I have run into this at a few clients over the past few weeks, so I decided to add it to my blog so I can reference it in the future. In a nut shell, we are looking for a way to build a simple FAQ list that users can reference as needed. For my clients this has ranged from an HR FAQ list to a simple SharePoint FAQ list. We want users to be able to filter the FAQs by category or view the entire list at once.
This approach is definitely nothing super fancy, but in most cases it will get the job done to get started, you will need to create two lists:
| Categories | FAQ List |
| Custom List Add an entry for each category you want to use to group the FAQs |
Custom List Add Column: Answer – Multiple Text Add Column: Category – Lookup to Categories |
Once you have the two list populated you can add the web parts to an existing page or create a new page for the FAQs. The screenshot below is an example of a web part page. On the page you will need to add three web parts:
1. Content Editor Web Part: You can use this to add a link that reloads the page with no filter.
2. FAQs Web Part
3. Categories Web Part
Once you have the web parts loaded you can configure the web part connections so that when a categories option is selected, only those FAQs are displayed.
Here is the page in edit mode.
Overall, this is a pretty quick simple out of the box solution. You want to be careful also that this approach can scale to meet your needs. If you know that you will have 20 different categories, then this option is probably not going to work for your specific need. You may also decide that you don’t like the radio buttons or the fact that the category is displayed in both web parts. In that case you would need to modify the web parts using SharePoint Designer and Data View Web Parts.
Jennifer Ann Mason 