I figured I’d write a small piece about the quick launch in SharePoint. For starters, the quick launch is the vertical menu that appears on the left side of your pages. It’s pretty useful because it gives you quick access to all of the resources within your team site.
quick launch menu
The quick launch allows you to view all of the content in your team site. By default when a list is created, it automatically will appear in the quick launch. You can change that – but we’ll discuss that later.
The quick launch automatically breaks down your lists by their type. For example, all document libraries will be listed under documents. Calendars, Tasks, custom lists…etc will be listed under Lists. Message Boards are listed under discussions. If you have subsites – they will appear under sites.
There are two other options – People and Groups – and Recycle Bin. The people and groups allows you to see the people and groups that are in your team site. Depending on your rights, you may be able to only see people or you may have rights to set permissions.
The recycle bin is self explanatory – it’s the recycle bin.
So you might be asking – what’s the point of all of this? Imagine if you have created a team site where you are using dozens of lists on different pages. You may not want to list 36 lists on the main page of your team site. Furthermore, you may not want your navigation to drive users to that long list. In such cases, you will want to hide that from the quick launch and have people use a navigation of your choice. Just to mention, a quick and dirty way to do that is to create a links list that has hyperlinks to your new pages. This gives an alternate navigation that’s easy to manage.
Hiding lists from the quick launch
Options to hide quick launch
If you want to hide your list from the quick launch, go to list settings –> title, description, and navigation. Then update your settings to select to not display the item on the quick launch. This will hide the list from the quick launch.
Changing what appears in the quick launch
Beyond just configuring a list to appear or not appear in the quick launch – you can also add hyperlinks to the quick launch. You can do this by going to Site Actions –> Under Look and Feel – clicking on Navigation . Here you can change the current navigation – aka the quick launch. You can add headings and then also add hyperlinks to any items.
Navigation Options
A real world application of this would be creating pages to house additional lists. Instead of linking people directly to the lists, you can put the links to the pages that display the lists. Then you would configure the pages to have specific views for your lists. This allows you to tailor your end users’ experience by formatting the way the list appears for them. You can also use the navigation options to change the order of items that appear in the quick launch to the left.
You can remove items from the quick launch or navigation this way. This means that you have two ways to remove an item from the quick launch. If it is a list, you can do it from the list settings (described above) . If it is a link you’ve added, you have to use this menu.
In case you were wondering what the difference between global navigation and current navigation is : The global navigation is the horizontal navigation bar. The current navigation is your quick launch. We won’t go into the global navigation now, but at least we’ve covered how to update the links and options in the quick launch. Hopefully this gives you a good picture of what is possible with changing the navigation on your team site.