Don’t hide my announcements!

I’ve been playing with the different views in Sharepoint, trying to sort out the Intranet homepage over at St. Peter’s.

The problem they have is that they don’t want announcements to appear on the main screen, but they also don’t want to have to click through to read the announcements.

I set up a new view using just the headers and the creation date, which seemed to be fine until Jason posted an announcement to say that the front page had been changed. Humorously, this didn’t actually appear.

After emailing me, I discovered that if I set the view to not show posts that have expired, I automatically exclude posts with no expiry date. Somewhat of a nuisance as the there is nothing in sharepoint that allows you to check for null dates.

A quick Google later, and I found This Much I Know, which pointed me in the direction of creating a calculated column and then putting some code to place a new date in, if the expiry is blank.

=OR([Expires] = "", [Expires] >= [Today])

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I found where you create those columns and set it up. I reset the view on the front page, and voila! It worked.