List/Library Settings

Simple SharePoint FAQ in 5 Minutes

theChrisKent List/Library Settings, SharePoint ,
Applies To: SharePoint

A common requirement/feature of sites is to have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. This is a quick and easy way to provide help to end users. A FAQ is nothing more than a series of questions with their answers.

This can be implemented in a variety of ways but the standard way is to have the question above the answer all on a single page. This isn’t always the best way, but it’s certainly the most common and recognizable way.

Fortunately SharePoint makes this really easy using a custom list and only takes about 5 minutes to setup. This can be done in SharePoint 2007 or 2010 in both MOSS/Server and WSS/Foundation. Here’s the steps:

  1. Create a custom list. Name it FAQ or something.
  2. Edit the Title column and rename it Question.
  3. Add a new Column of type Multi-Line Text and name it Answer
  4. Modify the default view to only show those 2 columns and set the style to Newsletter.

That’s it! You end up with something like this:

FAQ in SharePoint 2007

FAQ in SharePoint 2010

You can then place this on a page using a ListView Web Part or just link directly to the main view. WOWEE!

Want to get fancy? Add another column called Order of type Number and use it to set custom ordering values and just sort by that column in your view.

Disable/Remove Enterprise Keywords from a list or library

theChrisKent List/Library Settings, SharePoint , , ,
Applies to: SharePoint

I was experimenting with the tagging features of SharePoint 2010. Part of that experiment was adding an Enterprise Keywords column to my document library. After playing with it and realizing the Tag Cloud is nearly worthless, I don’t like the global nature of the keywords for our specific application, and I prefer the standard term set key filters portion of the managed metadata navigation to the Tags portion – I wanted to remove this feature.

So I went to Library Settings > Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings. This is the same place I turned it on. There were 2 checkboxes then to enable the Enterprise Keywords column and also to publish to social tags. I had just checked both when I wanted to turn it on and the column magically appeared in my library and content type. I assumed I would just uncheck this same box to remove it (hence the entire concept of a checkbox).

Unfortunately going to the page showed I could uncheck the bottom one to turn off social tag publishing but the Enterprise Keywords checkbox was disabled. Fortunately this was dev and I wasn’t too concerned, so I could experiment. The solution is pretty easy, but I’d have been wary to try it in production. So here it is if you are stuck in production and worried:

Just click on the Enterprise Keywords column in your list of columns and select delete. When you go back to the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings page everything will be unchecked and you’re good to go. Obviously all that data will be lost on every item, but if you are disabling this feature you were probably cool with that anyway.