HELP!!! My list is broken! Where did my list menu go?

This week, we encountered an interesting situation dealing with lists and list views. At first glance, looking at the list, we saw the following:

This is supposed to be the list view of the PMA Contacts list, but as you can see, nothing really shows up. The next step was to place the page into Edit mode through “Site Actions/Edit Page”.

Once the page was in edit mode, we could see the web part zones as shown below.
 Can you see what is wrong here?

If you said that the web part was missing, give yourself 5 points!  In order to restore the view properly, we need to add the list view web part back to the page. We start by clicking the “Add a Web Part” area.

Once the web part list page opens, we want to take a look at the closed web parts so we click the “Advanced Web Part gallery and options” link at the bottom right of the window.

In the web part gallery browser window, you can see the “Closed Web Parts” gallery noting one web part. That means that on this page, there is a web part that was closed. Select the “Closed Web Parts” gallery.

As you can see in the above screen shot, the PMA Contact list view web part shows up in the closed list. Select the “PMA Contacts” web part and drag it over the page.

As you can see, the PMA Contact list view is now restored again. Simply click “Exit Edit Mode” in the top right under “Site Actions” to return to the regular list view as seen below.

Now that we fixed the problem, the question arises… just how did the list get to that state in the first place? It’s actually much simpler than you would imagine and it probably happened with just a single missed click. To re-break the list view, click “Site Actions/Edit Page”.

With the page in edit mode, simply click the closing “X” button on the top right of PMA Contacts.

You should now have the same broken view that we started with, so as you can see, just one simple click on an “X” can cause some faster heart beats. 

Cheers
C