SharePoint Power Hour: Web Part Connections

hello everyone welcome to SharePoint power our this is our weekly show that we do every Wednesday at 11:00 central so welcome again today's topic is going to be webpart connections and I'm Laura Rogers if you've never been to SharePoint power our before this is just a weekly show that I do for free for fun just talking about anything SharePoint office 365 pretty much all different versions of SharePoint and nothing super deafy or programming or ed mini so it's a lot of power our topics and things like that are you all here so I don't have any guests with me in the chat window today so I want to make sure that everybody who's watching y'all let me know in the slack channel say hello and let me know if you can hear me and everything's good we have a slack channel that we use if you're watching this on YouTube there is a link to the channel it's IWM entered slack comm and if you've never been to the channel before there's a little also a link to fill out the form to join me because I have to send you an invitation if you fill out the form while I'm doing Power Hour I'm not gonna be able to invite you till after so yeah thanks I'm glad everyone can hear me this new computer is working out really well it's not struggling like the other one was I think I got all the webcam settings all good this time and it's not fuzzy or grainy I don't think so luckily I think it's gonna be okay all right so hope everybody had a good week I was off teaching my four day long workflows in forms class last week so we didn't have power our that went awesome that is I'm going to do a little shameless self-promotion real quick my SharePoint training company is IWM intercom and one of the classes I teach is a week-long the four day-long workflows in forms class it is advanced and it's very intense and it's very detailed it's mostly sharepoint designer 20:13 workflows and it's how to build an entire business solution not just build workflows but do all the planning and building all the content types of lists and building the workflow troubleshooting the workflow we have an entire module on troubleshooting workflows and how to get them to do what you want to do and then building out the whole thing so anyway that was that went really well we had a great crowd in there and you know what I wanted to ask you guys something before I get started on the web part connections um and it has to do with the classes hey everybody it has to do with the classes on my iw mentor comm site I have when I taught this power user class when I've taught it before it was we didn't have a beginner class and it was a week-long class of power user topics and even though we would say this is not a beginner class this is not a beginner class we would always get beginners signing up for it thinking whoa I want to be a power user so I should take the power user class but we you know we would just dive right in I didn't really have introductory information about what is SharePoint how do you what's a list or a library it you know it pretty much just dives into managing your site managing lists and libraries and settings and everything it doesn't really have in user stuff anyway so we so I still tend to see a lot of people wanting to sign up for a power user class even though when they're beginners so with my new company I created a beginner class but it's still like people I don't know when they think even there were a beginner they don't want to take a beginner class so what I want to see what you guys think what is your opinion on this this is my crowdsourcing maybe I should change my now beginner is just you know introduction all lists and libraries all the different templates all the different types and getting around in your side and views and and all kinds of stuff like that it's just not like getting into settings and managing a site and permissions and stuff like that and you feel free to go look at IW min or calm and go you know browse the the agendas and their syllabi for those but what do you think about calling it like for the for the beginner one calling it like power user level one and then calling the one that I've always that's been power user calling it like power user level two and that way maybe yes so you want to be a power user and that's it yeah so you want to be a power user yet I don't know if that might be kind of a long name for a class but that sounds I don't know so I kind of wanted to get y'all's opinion on what you think about just calling it something else calling it power user level one and maybe people will even if they're beginners they can take it and that way they become a power user so apparently the whole class called beginner like nobody's interested because they I don't know if they think it's too easy or what power user fundamentals oh that's a good one Potter fall like that all right well I'll let you guys thanks for all of your input I really appreciate it so I'll let you guys kind of brainstorm and there yes he said I don't think people want to admit they're a beginner yeah so I even on my on my training site I even created so for the people who sign up for the power user class even there though they're a beginner I created a new class that's just four hours it's called like beginner fast class and it's just a four hour prep you can take if you're a beginner and you are wanting to just take the power user class that way you don't have to take the full beginner class um so yeah alright thanks thanks for all the feedback appreciate it guys so um yeah alright well I'll get started as you can tell in so in slack I went ahead and posted links to all the different sources a home even a speaking beginner course course yeah that's a good idea so I went ahead and posted a bunch of just links to other power hours that we've done that just are related to the Power Hour today and it's you know we did a we did a Power Hour on filter web parts we did one on web part settings we did one on what part City we did one on the Excel Web Access web part and sending connections to it so we've done several different related power hours so I wanted to make sure you guys had all links to those because I'm going to attempt to not do all of the exact same things in the web part connections at our hour which all those other ones had webpart connections and I'm - I believe but all right so let's go ahead and I'll go ahead and just share my screen and talk a little bit about webpart connections and this is all just going to be a demo let me flip over to - there we go okay this is this is just like a my little example testing test bed I called it stage 3 for the class that I was teaching last week the workflows in forms class and this is the whole travel request solution that we built throughout the week and but we have I have a lot of just things with webparts webpart connections that i wanted to show you in here and hopefully we can it can give you ideas and get your you know kind of get the wheels turning as to what can be done with these now um I'm not going to dive into what the entire solution entails but what I wanted to do was go ahead and show you first show you an example of what the end result looks like for each one of these and then show what it looks like to build it so this is a site that's got my travel preferences and my travel requests and it's just the currently logged in user and there's a there's a list called travelers and there's also a list called the travel requests that they've made so that's kind of that's where those are coming from so each traveler is in the traveler list only once and then we want to see the person logged in to be able to see this cute little dashboard of all their own travel requests so how do we do that now when I build that webpart connections webpart pages I usually like to build them using webpart pages because the wiki pages drive me insane um people have differing opinions on that but what I'm going to do is I'll even show you another trick to where first of all you can just go to your and this has got the new look in it I've cut the new look kind of turned on and off and different listen here so it's kind of varying but uh you can go to site pages and you can adjust your out-of-the-box site pages library does have webpart page as one of the content types that exists in there so that it is possible to create a let's see make sure this is sure presented to everyone on the second okay so you can do a webpart page just in here and that's what I did but I'll show you another trick you can go you can go actually creates a whole other library and I'll just call it dashboards if I don't already have one called dashboards well be sure to go to the Advanced Options so you gotta love the way it wipes out your name there okay you can create a whole web part a library for webpart pages and just pick the template web part page and that way just everything you create in there will just use that template so that way you can just keep them all in there and as usual you know for during power hour feel free to chat and say hi in the little in the select channel in the power our hashtag power our channel in there and ask me questions as we go that's the whole point of this so then when I create a new file in this library it's automatically going to be a web part page now with the caveat that everything's changing right now in SharePoint and there's this whole new way of editing pages and you know I'm not sure I can't imagine that webpart pages are gonna go anywhere anytime soon but this whole new thing is being introduced and it's gonna be a lot more pretty and modern by the way so I'll just create fine which will be my travel request and I'll show you how to do the web parts in there so I'll just pick this default little template josh is asking why I hate wimpy pages I've when I'm dealing with wiki pages it's just harder to get around in there it's harder to like randomly webparts will disappear it's it's kind of hard it's it's not as easy I like just move webparts around it's harder to kind of get your cursor where you want to go and you end up with all this it's just kind of its it just seems like a big time waster to make so I always end up just having to struggle with it with getting things where I want them so what I'm going to do is go put travelers on here and this is going to default to the currently logged in user don'ts don't go to my web part settings so I'm just jumping right into web part settings I haven't done any webpart connections now but what I'm doing is I actually created a view ahead of time in my list and I just called it web part and it's just the the whole purpose of that view is just because it's kind of narrowed down and it had already has the columns that I want to see I got rid of that little checkbox that little tabular checkbox you know what I'm referring to so usually when I'm putting webparts on a page and i'll show you what it looks like i like to get rid of extraneous things to make sure that you know it's not going to wait waste a bunch of real estate on the page so in my webparts settings i like have a nice little edit link so people can immediately go in there and edit it and it's this tabular view thing that i unchecked so i got rid of that and because that puts that little checkbox next to the item which you don't necessarily need so that's really what's done in here and then you can just rename your web part and say it you know call it me or something like that and then the next thing I'm going to do is put the web part that has all of my travel so I'll just put it here as well and it's gonna be the travel request list for that person and we move that and if I have problems moving things with a webpart page I actually even have more settings in my webparts settings and a webpart page like it lets me say what zone i want it to be in and I can even hide webparts with a webpart page and I can't hide them with a wiki page so err Douglas yes the traveller is equal to me except something to know about this solution is that we made the list so that it has the setting in it to say that each person is only going to see the items that are created by them and only edit the items that were created by them so inherently they're gonna see uh their own are in a mess but let me go ahead and throw that in just to make sure just if that wasn't a factor just to make sure we have a filter in here okay so that's gonna be traveler and that's a people field in here traveler is equal to me that way even if it's someone else looking at this that does have access to all the travelers they're not going to see them all good point all right okay so now we want to go ahead and do a connection so this is the whole point of webpart connections is that we have a provider web part which is the web part that's going to be sending information and a consumer consumer web part which is going to be receiving information so let's go I'll go edit this page and I will go to connections so when I go to do the little drop-down at the top right of any web part I have connections here and I'm going to send my rogue data to and I'm going to send it to the travel request list and I'm going to say I want the first of all I'm getting a filter value we hardly ever ever use parameters anymore especially when you can't is readily go into SharePoint designer and add parameters like we used to be able to a dataview webparts so usually filter values and then which field I'm a my matching up this is important now it doesn't when you're matching this up it helps you know if you if you're using a lookup field in your list and they're related to each other that helps but you don't have to have a lookup in place so it really just has to be whatever field you pick up here for the provider has to match exactly the value in whatever field you look up you used for the consumer so the top one is going to be traveler and this is just a people field and I'm going they're never in an alphabetical order traveler and then the one down here this is actually the requester field is if people feel that is actually the created by field and I renamed it so you can always just rename the created by and modified by fields if you ever need to in your list so just so that it makes more sense for whatever that solution is so would anybody isn't that news to anybody you think that's cool or gonna try that out alright so I'm going to match that up with a requester and now magically I'm only seeing my own items because see it even shows the little filter so I don't even have to show the requester field that's kind of redundant to show that here in the consumer web part because it's gonna be the same person for all of them and when you're sending a webpart connection you could potentially have more than one traveler so it puts this little select button next to it but of course there's only one traveler so you don't really have to do anything with that but that just shows me which traveler is sending information to the travel request list so I could have a bunch of travelers sending and send that information to the travel request list so let me show you that so actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the filter off of the travelers and actually I don't have any other travelers so I might have to create another one okay I'm not going to do that right now I'm going to go to the next page that I wanted to demo for you guys now in this solution we have what's called something that you probably see me reference in other videos before we're using a lookup list for our approvers in this solution we have a list and I'm just going to cite contents this is the new look of site contents going to a list called Department approvers now the workflow that we have going on in here has whatever when someone fills out a new travel request I'll just show you what that looks like a little quick it has a two to two this is important because if there's a relationship in place here and why is it taking so long it has a field called contoso Department that's a lookup field and they're they're picking a department well that is a lookup field to the department approvers list so it's just looking up these departments okay so when this thing is going through its approval process it's automatically whatever Department they picked as their department you know when they filled out the travel request yes err Douglas you can also use the current user filter web part if you need like in that situation that worked fine but yeah and I will show you that as well and we'll use the department field when I do one of those as well so the idea behind this is that we have the departments each department has a department via VP and they're going to be the ones in charge of approving items for their department so we need to create a web page a web part page that looks at who the logged in user is and shows me all the travel requests for that department so the logged in user has nothing to do with the travel requests themselves their name is not going to be in any of those fields it's going to be the department that's going to match and I'll show you what that looks like when I go to go back to the home page and I'm going to VP approval I'm just going to scan the manager approval concept because that's just that doesn't really have any webpart connections it's just the manager field and in the travel request is equal to me so that's not anything complicated so this is my department to approve so this is where it's taking the currently logged in user and looking at what department there are the VP of and then sending that information down here so this is marketing and this is filtered by anything that's currently waiting for VP approval so let's go let's go fill one of those out real quick so I'll go create a new travel request and put it for marketing because it's only going to show in my filter if it's waiting for VP approval so you get to see a little taste of this I think I'll go to Atlanta I think I already have one in here for Lana whatever Corey will be my manager and hey what what Atlanta dates do you think that um it's anybody know why are a bunch of us going to Atlanta those dates and I need a pic marketing here Microsoft ignite all right any of you going to ignite okay yes is anybody gonna be there kind of say hi or I just put a blog post up yesterday that had all the information about the sessions I'll be presenting there oh goodness gracious hope this doesn't take too long for the workflow to run I'm just gonna refresh that and hockey game no oh no no you're going oh yeah ignite it's just it's huge it's so huge and it's so expensive but alright so this one is waiting for manager approval I'm just going to check that box really quick and that lets me approve it and if you want to learn to do this solution sign up for my next workflows and form class okay I'm refreshing that page so now it the workflows running and it's putting two VP approval and then it will be on our on our dashboard so let's go create that dashboard real quick and we'll do the if this will have views the Department of the VP oh good okay de D crack a v-sit D crack 86 nice okay um let's see go create another dashboard and this one's going to have another have more webpart connections and then I'll go to and you guys let me know is the workflow on the list or the document folder the workflow is well we're not even really using any documents in this solution the workflows running on the travel request list and the task list I have to work those okay so now what I want to do is have Department approvers here and also have I always add them backwards don't I because they end up showing the backwards alright and that's too many travel requests okay this one I need to filter it by Department VP is equal to me and pretty sure that's and I always get I always do no toolbar on these to get rid of all this stuff that I don't need all right and let me show you so the filter on here is Department VP is equal to me and then this travel request list will have I have a basically it's a filter that's going to show all the items that are waiting for VP approval so it says current status is you know like VP approval status so this is showing me all the waiting for VP approval and they're grouped by manager so there's the one that I just created for Atlanta and Corey's the manager and it's even showing me a nice little sum per manager and those are just view settings and then here comes the web part connection so right now it's it's showing everything that's waiting for VP approval but that's any VP's so I'm creating the web part connection so it'll only show the items that are related to their currently like this VP the one that it's already filtered by so I'm going to send so if I'm starting up here I'm going to send the row of data but if I start down the other web part I could go get filter value so I can actually start from either one if I'd like okay and a little pop up there we go okay filter value thank your dime SharePoint any day now okay so provider is not going to be department VP it's going to be this department field and the department field it's so it need I need to show all the items in the travel request list that have that same department name so that's called contoso department and the other one and I just I didn't name them all Department because I wanted to be able people be able to differentiate and understand which one was which so it kind of did that on purpose plus there's already an out-of-the-box psych column called Department so I was avoiding the confusion there now whoever's looking at this page is going to see their department and they're going to see it filtered by all the things that are waiting VP approval for their department all right cool now one that I see a lot and I might have already shown this when I did the current user filter web part but I'll just do one with the current user filter web part and what I see a lot is people needing to be able to see my department requests so it's a group of people that they need to process the requests and they don't need to see all the requests but they just need to see the ones that are related to them in their department now it really helps if your active directory is correct for this because it's going to be kind of kind of useless if it's not but I'll call it my department and so what we're gonna do is let me go let me know guys if you see this as a requirement a lot or what you think about this but it's going to basically look at the currently logged in users department and then show information you know filtered by that department so I will do the travel request list and do the current user filter all right again the current user filter any day now gets its information from this is from Active Directory and I even wrote a blog post called testing the current user filter web part you know I sent Corey the information about this broadcast maybe he said just send it to him and Skype maybe he meant the other Skype I sent it to him in Skype for business sorry I feel like I'm like he said he was gonna be a little late but I don't know how late he meant so I'm just gonna double-check and send it come all right in the meantime any air ducts as I've had to use the current filter current user filter to filter list on user profile attributes exactly okay current user filter now by default it just shows the login of the current user of course when you're filtering something by the current user you can always just use me and your filters right you don't have to you know that's kind of redundant but if you want to use something else about that user and use that to filter stuff departments the most common one I see I always see two departments listed in here in any environment I'm in I'm always just I just picked the first one I'm not sure why they're two you know you can do something weird like go look and you know have the first name of the person that's logged in match something in a list or without you know all these different things are from Active Directory available to you that manager is a useful one and let's go let's go to Department and in a minute we'll go look at manager and see what's you know what's in there I'm not sure if this account that I'm logged in has a manager though so all right so I've got Department and then so now that I've put department in there this webpart it's not doing anything yet and it's not gonna show on the page to anyone but it is now storing the name of the part of the department of the currently logged game user so in this case my department is IT and I just know that so I'm going to send the filter value to the travel request list which is the only other list on the page and I'm gonna wait for the little pop-up and left it makes I said real skype you know the original Skype okay there it goes get filter value any other type of webpart connections you guys want to see besides list to lists or any other particular ones that you kind of expected to see today so now got contoso department now I expected this to not work okay have you guys ever seen this not work now in the past this exact thing that I just did has not worked because the contoso department field is a drop-down it's a lookup field to another list and you know how lookup fields they kind of store the information a little weird it's kind of it's it's stored with the ID and all this extra stuff well the name of the person's Department is just IT it's just text so in the past when I've tried to send that information from the current user filter to this lookup field it didn't work because it didn't match because one was just the text just IT and one was this big complicated lookup field looks like Microsoft fixed something and now all of a sudden as of last week when I tried it works so I'm not sure when they fixed it but that's really nice to know if you guys are on prim and you've seen this network there is a workaround though so let me show you the workaround for this and you will come across this with lookup fields most likely so what I did as a workaround which I don't really need to do of course in office 365 now they fixed it but you can go to the travel request list and you have contoso department here and what you can do is check an additional box next to just the name of the department already showing the name of the department here but if you check the additional box here it'll bring across another field with the name of the department in it to the travel request list and that one is stored as text so when you create your webpart connection you can actually send the current user filter department name to this and it would be called like contoso department : d p-- EPT would be what the name of the column would be when I did this it does that make sense to you guys what I just said about bringing across an extra column do I need to show you see we're halfway done so um okay so yeah Jeff we did I did do an entire power hour about Excel services but that one's really fun so I'll go ahead and do that one anyway oair douglas says their two department fields in User Profile Service one is mapped to a term set and the other is not good to know I never really dug into why there are two there okay so you guys want to see okay so I check the box so this is my lookup field in the travel requests list and it's a lookup to get the name of the department from the other list so I added an additional field so what happens when I check the box is now I've got this is the lookup field contoso department and this is just the name of the part the department see it's just text it's not that weird funky thing with a hyperlink and everything okay so then when I go to my dashboard and I go to the one that I'm trying to create called my department and at the page what I can do is so I'll just go edit my webpart connection it just got slow all of a sudden not sure why I am oGH is I can't pronounce that I'm I'm like to know there's between new new list at ok new edit in in display ok ok so instead of contoso department I could do my connection from the current users department to this one that I just added and so even if you're on Prem and you're not in an environment that where Microsoft is just fix that it will still work and it will still show you the right department now does that make sense all right ok so um the new edit and display form I can show I'll show you that because I did an example of actually customizing one of those in here um so the new form is what you get when you create a new item in a list and I have mine as a pop-up but um it's it's basically when I go to whatever the list is if I go new form got aspx so it's like travel request list slash new form aspx this is what you're filling out when you're filling out a new form ok and that's its own page and then the Edit form is when you're editing an existing item and that one's edit formed aspx and then it's got a query string ID equals and it's gonna that determines which item you're looking at so if I just kind of go directly to one of those lets see that ID is 10 right there so I'll go edit form the aspx question mark ID equals 10 and of course everything in SharePoint has an ID that's the inherent unique ID and then watch this if I change it to 9 and I'm looking at a different and I'm editing a different item so that's how the Edit form works and that's how the display form works it's just dis form and for your display form it's just you're looking at an existing item now I actually customize the display form on these so I'll show you what I did here going to edit the page and I added a webpart edited just a content editor web part to this page and I just typed in it I just typed a travel request form and that makes it nice and pretty and then I added my two different copies of the task list with two different filters on the completed tasks they're just filtered to show tasks where status is equal to completed and pending tasks are ones that are not completed so I'm Mac I've actually got webpart connections in place here where whatever travel request I'm looking at on the display forum it's actually sending webpart connections so the task list has a lookup field in it to the travel request list so whenever I create new tasks in my workflow with my workflow I you know I set that value so that's how I'm able to create the these webparts of the tasks that are related to any given travel request so the ID of the travel request is being sent to the lookup field in the task list called travel requests so I'm sending that in the connections exactly the same on both of these I just when it's a pending task and I'll just I'll go show you one of them that's pending real quick I'm like Atlanta - - um okay it's not me it's you office 365 all right so one that's pending I just I give them an edit button and a checkbox to check it off and I just don't give them any way of clicking on it or editing it when it's completed and that's just my easy way of doing that and that's just what I've just the columns that I selected to show in that view alright so that was a quick overview of those three forms and then says Excel services and then yeah okay so let's do Excel services now the trick to that is going to be where's my fake content that I can you you know what I'm just gonna create a spreadsheet that's what I'm gonna do alright and I'll go to so I've got fake content you know around on different computers and different pretty spreadsheets but I'll go ahead and create who that looks weird create a new spreadsheet and show you just some basics in here if it ever comes up there goes and some of the stuff I'll show you in here I'm not sure if it's even compatible with this online version so let's do Department and onto total there are some other columns let's see this is like budgeting or something like that and then prediction I'm just making this up okay so we'll have like 90 marketing and I put a few numbers in here and make it super simple just so I can show you the idea about with the connections and kind of make it so that it's really understandable now what I need to do is when I'm dealing with the Excel Web Access web part I can do parameters in there I can pass parameters to the Excel Web Access web part and make it do kind of fancy things in there you know what I want to do I want to open this and edit in Excel I'm just not as comfortable at doing the things that I do in Excel in the online version I'd never do that okay so here's Excel and I'll edit the workbook so on the other power our what I did was I created a dynamic Excel web part where I you know whichever item you picked in a library full of Excel spreadsheets whichever one you clicked on it showed that one dynamically in excel web access webpart on the same page what I'm going to do here is make this like bold and put an underline and put a filter on that so you can tell that it's a here I'll put some numbers format cells make those currency no decimal places okay and what I'm going to do is make Department a parameter so what I have to do is I have to name this I have to name this field and I'm going to call it Department and this is okay all right now think I'm doing that right now I need to save it okay so this is book dot xlsx and it is in a library in SharePoint and it is super simple but let's show what we can do with the connections you know in a web part yeah yeah okay let's go to my dashboards and create a new dashboard and I'll call it um tell fest people still put stuff in spreadsheets don't they okay I'm gonna put um I'll put the spreadsheet down here in my excel with access webpart and I think we actually did we might have even done two or three power hours where we do Excel Web Access web part because they're just so so much you can do with it there's this awesome REST API there's just I'm not a developer but that's it's fun stuff and I can understand it so it's figure out abble I just made up a word okay so I'm navigating to my spreadsheet that I want to show in my Excel of access webpart and if I wanted to I can make it show just one particular named item I'm just going to click apply just so you can see it alright there's my web part now I can also do make it so you know like the filtering here that's enabled in in with these I could take that away if I wanted to so I could take away different things that people are able to do in here with sorting and filtering and even typing now let's see let me click OK and let's do another web part where I'm just going to do something super simple like this there's a web part called the text filter web part and this is a good one for just testing webpart connections and it lets me just be able to type something in there and that way it can really see kind of what's going on and really narrow it down when I'm kind of troubleshooting or trying to figure out how to do a web part connection so I'm just going to basically type something in there and hit enter and that will send my filter information so I'm going to send my filter value to get named item and I did do my named item I created that named item called Department now one thing that I didn't do is when you're in excel web access and you're publishing it to share points there's a little extra screen that you need to be aware of so when I go to save as and I'm putting it in here in my shared documents the browser view options so this is important when you're doing spreadsheets and you're trying to especially when you're trying to control what shows in SharePoint you can even take away you know certain sheets and certain items and things like that when you're deciding what you want to be able to share be shared in the Excel Web Access web part so here's the step that I didn't do I didn't add my parameter so here's my parameter I created a named cell called departments but then when I publish it to SharePoint I have to actually add that as parameter and won't let you add it if it's more than one cell it has to be just a single cell yes I want to replace it so that was me flipping back to excel and doing that okay so let me go back to here and we refresh this page that I'm going to have to edit a little bit some tests okay now my webparts going see now it's got a parameter cool right so let me type I T in here and hit enter if it filters it maybe maybe not oh fly Oh see it put IT in here it didn't filter the information god it sucks huh something I didn't do with the way it's filtering it's just putting the value right there okay I'll have to I'll have to figure that out but I want to show you how to pass the parameter to it from another web part so let's go here go to my connection and remove it because I need to recreate it and I can also go from down here and create the connection so there are several different things I can do when I start from the excel web access web part I can get the workbook URL and this is what I did in that whole other power hour was I showed how to do this and how to make that work get workbook URL from and it's getting it from another web part get named item from get filter value from and I want to try getting a filter value all right so this is you have a lot more options when you start from the the top corner of the Excel Web Access web part to see what you can get from other webparts as opposed to when you start from the the webparts that that's sending to it um let's try get filter values see if that works filter is my text filter filtered parameter is Department again I'm not sure if I set that up correctly so let's see now I'm gonna stop editing so theoretically I would type now what I wasn't going to do in excel web access demo in today's power hour just for the record because I had already done a couple of other power hours with that so this is very on-the-fly theoretically I should be able to type IT and hit enter and no it's not doing it it's just putting the word IT right here so that is now now think about though think about ways that you could have have it just doing calculations so think about if you have like you know something like a mortgage calculator or a resource calculator anything anything like that that you have as a spreadsheet you could put that as an excel web access webpart with parameters on your page and you wouldn't even have to do a webpart connection the parameters pane shows up in here in the web part and it lets you you know send just let them quickly fill in information and it does a calculation for them without necessarily saving that spreadsheet with a new data in it all right let's see did anybody else have one that was not that I haven't shown you so let's go see now um the the content search web part actually lets you do a query string filter did you know that so the content search web part the new awesome one in SharePoint 2013 and up it doesn't actually let you do webpart connections but it lets you get query string information so potentially you could get you know do things like that to be able to get information from a filter that you're sending through the URL and not necessarily something that's just being sent from another web part so let's see trying to think Oh another one I don't have Excel SERP I don't have SSRS set up on this one but another one in it I'm pretty sure we did this in another power hour that's really really useful is anybody using SSRS sequel server reporting services that one lets you do connections there's a report viewer web part that you have when you have SSRS integrated with sharepoint and it lets you do the same kind of thing where you you may you have a report that you've created a parameter on say I want you know I have a report that's got everybody's budget numbers but I have a parameter name Department and I want just people to see their own departments budget numbers in this SSRS report well you can actually pass a parameter from the current user filter web part to the SSRS web part to report your web part and show that information I don't think any of you are using SSRS okay let's see try to think what other I had another one in here that was fairly complicated let's go look at my any other ideas of things that you want me to demo I could just work on that Excel one and try and fix it but okay so I've got one called I've got another one called dashboards so when I go look at a traveller I create and I did a blog post on how to do this the other day on how to create a custom little button that will take you that you can create that via workflow that will take you to a special page and this one's sending a parameter to it so that little special button was sending a parameter of whatever the ideas of the item to this special little web part page so this one is using a query string and I did I get a whole pop other power our on query string oh hey Cory are you in here now other you are yeah I'm here just chillin okay um yeah I've been just demoing webpart connections and what did you see what I did with the wood this one that I couldn't get it to work yeah it was pretty I'm not sure what I'm sure whatever I'm doing wrong is in Excel though so I'm not sure I know I've done it in the past but it was it's been a long time and I wasn't really planning on demoing that but all right so this one is using a query string filter and it's usually a kind of a couple of other a couple of a little bit complexity so I'll just go in here since we've only got nine minutes left I'll show you kind of several different webpart connections that we're doing in here so the idea behind this is that someone who's in charge of managing their like in the travel department and they are in charge of sort of managing all the travelers and helping them and looking at their preferences and things like that they can go click on this dashboard button for any traveler and be able to go to this page that has everything that can go see what's the holdup on something that needs to be approved etc so I've got the query string URL filter now what I did was I created this query string and I called it traveler so that means I just have to use that word when I'm sending a filter to this page so it's basically traveler equals and then this number one right here that is the value that this query string filter is going to hold and that's just because the URL s sent you to has that number so each different travelers dashboard button is going to have their unique ID that it's going to take you to this same page and just pass that different information to it I don't have a default value I just called it a traveller that's all I did but then I'm sending this query string information to a couple of other webparts send filter value to and I'm sending it to traveler details I've got several different things going going on in here so it's taking the query string and it's just sending it to traveler details just so that the traveler details just shows that one item that one person okay and that's all there is to it it's just the idea of that traveler then the traveler details web part is sending a row of data to the travel request list so the query string isn't sending the information of the travel request list whichever travel are you having happened looking up it's sending that travelers name as a connection to show all the travel items for that person when they were the requester okay and then where you want to see all the associated tasks so the query string is sending information to the tasks now why is the query string associated with a test well the query string has a look up to who the traveler is and so you remember what I did a minute ago with the way that I checked that additional box with the lookup okay so the task list has a column that they look up to the traveler so every task knows which traveler is associated with so what I did just like the one where I checked the additional box for the department a minute ago I went into the task list and checked an additional box to get the ID of who the traveler is and that way when I'm sending the query string parameter that you know traveler equals one or two or whatever to the task list it's going to be able to match that number because the value in one web part the provider web part has to match exactly the value in a consumer web part so that that's how I did it so there are multiple different webpart connections going on here but the traveler the travel department people can go here and be able to see all that person's travel requests and all the tasks associated with them so they can kind of narrow you know if they need to help and figure out what's stuck or who they're waiting for cetera let's see figure out yeah I'm not sure why because see when that one gets filtered it sends it it sends it in here from the filter value but there's something additional I'd probably need to do in in this name or in the name manager that would make it so that it when you send a value to it filter this other you know this whole column so and that's going to be more of an Excel functionality than a SharePoint functionality all right what other any other Visio Web Access webparts let you do webpart connections too but we did a whole other power hour on that one too I'm think we pretty much wrapped up all power hours having to do with webparts any other last questions in our next four minutes and now we're gonna have this whole new type of web part right are you all excited did you all see what Microsoft announced the other day that the whole the new type of sites and the new web parts are coming out soon I think I showed you guys that in one of the power hours I'll just give you a little glimpse of it real quick while maybe you're typing questions if you go right just right now if you go to your office 365 profile and you click about me they're going to be able to go see this blog write this blog thing right here and when you do a new blog post it's got the new look and it's got the new webparts so test blog looks and it's got I can start writing but see this little plus these are webparts so this is going to be kind of what the new way is for putting webparts on a page where you're putting them down the page using those little these little plus buttons so you guys look forward to that if you're in office 365 then when you go to go ahead and go to the SharePoint page like this and supposedly this week it's coming out but when you click the little I don't have it turned on in my tenon I think I took it away from people so they wouldn't click on it but it's a little new site button and I'm talking about so it's a little new site button that shows right here so we click new site that should give you the new type of site that's like a group combined with a team site that's the new the new thing and that's what i'm adam and i are doing our presentation on had a night oh Carlos says looks like you can filter if you add us aye sir then you couldn't connect the slicer to the parameter you're passing in awesome Carlos you're a genius I appreciate that yes excel 2010 does excel the excel web access webpart and in Excel 2010 does all that same stuff that I just showed you I don't think any that's new in 2013 Trey triva um look at the general tab right here in the in the slack channel and I posted all those right before power hour started I posted the links to all those old power hours the one on webpart settings the one on the dynamic excel web access webpart the one on the filter webparts and i'll go find the one on the vizio stuff too but yeah and I posted a link to your channel as well oh yeah thanks cool well um thanks everybody for coming that just about wraps it up and next week let me flip over to my other there we go thanks everybody for coming um let's see mo says what site do you go for MS updates to SharePoint I would go to the fast track so it's like fast track but off-night microsoft comment must be it yeah emojis are you talking about on-prem or office 365 for on promote go to Todd Clint site oh yeah all the big actual patching and stuff yeah yeah that this uh I'm trying to click on it's fast-tracked up Microsoft comm or maybe even fast-tracked at office.com so Corey yesterday last week in our class when somebody was asking where you can get updates of all the new stuff that's coming out I went and looked it up rater like you when you go to the admin Center for office 365 it takes you to and I'll put this in the general tab takes you to this fast track got microsoft.com slash office and that is where it's got the road map tab in there so the road map is where you can look to see like all these new features as they're being rolled out etc cool looks like a whole big list there so I'll I'll paste that in there too all right cool next week I've got see what's the topic sure off the top of my head what the topic is I need to start populating more topics so we're having we're having a power our next week but then a week after that is my power user class I'll spread the word right on power user classes coming up so Corey and I will be in there teaching that and then the week after that is ignite so there are going to be two weeks in a row where we're not gonna have a Power Hour you're not gonna do a Power Hour from ignite uh that's gonna be so tricky I'm not sure and I won't be there to help you so next week we're doing Microsoft planner so that's sort of like that's the tasks thing like test at office comm so that's that's all in office 365 thanks everybody I will see you next time thanks for coming over and out

Channel: Laura Rogers

Views: 4,633

Rating: 4.757576 out of 5

Keywords: SharePoint, Office 365, web parts, web part connections, web part pages, dashboards

Id: rll9GSifw_g

Length: 61min 30sec (3690 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016