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Adding local weather to your SharePoint intranet home page

Update 5/9/2019: AccuWeather has discontinued their widget. Watch
https://www.accuweather.com/en/free-weather-widgets for updates.

weatherI jokingly said at a recent presentation that I thought adding weather to our intranet’s home page was a good idea for employees like me who work in the basement and don’t see much of “the outside.” But it can also help with planning and decisions depending on your industry and daily routines.

Accuweather has a free script for a widget you can use that resizes perfectly on different screen sizes. I’m impressed with its simplicity and how dynamic it is.

All you need is a script editor where you’re placing the weather on your page and the following script from Accuweather.com. This script will work as-is from a straight copy and paste, but you should generate your own code from their website to paste after the closing style tag so that when clicked, users will be taken to more info specific to their location instead of mine. You can start from scratch on their site, just be sure to add the “style” tag and content below before the script they generate for you. This will get rid of a rather pesky button they include.

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Embed quizzes and/or results in SharePoint using Microsoft Forms

Asset 1quiz.pngThis morning I looked around for either pure javascript or custom service solutions for trivia or quiz embeds for SharePoint. The out-of-the-box survey web part wouldn’t allow the kind of features I needed such as showing a message upon submission about correct and incorrect answers, and I wanted something more robust than a newsfeed or Yammer quiz. I also wanted users to easily be able to change their own quiz questions and answers and no high-maintenance code solution was going to cut it.

What I learned? There aren’t a lot of free solutions out there for quick quiz creation and embedding in SharePoint. And the ones that are out there don’t look the greatest. Then I remembered Microsoft Forms has a quiz function! Don’t these look great? Even better – you can embed in SharePoint Server/On-Prem or SharePoint Online/O365!

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Microsoft Form’s quiz capabilities are incredible. In five minutes you can create a quiz that looks good, is easy to update and has features ordinarily only available with a premium subscription through other services. And as seen above, you can embed the results as well, making voting fun or showing a group how everyone is performing as a whole on a topic quiz. Here are some of the great features you get with Microsoft Forms:

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Upgrade your image slider on SharePoint

Your image slider is okay. But you’d like it better if it had a makeover (50 points to whoever can guess the commercial reference).

This post will show you how you can take your out-of-the-box content search web part slideshow from this:

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to this:

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This solution supports multi-line descriptions that don’t get cut off. It gets rid of that dreadful partially transparent overlay and gives you more of your photo uninhibited by messy design. It’s more modern, lighter and sure to impress. At the end, be sure to adjust the CSS to match your own color scheme and size needs.

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How to create a dynamic “this week’s menu” button for your intranet

People jokingly (or not) sometimes tell me the only reason for which they use the intranet is the cafeteria menu. So on a recent draft of a redesigned homepage, I introduced a prominent “Menu” button that would always be linked to the most recent menu uploaded by dining services.

menu

Previously people would click a link which took them to a document library where the current menu lived, and would open it there. 2 clicks.

I had two goals for this project.

  1. Get it down to 1 click.
  2. Never have to manually update the link for the button. Set it, forget it.

Note: this could easily be applied to newsletters, updates, meeting minutes, etc. Anything that is published on a regular basis that could benefit from an always-current hyperlinked button.

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Change SharePoint “Save” button to “Submit” in new item forms

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“Save” isn’t as familiar/intuitive to non-SharePoint users as language such as “Submit” can be. Change “Save” to “Submit” by adding a script editor or content editor web part (CEWP) to the newform.aspx page for your list.

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Alerts/notifications for SharePoint site newsfeed webpart posts & replies

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One of the greatest business value features of a site newsfeed webpart would obviously be to know when people are participating, asking questions, etc. This way moderators or other interested parties could go in and respond in a timely manner. And while there’s no straightforward way to get these notifications from the webpart itself, there’s a workaround. Follow these steps once you have a newsfeed webpart on your site (by default, most team sites have them already).
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Adjust SharePoint list column widths in classic view using jQuery

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This is a popular request that I’ve recently modified, thanks to the recommendation of a colleague, to be responsive to different device or browser sizes. By default, SharePoint lists respond to their viewer’s size but once customized with a fixed pixel width will lose that feature. This solution utilizes percentages so you can create column widths ideal for any screen.

Update 6/18/19: I’ve recently shared how to adjust widths using CSS and it covers standard AND datasheet views, while the method below is written only for standard views (but could certainly be adapted for datasheet, I imagine).

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Remove select/de-select checkmark column, column headers, edit/new options, and border in SharePoint list view web parts

tooltiplinkedtitlesIn a recent post, I discussed hyperlinking URL title text and adding tooltips. I used the above screenshot which also illustrates what we’ll accomplish in this post which is to remove the select/deselect checkmark column, column headers, toolbar edit/new options and chrome border. This leaves us with a simple title and list. Pick and choose what you’d like to remove for your specific needs, and let me know if you run into any issues.

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