OK. Now you’ll see all of those calendars rolled up into one master calendar.