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Custom icons in a SharePoint list using SharePoint Designer

  •  11-20-2007, 11:48 AM

    Custom icons in a SharePoint list using SharePoint Designer

    Here's a handy quick tip.  You can have your own icons/dashboard-looking graphic for list items based upon a choice field (e.g. priorities: high, medium, low) or even a combination of fields (e.g. a choice field such as aforementioned priority along with a due date) and have icons displayed prominently in the list without having MOSS - for that matter it would probably also work using FrontPage and the earlier version of SharePoint ....

     The idea is to have a calculated field (can't remember whether or not that feature was available in version 2....) - I call it symbol - but use a single letter based upon the choice value, e.g. a priority of high = l, priority of medium = n, priority of low = t) and then create a list view or data view in SharePoint Designer and format the calculated field using a font type of WingDing - which turns your single letter into squares, circles, diamonds, etc.  You can experiment with all the lower case, upper case, numerics (I used Word to type each and then applied the WingDing font to see what the result would be).  Some of the other WingDing fonts include other cool symbols like thumbs up, thumbs down....  By using the additional field, (e.g. due date) and conditional formatting, you can turn the WingDing symbol into different colors, e.g. overdue items could be red.  Here's what one of my caluclated column's definition looks like:  =IF(Priority="High","l",IF(Priority="Medium","n","t"))

    All of this assumes one knows how to use SharePoint Designer to create custom views with conditional formatting - but once you know how to do that - this provides a slick way to add graphics to your list - without having to store a bunch of graphics somewhere in your portal - and thus becomes easily passed around using list templates.  The view can also be exported as a webpart and used other places.

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