The one downside to this is that you can’t edit the fields in Office Web Apps. The columns that I added to the document automatically populate the columns in this library and can now be used within SharePoint for creating custom views and reports.

I then do a “save as” and save it to my Office 365 library. The column that I added that was of type ‘choice’ has a dropdown with only the choices available. The fields that require a date give a dropdown for selecting a date from a calendar. I downloaded a copy of the template and filled in some information. I’ll create a dummy report and insert my columns of information.Īt this point, I save the document to be used as a template and would probably lock it as a read only copy that users can download to fill out. Under the ‘INSERT’ ribbon, I can then select the columns from the library as quick parts. Once it is created, I’ll open this document with my local copy of Microsoft Office Word. I will choose to create a new document in the library that I will name “Report Template”. This requires Word to be aware of the columns. Now I have to add these columns as quick parts to my document. I have my library “Test Reports” with a few extra columns that I’m going to add to my Word document. Office 365 is almost the same as SharePoint 2013 so my SharePoint 2013 Training directly applies to it. For this demonstration, I’ll be using my Office 365 account. This is important because it allows us to add the metadata columns as Word quick parts. The first step is to have a SharePoint library that you want to use with the appropriate columns that you want linked to your document. There are a few steps involved in getting it setup with a small change in how individuals operate to get this to work smoothly. Unfortunately, this ability to link information within a document to metadata outside the document (but still inside SharePoint) is not intuitive or automatic. One of the wonderful tools that comes from using SharePoint as more than a file store is being able to add SharePoint metadata to Word documents. It just requires a little push in the right direction and a little knowledge on what CAN be done. “Why would you want to use SharePoint for storing documents? We’ve always used file shares and it works just fine.” Why indeed? The simplest answer is that there is so much more that SharePoint CAN do.

Insert into word visio