How To Add a Lookup Column To a SharePoint Online List

hey there louis acabalis here thanks for stopping by in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to add a lookup column to a sharepoint online list now before we get started if you find this tutorial helpful please hit that thumbs up button below and be sure to subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on the latest sharepoint online tutorials also be sure to follow me on twitter and instagram at luigiacobalas to make sure that you don't miss out on any of my new content last but not least if you're interested in learning more about the tools that i use to produce these videos check out the links in the description below now let's go ahead and let's get started all right now before i actually show you how to create a lookup column in a sharepoint list i am going to explain what exactly a lookup column is and then i'm going to show you the example that i'll be using throughout this tutorial now a lookup column in a sharepoint list is essentially a reference to data that is stored in another sharepoint list that's right you can actually add a column to a sharepoint list that is going to reference data that is stored in a separate sharepoint list now why might you want to do this uh well in the example that i'll be showing you i have a sharepoint online list that i'm using to track my invoices that need to be processed through my accounts payable department and you can see here the data that i am storing in this list includes invoice number date amount short description vendor name okay so in theory somebody who's going to be submitting an invoice for processing would create a record in this list and what i'm going to do is i would also want that person to be able to select the most appropriate account code so the code that is going to be charged for that particular expense now that type of data perhaps is managed by a different team or different members okay in my example it might be managed by our finance department and so i wouldn't want the users of this list to go in and mess with that data so instead of them being able to manually put in that information which may be error prone i'm going to point this list to another list where that data is stored now to demonstrate this i have already created a separate list here called business units and in this sharepoint list i'm essentially tracking my different departments and the corresponding account code that expenses should be charged to when they are incurred by the particular department okay now to get started what you want to do is navigate to the list that you want to add the reference column or lookup column to and you want to click on the add column button and what you want to do here is click on more and the first thing that you want to do here is give your column a name so in this case i am going to call this business unit and from the data type options you want to select lookup okay and you can see the description it says information already on this site if you want to put in a description for this column you can and if you want to make this column required you want to check the yes box here i'm going to go ahead and make this required and now what you can see is get information from and if you click on this drop down this is actually going to show you all of the different elements that exist on this sharepoint online site okay so in this case i am selecting data from my business units list and if you had multiple lists again you would be able to see those here next you want to populate in this column okay and clicking on the drop down essentially what this is going to show you is all of the columns that exist on the list that we're pointing to okay so i want to populate this first column with business unit okay and the next thing that you want to do which isn't required is select any additional columns from the list that we're referencing if you want to incorporate any additional columns on that original list that we are adding this lookup to okay now in this case i'm going to go ahead and check account code okay and i am going to go ahead and click ok and you can see here that two additional columns have been added business unit and if i expand this here business unit account code and you'll notice the colon between business unit and account code this is indicating that we are actually referencing data from that business unit list now i'll go ahead and click on new and create a record here so invoice12345 i'll just select the date amount is 500 short description new laptop vendor name is dell and when i click into the business unit again you can see here i have some choice options and if i just quickly flip back to my business unit table here you can see that those options we just saw correspond to the values that are included in this list so i'll go ahead and select finance and i'm going to click save and there you go now you're going to notice that i wasn't able to actually modify the account code again because this is a lookup so we are going to choose our business unit value and sharepoint is going to automatically pull the related value uh in this case the account code that corresponds to finance all right so that's it this was just a short tutorial showing you how to add a lookup column to a sharepoint online list i hope you found this tutorial helpful if you did please hit the thumbs up and be sure to subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on the latest sharepoint online tutorials i'm louis aquabelis thanks for stopping by talk soon

Channel: Lui Iacobellis

Views: 1,630

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: how to create a lookup column in sharepoint list, how do i create a lookup column in a sharepoint list, How to add a lookup column to a sharepoint online list, sharepoint online lookup column, how to create a lookup column in sharepoint online, sharepoint lookup from another list, sharepoint list lookup from another list, create lookup column in SharePoint list, how to add a lookup column in SharePoint, lookup column in SharePoint list, lookup column in SharePoint online

Id: H_8jrMzP4Og

Length: 6min 8sec (368 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021