One of the fun things about giving a beginner’s workshop is getting off the slide deck and helping people with the things they run into in their work situation. Here is the short list of some of the questions that came up during the workshop this week. I’ll do some followup with extended explanations and screencasts on a couple of them, but in general once the solution is explained, it becomes one of those "Ah hah" moments. Hope you enjoy it. - Mark
Trap
I keep getting a request to authenticate a connection to SharePoint whenever I open Outlook. What’s going on?
You’ve got connections to a SharePoint server setup. Manage your connections in the Connection Manager: File -> Data File Management, tab to SharePoint Lists.
Trap
Someone else has put me on an Alert list, but I can’t access the site to turn it off.
You must go to the location of an Alert to delete it, even if it’s on someone else’s site. You’ll have to contact the person to get access to the site since they don’t have a way to access the Alerts for you.
Note: Alert management is really lame in SharePoint 2007… more to come in a later post.
Trick
I’ve got a simple approval process and don’t really need a complex workflow. Is there an easy way to set this up?
Setup an approval based, sequential workflow with Alerts and views. Mike Ganotti demos this in a nice, ten minute screencast on his site.
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The "Title" column isn’t needed in a lot of the Custom lists I’m making, but I can’t delete it. What can I do?
Create a list in Excel and import it as a list. No title column will be created.
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I’ve setup a recurring meeting and now I need to turn it off.
Go to the item in question, choose Edit this Item and uncheck the Recurrence checkbox.
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Anonymous surveys are great, but how can I set it so that only I can see the results of the survey?
Hide the results of a survey by going to the survey, choose Settings -> Survey Settings, Advanced Settings and set Read Access to Only their own.
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My profile image is distorted. It looks like I’m in a carnival mirror. Is there anything I can do?
Size the profile images to 200 x 200.
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When I go to open a site, the authorization screen doesn’t come up and I can’t log in. What is going on?
The Authorization screen sometimes hides behind open Windows if you move away too soon. Look behind the open Windows.
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I’ve looked on my harddrive but I can’t find the library files I’ve linked up to in Outlook. Where are they?
That’s because they aren’t stored as files until you make a change. They will appear under My Documents -> SharePoint Drafts when you’ve worked on them.
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When I import an Excel spreadsheet into a list in SharePoint, I get this error: IOWSPostData Failed.
This is an issue with Excel. Here’s a link on how to fix it.