Modify SharePoint website Quick Launch

So after a series of non Technical posts, I am back at writing some technical ones, starting with this one. I was in a Solution Manager role for the last 6 months so I wasn’t getting my hands dirty with tech stuff as much. But now I am back into a Developer role so hopefully there would be many more tech posts from now on.

To start with, I would like to talk about a very basic requirement in SharePoint – adding new links to the Quick launch or modifying the existing links. For the uninitiated, Quick launch is the set of links we get on every page (as long as Quick launch is enabled for a web page; I will be talking about enabling Quick launch for new pages in another post) on the left hand side, just below the title of the site. Commonly, you would have links like Shared Documents, Tasks, Calendar etc. in here by default when you create a basic site. Now you might not want some of these links to appear because your site won’t be using a particular feature, for example, you don’t need the calendar and hence, having the Calendar link in the Quick launch would be meaningless. Or suppose you have created a new page of your own and want it to appear in the Quick launch so that users can visit this page from any page they are currently browsing. Both these requirements can be easily accomplished by editing the Quick launch section.

Here is how you can play around with the Quick launch:

1. From any page, click on Site Actions in the top right corner and then click on Site Settings from the drop down that appears(you need to be an admin to have this option available to you)
2. In the Site settings page, under the Look & Feel section, there would be a link either called Navigation or Quick Launch, depending on the version of SharePoint Server you are working with
3. On clicking this link, a page would open that would show the existing Quick launch items along with options to add a heading, a new link, edit the existing links, change the order of links etc
4. After making the changes, click OK to save the changes and you should be seeing the changes on any of the pages with Quick launch from now onwards