When creating library views in SharePoint you might have noticed that you can group by virtually any field available in a certain document plus a whole host of SP specific fields such as ‘Checked Out To’ yet for some reason you can’t group by the Content Type of a document, theirs no obvious reason I can see why this would be the case but luckily there is a pretty simple workaround!

To do this will require SharePoint Designer which can be freely downloaded on the Microsoft site here. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this modification will be lost if the view is modified afterwards within SharePoint.

Grouping by Content Type

1. Create the view you want in SharePoint as you usually would setting the Group By property to something simple such as ‘Created’.

2. Save the view as per usual then you want to open the view in SharePoint Designer. The easiest way to do this is to open the Library tab at the top-left of SP then click the small drop-down right of the Modify View button as shown below.

3. Click Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced) to open the view is Sp Designer.

4. You now want to find the code displayed in the image below, it is generally if not always found on line 33 and will usually require scrolling right so see.

5. Now modify the Name=”Created” part of the code so it reads Name=”ContentType”.

6. Save the view by clicking the save button in SP Designer or simply pressing CTRL + S on your keyboard then close the designer.

7. Refresh the view in SharePoint and it should now be grouping all documents by their Content Types as shown below.