OneDrive Views Introduction
C HAPTER 1
OneDrive Views An Introduction All district employees and students have an Outlook email account and OneDrive access. OneDrive is a cloud service and storage system. OneDrive provides online versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. These are very basic versions of the full applications installed on computers but they provide most of the essential tools. OneDrive is also an online storage system for Microsoft documents and other file types. OneDrive can store a variety of file formats like images, videos and audio files. One Drive does not support Apple’s iWork documents from Keynote, Pages or Numbers. In OneDrive you can upload all your documents very easily and you can also arrange these documents into folders. However, if you use folders, they don’t operate the same way as they don on your computer. You can place files into these folders, but you cannot easily move or copy files from one folder to another in OneDrive. To accomplish this move or copy task, you need to download the files to your computer and then upload them into the desired folder in OneDrive.
OneDrive uses view, which I like to call smart folders. These views are filters for your documents and allow you to easily organize, sort and filter your documents without the need for folders.
How do views work? OneDrive automatically creates a default view with your account. This view contains information on your document library. This information includes the document name, creation date, modification date and document type. This information is seen as column headings. With these column headings you can sort the documents by document name, creation date and any of the other headings. This library is not filtered and shows you all the documents in the library automatically. You can create your own views and add or remove column headings for these views. These views you create can also have filters that display only the documents you want to see. For example, you can create a view that shows only Word documents created in the last month. By adding metadata to the document library, you can refine views for specific needs.
What is metadata? Documents contain some basic information like document name, extension, creation date and modified date. This is basic metadata or information about the document. Metadata can be added to documents. This metadata can include additional information about the document like notes,
upload date, grade level, or subject. In OneDrive you can create your own metadata and apply this metadata to documents as needed. This metadata is used by views to automatically place documents into views you create. For example, you can create a view that uses the grade and subject metadata to filter and sort documents by grade level and subject.
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L ESSON 1
OneDrive Views an Introduction
Click on the document Library tab.
Your document library is already a basic view. In this view you can sort documents by name, modified date, sharing and modified by.
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We will be creating our view using the options in the Library tab. In this example we are looking at the default view, which is all.
The view type setting page will display. There are five types available. We will be creating a standard view, which is the easiest view to create for files. Click on standard view.
Let's create a simple view. Click on the create view button.
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On the create view page you will be prompted to provide information for creating the custom view. First, let's provide a descriptive name for this view.
Below the view name is the option to select who can see this view. You can create a view that is only available to you or one that is available to anyone that has access to your document library. For this example, keep the public view option enabled.
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One of the criteria used for views is the column information for documents. The automatic column information for documents is shown by the check marks in this example. These columns are used to sort and filter our documents. Let's change some of this column information for our view.
I've removed the modified and modified by column headers. I've added the content type header.
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Scroll down the page to the Sort section. In this section we can instruct the view to automatically sort our documents based on the columns we’ve chosen. We can sort our view based on one or two column criteria.
Click on the pull down menu to see the column sort options. We won't sort our view in this example, so leave the sort options set to none.
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Scroll down to the Filter section. At this point the filter is showing all the documents in our library. Let's filter and show only Word documents.
Click on the option to show items only when the following is true. Click on the columns pull down menu.
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Select Name from the pull down menu options.
Click on the criteria pull down menu and select contains.
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In the box below the contains criteria, enter "docx" for the Word doc extension. Most documents created will use the docx extension but some older Word documents might be uploaded, and they use the doc extension. Let's add a criteria to get those documents too.
The Or option is automatically selected in the next filter criteria section. Repeat the same process as in the previous criteria. Select name for the column, contains for the criteria and "doc" for the criteria information.
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Scroll down the page and we see the tabular view option as well as the group by option. We will leave the options alone for this example.
Scroll down the page until you find the groupings section. Documents are automatically grouped into sets of 30. This means you will see the first thirty documents before prompted to see the next thirty documents. We can change this to see more documents in our library. Leave this alone for now.
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The next section allows us to run totals based on column information. We won't use totals in our example.
Scroll down to the style and folder sections. Leave the styles and folder options at their automatic settings.
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Scroll down the page to the item limit and mobile view options. We’ll learn more about these options in future lessons. Leave these options alone.
At the bottom of the page, click the Ok button to save your view.
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The view will be created and automatically selected. We can see the three columns selected in the beginning. All the documents in this view consist of Word documents. All the documents have the docx extension except the third, which has the doc extension. You can tell by the different icon shown for the document.
Click on the Library tab. In the current view option we see the view set to Document Types, which is the name of the view I created.
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Click on the current view pull down menu and select All.
The document list will refresh to show all the documents in the library. This is our view. We’ll create a view with practical applications for our next example.
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