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Paulette Perhach's avatar
Paulette Perhach
Copper Contributor
Nov 15, 2018

Seeing information on both lists?

Hi All!

I'm a freelance writer organizing my life on Sharepoint. I have a list called "Stories," where I keep all my ideas for articles. Once I pitch them to magazines, I have a separate list called "Submission Tracker," where I create a record the publication, which article I submitted, the date, and the status (waiting, accepted, rejected.)

I would like to see on my Stories list where I've pitched each story. Is it possible to have a lookup fill in this information, or what's the best way to see that?

 

Thanks!

  • Although you've already responded positively to a reply, I'm going to go ahead and offer a different view. Two views, actually. Bear in mind that I am hardly a tech consultant; but I use SPO extensively, too, and so have a "prosumer" knowledge of what it can do.

     

    If you want to do what you asked about, which I don't really recommend, then the answer is yes, you can easily have a lookup in the "submissions" list to pick an entry from the "stories" list, assuming that they are in the same site. But, as slick as that might be, it might also be more complicated than necessary, and at the cost of some functionality.

     

    If, instead, you expand your "stories" list to include columns for submissions (dates, contacts, status, whatever), you could not only keep it all in one place, but also search and filter in ways that you couldn't do if the lists were separate. Additionally, you could more easily use the list from your phone, because the mobile SharePoint app has no functionality as of this writing (under iOS) to use a lookup.

     

    If you want to use the lookup feature, you could have a lookup from the now-expanded "stories" list to, say, publishers. Then you could separately keep a list of promising places where you'd like to submit or have submitted.

     

  • Matt Coats's avatar
    Matt Coats
    Iron Contributor

    Assuming the possibility exists that you send articles to multiple magazines, you have a many-to-one scenario that makes tying back submission information to your Stories list very difficult--you'd have to add fields like "magazine 1, magazine 2, ..." to account for articles getting sent to multiple places.

     

    I think you might be better off using your Submission Tracker list to see where you've sent submissions. With that model, you're treating every submission as its own item, and in doing so, you can use filters or grouped views to discover where your articles were submitted.

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