kalmstrom.com Tip: Use CSS in SharePoint 2010

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a time saving invention when you work with websites. Most web designers want to use a limited number of fonts and colors on a site, and they also want all lists, heading types etc. to have the same look. Instead of adding the code for this on each page the info can be gathered in a CSS file. When a page has a link to that file, all formatting info in the CSS file will be applied to the page. Changes in the CSS file will apply to all pages that have the link, so with CSS it is easy to try out and change the formatting of a website.


Microsoft Certified SharePoint expert
CSS may also be used with SharePoint, but working with SharePoint is not exactly the same as working with web pages. Our kalmstrom.com CEO has earned all the available Microsoft Certifications for SharePoint 2010, so he knows how to do it. In the demo above he shows how to get started with CSS in SharePoint. This demo is also included in the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website.

Create the CSS file in SharePoint Designer
First Peter creates a CSS file in SharePoint Designer 2010, and since he wants to keep it very simple he just makes a change of the text color. When a link to that CSS file is added to the SharePoint homepage in addition to all the CSS files already uses by default, the custom styles is layered on top of what comes out of the box, and the text color is changed.

Add the CSS link in the browser
However, it is not possible to just add a link to the new CSS file in an ASPX page because SharePoint will not save it. Instead Peter explains how to edit a SharePoint web part in a web browser and add the link to the CSS file that way.

Expansion of SharePoint usage
Peter is fascinated by the endless possibilities of SharePoint 2010. For several years HelpDesk OSP has been one of the most popular kalmstrom.com products, and we also plan to add SharePoint as an alternative for sharing and storage in more applications. In the future kalmstrom.com will make a much stronger use of SharePoint than today, but I will come back to that in later articles.

Export Excel Lists and Connect Them In SharePoint

The kalmstrom.com CEO, Peter Kalmstrom, is a Microsoft certified expert on both Excel and SharePoint, and he is happy to share his knowledge. Now he has published another demo on how to transfer data from Excel to SharePoint. This time he shows how to export Excel lists, and then he explains how to connect the two new SharePoint lists on a page.

If you use SharePoint but don’t know how to export Excel lists to your site or how to connect lists in SharePoint, I sincerely recommend you to watch it. Also if you already know it, you might still get some other useful tips from Peter’s demo.

Export Excel lists to SharePoint
Peter starts with exporting his Excel lists “Customers” and “Countries” to a SharePoint site. In the “Customers” list there are some multiple line fields that cannot be used for sorting and filtering but Peter shows how to change them into single lines.

Connect SharePoint lists
Peter continues by showing how to connect the Countries list and the Customers list on a page, so that he can select a country and see what customers come from that country.

The possibility to connect two SharePoint lists to each other on a separate page is very useful. On the kalmstrom.com intranet SharePoint site there is one list for Customers and one for Purchases. Of course you can have all the info in one list, but loading, filtering and sorting works better if we separate the data into two lists. The two lists are connected on a CustomerPurchases page, though, and when I open a customer organization on that page I can see all data for that organization + all their purchase information.

More info on the kalmstrom.com website
In the Tips section of www.kalmstrom.com the various tricks are listed in the order Peter shows them, and for each trick the steps he performs in the video demonstration are described more in detail. Welcome to have a look at the article “Export Excel lists to a SharePoint site and connect them”. The kalmstrom.com Tips section also contains pages with tips on Outlook, Skype, Exchange, SMS and more. These tips are not directly connected to the kalmstrom.com products for Office, Exchange and SharePoint ‒ for them we have a lot of documentation on other pages. Here we have instead gathered information that may be useful for many, either you are a kalmstrom.com Community Member or not. Welcome to see for yourself!