This was a question that came up – why can’t ListView web parts that you put on a page through the browser have a View menu? There’s no view menu, and they can’t have one. However, if you go to a List, such as a Document Library, they do have view menus.

Web Part put on Page:

Document Libary:

The interesting thing is, though, that the page you see in the Library uses exactly the same web part as the one you can add to a page. Therefore there is clearly some way of making the web part show that menu, but that you can’t configure that. Why not, what gives?

Well, it suddenly hit me – the views that you create for a list or library actually create new pages. They’ve their own URLs, and are actually their own pages. You can see this through SharePoint Designer. Anyway, all the View menu really does is navigate you between pages. Thus, in a Listview web part that you create on a page this menu would, instead of just changing the view in that web part, take you to another entirely different page. That’s probably not what users would expect! Consequently, the view menu is unavailable in the ListView web parts that you create!