Can views in a list have descriptions?

Question

So lets say you have a list and that list has multiple views. Is there a way to give each view a description? Whether that is in the drop down list of views as you hover over it or when you open a specific view.

I am a fairly new site curator responsible for maintaining a lot of lists and one particular list has 15+ views and not all the views are named based on what they are showing.

I have infopath and SharePoint designer installed but have not used them. So really looking for a none coding option if possible. Maybe this can be done with a CEWP (not that i know the code for it).

SharePoint 2007 list

Thanks ahead of time.

Oct 30: Learned that SharePoint Designer/Infopath is locked down (for me at least).

Answer 1

The views themselves can't have descriptions, but if you're satisfied with the desciption being on the view page you have a couple of options:

1. You can use SharePoint designer to modify the page generated by the view to contain any text/html you want. This has the downside of customizing the page, which may cause problems during upgrades.

2. You can edit the page and insert a CEWP on the page with any text/html. This has the downside of confusing code using certain methods (SPWeb.GetListFromUrl/SPWeb.GetListFromWebPartPageUrl) which assumes that the first web part on the page can be used to identify the list.

The steps to achive number two are:

1. Create the view unless it already exist
2. Go to the view
3. Select "Site Actions" | "Edit Page"
4. Click "Add a Web Part" (above the "real" content of the view)
5. Scroll down to the "Miscellaneus" section and put a check mark in front of "Content Editor Web Part"
6. Click "Add"
7. Click the link "open the tool pane" or in the title part of the CEWP select "Edit" | "Modify Shared Web Part"
8. Click "Rich Text Editor..."
9. Create your desciption to shown above the view
10. Click OK (twice)
11. Click "Exit Edit Mode" (below "Site Actions")
12. Repeat for other views

Answer 2

You can add the same list to a page multiple times, edit those web parts to show different views and change the web part titles to describe the views.