Previous post in the series: Glossary

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Everything you need to know about table view

In this post, we'll discuss how we can make our lives easier when we're looking at Tables in ServiceNow. By the end of today's lesson, you'll be a wiz when it comes to working from the table view.

Basic terminology

Hopefully, you've already checked out my Glossary post (if you haven't, click the link at the very top of this post). It will make understanding some of these concepts a little easier. But I'm going to throw some new terms at you today -- straight from ServiceNow's docs. Check out their graphics which break down what each of the parts of the table view are called. Try not to get overwhelmed--I'll point you towards what you really need to know in the next section.

Breaking it down

Now that we have some of the terminology defined, let's check out the table view in my PDI for the User [sys_user] table and show you what actually matters to you as a newbie.

This looks like... a normal table view. It pretty much hasn't been touched. But it's not what we need in our real-life scenario. So how do we get what we need?

One way to get what we need is to...

Use the hamburger menu

Top-left of the Title bar is what's commonly referred to as the Hamburger button (pictured below). If you click this, you'll see a menu with a few options.

You can do quite a few actions from here:

1. You can change the View that you're looking at
2. You can load a saved Filter (more on that a little bit later)
3. You can Group By a certain field
4. You can Show a different number of records in your table (default is 20, but you can go up to 100!)
5. You can Refresh List
6. You can Create a Favorite (more on that later)

For Views -- sometimes the system admins create a view to show certain columns. But if you don't have what you near, fear not, because you can always...

Personalize the list

Maybe the way the table is laid out doesn't make the most sense to you. Or maybe you're not seeing the columns you truly want to. You can customize the columns you see and the order of your columns right from this page. To do this, look for the Settings/Cog icon on the far-right side of your Title bar:

When you click on that, a pop-up will appear that allows you to re-arrange the columns you see on the screen.

Pro tip: make sure the two highlighted checkboxes are checked.

Filter on the list

There's a few different ways to filter on your list view. You can...

Use the filter in the Title bar

Click on the little filter icon and you'll be able to search on any column in the table. You can change the middle dropdown to change how strict your search is (you could do a contains search, an is search, a starts with search, etc.) By default, it'll be Starts with. You can also use the AND and OR operations to string together more complex queries.

Also, you can also Save your filter if you want to quickly access it later. This will then display in the hamburger menu we saw earlier.

Make sure you click the Run button to see your changes apply to the table below.

Note: I will be describing additional filter methods below. But you can always see what filters you have applied by clicking the icon described above. The methods below will get added as AND conditions to your filter.

Use the search bar

You can also type directly into the search bar below a column name. (If you don't see it, click the magnifying glass next to the column headings.) Forget that search bar in the title bar exists. It's pretty much useless.

By default, this will search your condition as starts with. So in my scenario, it's searching for first names that start with Jackson. You can toss different wildcard characters into the search bar to change how it interprets your search. For example, if you use an asterisk (*), you turn your search into a contains search:

Right-clicking on a field

If you right-click on a field, you'll have the option to Show matching or Filter out. This is a super simple way to remove results that you don't want.

Breadcrumbs

Below your filter icon, but above your column headers, you may notice a list of text that indicates what filters you have. If you want to get rid of an individual filer without opening your filter list, you can click on the > icon to remove the next condition.

If you click on the text before or after the > symbol, you'll remove all filters after that point. So, in the screenshot above, if I clicked on All, my list would have zero filters applied. If I clicked on Name contains son, it would simply remove my Department filter.

Sorting

You can do this from the filter menu, but sometimes you need to quickly filter and don't want to bother with a lot of clicks. All it takes is one: directly on the column name. Click on a column name once to sort it Ascending, and again to sort it Descending.

You can also right click on the column name (or click the vertical three dots that appear if you hover over a column name) to sort and take other actions.

Group by

You can also right-click a column name to quickly group by that column. This is helpful if you want to see similarities in data. For example, I've grouped by Department in the screenshot below, and the system has organized all of the different departments into clean folders that I can expand/collapse.

Pro tip: You can also sort your groups by clicking on the icon highlighted in blue:

Editing from a list

If you followed my pro-tip in the personalize list section, you'll be able to edit certain fields from the list view. This makes updating records super easy -- you don't have to go into each record individually if you need to make a quick change.

Note: Some fields are not editable from the list. This may be due to them having read-only properties or extra security controls.

Pro tip: You can shift and drag your (clicked) mouse down multiple fields to list-edit multiple records at the same time.

Sometimes, you just need more info

Sometimes, you can't do it all from the list view. And that's okay! If you click on the farthest-left field value (abel.tuter's username, in the screenshot below), you can open that record. Also, if you hover over the row, you'll also see a little (i) icon appear, which allows you to preview some information in the record:

Additional resources

ServiceNow has a great YouTube video that covers most (if not all) of what I described above.

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Next post in series: Forms 101