I am working on a sharepoint server 2016 on-premise server. and our customer have asked us if there is a way to import excel sheets into sharepoint sites. now i find this quick and easy way :-
- add an App of type "Import Spreadsheet", give it the same name as the excel sheet.
- browse for the excel sheet from my PC and click on import.
where the results will be as follow:-
- a new custom list was created.
- all the excel sheet columns were created as list columns.
- no content type was added to the list.where all the list columns were added directly inside the Item list content type
now i got a quick list created in almost no time and no effort.. but i have been working on SharePoint for around 4 years, and i always do the following when creating lists:-
- create all the columns as site columns. since site columns can be re-used on multiple lists. while the "Import Spreadsheet" will create the fields as list columns. also site columns will have managed properties created automatically for them unlike list columns.
- i always group my custom site columns inside custom content types. and i always have a hierarchy between the content types to ease re-usability. while when using "Import Spreadsheet" no content type will be created.
so can anyone adivce on the below 2 points:-
- should we depend on the "Import Spreadsheet" to import excel sheets as lists inside sharepoint? keeping in mind the limitations i mentioned above?
- will it be a better appraoch to manually create an empty list . where i can manually define site columns which represents the excel sheet columns, and group my custom site columns into site content types and reuse existing custom columns if applicable? then using the quick grid to copy/paste the excel sheet data inside the new list..
i am really confused if using "Import Spreadsheet" should be prevented or not? i can see it will provide a fast way to import existing excel sheets and data,, but at the same time it will provide poor design since it will always create list columns which can not be reused and also will not create and arrange columns inside content types,which is considered a bad design in sharepoint...so can anyone adivce on this please?