Modifying the left navigation

When you create a new Team site, SharePoint also creates a navigation menu toward the left of the page. This menu is called theQuick Launchmenu. The purpose of the Quick Launch menu is to help the users of your Team site quickly get to the different areas within your site.

In this recipe, we will learn how to modify the Quick Launch menu in your site and how to add a link to an existing list within the site.

Getting ready

You will need to have the Edit, Design,or Full Controlpermission levels in your site to be able to modify the Quick Launch menu. The site you are modifying should be a Team site or a Team site registered as a hub.

How to do it...

To modify the Quick Launch menu of your site, follow these steps:

That's it! You just learned how to modify the Quick Launch menu for your site.

How it works...

The purpose of a Team site is to facilitate collaboration within a team. From that perspective, the users of your site are expected to navigate more within the different areas within the site than across other sites. The Quick Launch navigation menu helps to facilitate the process of browsing to relevant content within the site for such team members. Just like the top navigation menu, the Quick Launch menu also allows multiple levels of submenus to help you better organize the navigation within your site.

Note that in addition to defining your custom link, you can also use some pre-defined links, such as the ones shown in the following screenshot:

Clicking on Notebook in the preceding screenshot, for example, will create a link to the OneNote notebook for the site.

Finally, if you need to, you can completely disable the left navigation menu by browsing to the Navigation Elementssetting underSite Settings and deselecting the Enable Quick Launch option, as shown in the following screenshot:

Note that the Enable Tree View option shown in the preceding screenshot is deprecated in the modern experience and is therefore not discussed here. A few classic pages, such as the Site settings page, which we will learn about in the Viewing and changing site settings recipe, later in this chapter, will still show the tree view if this option is checked. However, modern pages will not show the tree view, even if it is selected here.

See also...