Adding Columns to Gather Information | SharePoint 2010 Tutorial

Adding Columns to Gather Information

You can extend any list by adding new columns to it. Let’s look at the Phone List sample again to show how that works. 

To add an Assistant column to the Phone List:
1. Navigate to the Phone List sample list created in Chapter 1. Tip: you can navigate to a list by clicking on the title bar of the web part that displays a list.
2. On the list toolbar, click Settings -> Create Column. SharePoint displays the Create Column page.
3. Complete the page as shown in Figure and click OK. SharePoint adds a new text column to the list.
Figure: Adding an Assistant column to the Phone List

Once you add an Assistant column, it’s up to you to add data for each row in the list.
Since you selected Add to default view in Figure, Assistant automatically shows up in main view of the list, so you can just click Actions -> Edit in Datasheet to fill in the new column. But don’t do that yet! I’ll change and expand this example shortly.
Assistant is a simple text column. Figure lists the special uses for some of the other column types. Most of them are obvious, but I’ll explain the Calculated and Lookup columns in detail in the following sections.