Microsoft (SharePoint) Lists and Libraries Changes for Content Types
Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Markus Bütterhoff’s (@buetti) comment on my post showing how to Group By Content Type in Modern Lists and Libraries, I learned of some recent changes for Content Types in Microsoft (SharePoint) Lists and Document Libraries. I’m not sure when these rolled out, but it must have been in the last few weeks.
As far as I can tell, all of these new capabilities work the same way in both lists and Document Libraries. I’ll say “list” below, but everything applies the same for Document Libraries.
After you’ve enabled Content Type management on the list, when you click on the Add column dropdown you’ll see Content type as an option.
This takes you to a funky little screen focused on Content Types. From what I can tell, if you’ve only enabled out of the box Content Types, it doesn’t do anything for you.
If you’ve defined any customer Content Types, then you can enable them on the list with this screen. If you’ve enabled a custom Content Type, you get some info about the Content Type and a button to remove it, but it’s not clear what else is supposed to happen here. My guess is this is the beginning of a replacement for some of the List settings classic pages.
If you click to the Show/hide columns option, you can add the Content Type to the view – painlessly. In the past, we’ve needed to navigate to the classic View settings page.
The best thing I’ve found so far, though, is what Markus pointed out to me in his comment: we can easily group by Content Type with no more query string tricks that sometimes fall down.
So easy!
It’s great to see Content Types back as first class citizens in SharePoint lists.
Ey Mark,
The Content Type option is intended to easily allow adding Content Types created and published in the Content Type Gallery. As soon as you have Content Types published, you will be able to add them to any Doc. Library by means of that option
That seems like the right answer, but it’s not really very clear in the UI what the intention is. That screen also doesn’t seem to do anything with out of the box Content Types.
By “Content Type Gallery”, I assume you mean the modernized Content Type Hub which is available in the SharePoint Admin Center? I also see the custom Content Types I’ve defined in the current site.
Yeah, I mean the “old content type hub” :-) that is now part of the Content Type Gallery in the SPO Admin Center
I always learn new things from you Marc; thanks for sharing. =)
It’s all for you, Ruth. :)
Hi Marc, this is awesome works beautifully, but I had a situation where I needed two column grouping, and this did not work for that situation.
@Dhruv:
Can you explain what you tried and what the issue was? I can take that back to the product folks.
M.
Hello Marc,
Is there a way to migrate/move SITE custom content types to centralised Content Type Gallery? I have a site with site content types and I would like to make them available to other sites in my tenant? What would be the best way to achieve that?
Thank you.
@Dovydas:
I recommend Site Designs or PnP Provisioning Templates.
M.