SharePoint 2010 : Specify the Item Limit for a View

For example, suppose you have an announcements list that is used a lot. With at least three announcements made every day, after a year, the list will contain more than 1,000 announcements. Displaying all the announcements in one page makes it difficult for users to focus on the current announcements.

A common solution to this problem is to create a view with an item limit that displays, for example, only the last three announcements (see Figure 1). To do this, you need to make sure the view sorts the announcements by their creation dates (or modified dates) and then set the item limit to 3.

Figure 1. An announcement list showing only the last three announcements.

To specify an item limit for a view, scroll to the Item Limit section in the view creation page and expand it by using the plus sign next to the section title. You then have the option of specifying how many items should be displayed and whether the view should limit itself to that number or display the items in groups of that number (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Specifying the item limit on a view.

If you want to let users see the old announcements, you can choose the Display Items in Batches of the Specified Size option. This makes the view show the items in pages and allows the users to go back and forth between the pages, showing at one time only the number you specified (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 An announcement list showing the announcements in groups of three.