I had to explain to one of my colleagues that SharePoint Lists could be presented as more than just, well, lists – so here are my examples…
Normal List View
Simple – items are presented in a list with columns. It can have default sorting, or users can choose their own sorting and filtering:
Grouped Views
You can have Grouping of results, and for the groups perform functions, such as averaging, totalling, counting, standard deviation, etc.. It’s actually quite powerful…
List and Details
This view shows a list of the item’s Titles on the left, and moving your mouse over them shows the details of the item in the right hand part of the page. Interesting, though I’ve not figured out when I’d use it yet…
Boxed
The boxed view shows each item as a box containing all of the item’s details. The main idea I’ve had with this one is that it’d be good for showing contact details – it looks quite a lot like Outlook’s contacts page.
There are several other types of view, but most of these are variations on this theme. What’s a really interesting possibility is whether one could create your own View Styles… … I might have an investigate.
Andy Burns' Blog 
[…] I’ve mentioned the intriguing idea of creating a custom view style for SharePoint 2007. Well, it turns out that instructions exist for how to do this in SharePoint 2003 – but I […]
I’m wondering if there are certain situations where some of the SharePoint View Styles are not available. For instance, I have a situation where I want to use the “Boxed” style; however it is not listed in the “View Style” section of the Edit View window. My hunch is that this is due to the fact that the SharePoint list is created from an InfoPath library, however I have not been able to find any references to this limitation.
Hi Adam,
Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s the case. I’ve been looking at picture libraries lately, and they have a different set of view styles…