How To Effectively Use SharePoint List Views - Part 3 (Grouping and Summarizing)

By: Rahul Mehta   |   Updated: 2010-08-18   |   Comments   |   Related: > Sharepoint Design

Problem

In a SharePoint List, sometimes you need to display information in groups and perform mathematical operations like sum, averages and others. For instance, what if you want to see the total monthly salary paid to employees for an individual department?

Solution

SharePoint List Views provide features like "Group by" and "Totals" in order to show advanced results.

I have created a sample employee list which contains basic employee information like name, id, age, department and salary.

For a summation of salary, click on the "Modify this View" at the top right near the view name, "EmployeeView" in our case.

Move to the "Totals" area.

All column names will be listed on which mathematical operations can be performed. You can perform different mathematical calculations like Average, Maximum, Minimum and others. For our case, Select "Sum" in the Total column next to "Salary".

Click on "OK" and now you will be able to see the total of salary for all departments.

In order to display totals for individual departments, click on "modify view" and move to the "Group By" Section.

Select an appropriate field in the "Group By" field -- like "Department" in our case.

Click "OK" to apply changes.

At first you will be able to see the totals for all departments.

To see totals for individual department, "Expand" individual departments by clicking on the "+" sign.

There you have it!

Next Steps

• Create List views by implementing several combinations of Totals, Group By and others to calculate information in different groups.
• Use other features like Mobile View, Item Limits and others to provide an enriched view for specific information.
• Check out MSSQLTips.com for great information about Microsoft SQL Server.

About the author

Rahul Mehta is a Project Architect/Lead working at Tata Consultancy Services focusing on ECM.

This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.

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