Question: I have following problem with my Sharepoint website. (The view cannot be displayed because the number of lookup and workflow columns it contains exceeds the threshold (8) enforced by the administrator) but any solution I have found online points me to change the throttle settings in web applications settings under central administration. My problem is I simply do not have Central Administration > Web Applications etc... The problem is appearing on a document library for me and I have explored very settings options on the site but cannot find anything about trottleing or column threshold. I just have Site Settings > Library settings etc...

How can I increase the column threshold in this case?

I am working on a Sharepoint website and have Workspace and Designer 2010.

Answer: 
Application Management > Manage Web Application.
In the Web Application list, select the web application you need.
Then go to General Settings > Resource Throttling.
In the Resource Throttling window, scroll down to List View Lookup Threshold and change the value to the number that suits your needs.
Use caution when changing this setting:

This does have a very significant impact on SQL performance. In the article below you can see that in this persons tests, using 8 and executing the query there was about 7% CPU utilization on SQL. Moving that to 10 and executing a query that pulls back 10 columns increases the CPU utilization to almost 40%.
<http://sympmarc.com/2012/07/23/sharepoints-list-view-lookup-threshold-and-why-we-dont-change-it/> 

You can also read the whitepaper here: <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608068(office.14).aspx>