'Open Mike' session for SharePoint User Group

Would you like to find out;

• How can you leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint technologies to provide a platform for collaboration, ECM, search, BI and social computing?
• The interoperability with MOSS and other line of business applications such as SAP?
• How SharePoint and Office can be the people friendly face of service oriented architecture?

Well we’ve got just the man to answer those burning questions... Microsoft’s Mike Fitzmaurice, Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS, has kindly agreed to hold a lunch time ‘Open Mike’ session on May 5th during his Sydney visit.

We look forward to seeing you there! Please click here to register for this event.

Registration opens at 12:30pm and the Q&A session commence at 1:00pm. This special event will be held at Microsoft’s office, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde, Sydney.

Food & Refreshments will be provided.

‘Open Mike’ – Mike Fitzmaurice Q&A Date: Monday May 5th 2008 Time: 12:30-2:00pm

Visit http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney for further information.

Problem with using a Calculated Field in a Lookup property

I've been playing around with using a calculated field as the source for a lookup column in a document library. I've run into a few annoying issues that I thought I'd share. Try this:

1. Create a custom list
2. Add some rows to your list. In my case I added values like "Quick Pick 1", "Quick Pick 2"…
3. Add a calculated column with the formula of [Title]. Leave the calculated type as single line of text
4. In your Shared Documents library, add a lookup column and point it to the calculated field you created in the previous step

I agree – not the most productive piece of SharePoint work you will do, but bear with me.

1. When you edit the properties for a document via the browser, the Lookup field values display as expected:
   
   
2. Now, edit a Word 2007 document in the library
3. View the Word 2007 Document Information Panel
   

If your environment is anything like mine, this is what you will get:

I don't know why the "string;#" text is visible in the Document Information Panel view. I know that the Lookup column does store an ID along with the displayed value, but I definitely do not want this displayed in Word 2007.

It's a shame that this doesn't work. My search through the newsgroups and blogs didn't bring back any details about this specific issue, but there were some related questions about not being able to reference certain column types as lookup fields. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found a fix for this. I can work around this issue by developing a simple event handler on my list to set the value of a text box to what I need. That way I can just use an out-of-the-box lookup column on a text field.

There was also another issue that I saw mentioned in relation to calculated lookup fields. If you try to use one of these in a collapsed Group By view, you will see a "Render Failed" message for each column when you expand the group:

My event-handler work-around will also avoid this issue. However, another alternative is to select the "Show groupings expanded" option for the view. You can then expand/collapse the views as you need.