Why Lookup columns?

Quoted from Jason’s article How to make a SharePoint list look the way you want at Get the Point

Lookups are one of the more complicated aspects of list making, but can be really useful if you have a process which requires items of different types to be linked to each other. Let’s take this example: you have a list of employees and a list of possible interests. You want to store other information about the employees and about their interests, but you want to link them together.

• One of the reasons we use Lookup columns in our SharePoint site is because it’s easy to give permissions to a user to update the list where a Lookup column get’s it’s data from, giving them the opportunity to add lines to the selection box.

• Another reason is that the chosen value stays linked to the List where the Lookup column get’s it’s data from, for example, if you change the description of a certain item in the List all references to this value get changed too, this is not the case with a Choice field.

The problems I’m experiencing:

• Let’s say you use one of your Lookup columns in a Content Type and you want the user to have the ability to select a value in a Word 2007 document linked to that Content Type. You would think that adding the Lookup column with a QuickPart to your template (linked to the Content Type) would do the trick. Well it doesn’t … it only seems to display the ID of the selected record in stead of the actual values (Title column) in the documents created from the template?

• You can’t use a the “Contains” or “Begins with” filter on a Lookup column while creating a View. “Is equal to”, “Is not equal to”, … are working though. If you try to pick “Contains” you get a “The filter type you selected cannot be used with this type of column.” error.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Best Practices Conference Notes (London 2009) – Day 1