Practical Tweaks: creating a Social Security Number column
Many people find SharePoint to be somewhat limiting in its out-of-the-box functionality, but really, a creative approach can take you pretty far. Say, for example, you need to create a column to hold Social Security numbers (assuming you've worked out all the relevant security issues). You have a field that requires numeric validation, but it has a specific length requirement, which sounds more like string validation. Here's what I came up with off the cuff:
- Create a new Site Column. Add it to whatever group makes sense (I picked Core Contact and Calendar Columns).
- Give it a name and a datatype of Number.
- Specify a maximum of 999999999 to take care of the ten-digit formatting issue.
- Explicitly set Number of decimal places to zero.
- Click OK.
That's it. Next time we'll look at masking/validating your user's input for this field.
