Corey Roth [MVP] : SharePoint, End User

End User Quick Tip: Use SharePoint Workspace to create friendly links to documents

CoreyRoth — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:49:21 GMT

SharePoint URLs can be quite long. When you paste a link to a document in an E-mail they can prove to be quite long. The community has developed a number of solutions for SharePoint URL shorteners. However, I thought I would share a quick solution that you can take advantage of as an end user without requiring any SharePoint customizations. I regularly use SharePoint Workspace to work on my most common projects. If you haven’t worked with it before, see this post for more on how to get started. Whenever, you need to share a link to a document, just right click on the document and use the Copy as Link menu item.

You can then paste the link into Outlook, a Word document, or wherever. When you do, it creates a nice link using the filename of the document instead of the full URL of the document.

It’s that simple. Sometimes, you may get an error when using the Copy as Link feature but when that happens it still copies the link to your clipboard.

Dealing with that pesky SharePoint server in another time zone

CoreyRoth — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:17:07 GMT

Working at an International company now, I found that I was often running into issues looking at the time stamps of documents. Our collaboration server was in EST while I was in CST. It could be confusing at times when you were working on a document for a while and you weren’t sure if the latest version had been saved. While I was at #SPC11, I sat in a session and picked up this quick tip. You can actually configure SharePoint to display times in your own time zone. If you’ve been working for a large company, maybe you already knew this, but I had never noticed it before.

It’s quite simple to configure. In the top-right menu (the one with your name on it), there is a menu item labeled My Settings.

Clicking this link will bring you to a page that contains profile information.

However, we’re not interested in the profile, we’re interested in the My Regional Settings button at the top. Click it and we can fix the problem.

Uncheck the Always follow web settings checkbox and then we can change our time zone.

This is also where you can change the Locale as well if you want your dates in a different format. Once you make these changes, your document libraries will show your documents with time stamps adjusted for your time zone. This setting is available in SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2007, as well SharePoint Online. The screenshots were from my Office 365 account.

End User Tip: Removing troublesome white space from the wiki page editor in SharePoint 2010

CoreyRoth — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:44:00 GMT

The new wiki page editor makes editing content on SharePoint pages a ton easier. This lets site administrators and others easily edit text on the page as well as drop in web parts, pictures, and videos wherever they want on the page. I find that the editor works pretty well. However, depending on what is on the page, sometimes I find that I struggle with moving things around and removing white space. A lot of white space tends to get inserted as you add more things to the page. I like to keep things close together so I find myself looking to clean things up a lot. It is just hard to get the WYSIWYG editor to remove some of this sometimes.

As a developer the answer might be obvious to you, but as an end user, you may not know where to go. That is why I thought I’d write up this quick post. Consider the following page in edit mode.

The trick here is that we want to edit the raw HTML of the page. Don’t be scared, it’s easy to do and if you are careful, you won’t break anything. If you do break something, you can always go back to your last version. In the bottom right of the ribbon, there is an HTML button, click on it and then click Edit HTML.

You will then see a popup with the HTML markup for that section of the page.

There is a lot to take in here. However, since we’re just looking to remove white space, we’re just looking for one particular line. In this case, we want to remove the following:

<p> </p>

In my example, you might notice that I have that listed several times. I will remove each one I don’t want. It may take some trial and error because it might not be obvious what some of the things are. For example, the div tags in the window above are actually references to web parts. Remove those lines I mentioned above and you will have a lot less white space on the page. When you are done, click OK and you will see how you changed the page. Click Save & Close, if you are happy with your changes. If you do mess something up, just go to the ribbon, click the arrow underneath Save and Close and click Stop Editing. The prompt will ask you if you want to save or not. Just click No and you can try again.

I find myself doing this a lot on demos when I am customizing the page a lot through the browser. I thought it would be a good tip for anyone that wants a little more flexibility with how things are shown on the page.