Exploring the SharePoint Online Interface

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the last lesson I showed you how to access SharePoint.
• 00:07 Now what I want to do is, jump into a SharePoint site and
• 00:11 take a look around the interface.
• 00:13 So, we really want to become familiar with the different parts of
• 00:18 a SharePoint site and how to navigate.
• 00:21 So currently, I'm at the SharePoint start screen.
• 00:24 And this is where you can see an overview of all of the sites that you've recently
• 00:28 accessed and all of the sites that you follow.
• 00:31 And I'll talk more about following a bit later on.
• 00:33 So if you take a look at my start page, you can see I have a recent section.
• 00:38 And this is showing me all of the different sites that I've accessed
• 00:42 recently.
• 00:43 And then right at the top here,
• 00:44 it's telling me that I'm following the Microsoft 365 rollout site.
• 00:49 And this is actually the site that I'm going to be using throughout this course.
• 00:53 This is a site that I created in a similar way to the practice site.
• 00:57 And because I created it, I'm automatically following it.
• 01:01 So, let's click on the link and dive into the team sites.
• 01:04 So this is basically the structure that all of the home pages for
• 01:08 each site take on.
• 01:09 And if you remember, right in the introduction, I mentioned that there
• 01:12 are two different ways that you can view a SharePoint site, classic and modern.
• 01:16 Now, the way that I have my SharePoint set up, is to default to the best view for
• 01:21 the particular page that I'm on.
• 01:23 And currently, I can see that my home page is showing using the modern experience.
• 01:28 And as we go through you'll learn to differentiate between modern and classic.
• 01:31 The classic experience does look a little bit more old school then this nice, slick,
• 01:36 modern interface.
• 01:38 So, running across the top we have the header.
• 01:40 We know that we're in SharePoint, I have a search bar at the top,
• 01:44 which we can use to search for files, and documents, and people, and
• 01:47 all different kinds of things within SharePoint.
• 01:51 And then over on the right hand side, we have a little cog icon where we can access
• 01:55 our settings and we're going to be diving in and out of here.
• 01:59 We have a little help button.
• 02:01 And then I have access to view my account and my profile.
• 02:05 Then all the way over on the left hand side, we have this main menu.
• 02:10 This is how I like to think of it.
• 02:11 We have the main menu and then we have our site menu.
• 02:15 So, if you ever want to get back to that SharePoint start page,
• 02:19 you can click that home icon and you can then dive in to a different site.
• 02:24 The icon underneath is going to show you all of your sites.
• 02:27 So, this is the My Sites button,
• 02:29 is going to show you all of the sites that you've created.
• 02:33 So whilst you might be a member of all these different sites, you're only going
• 02:38 to find the ones that you have specifically created underneath My Sites.
• 02:42 The next button down is going to show any news.
• 02:46 And you can see here, there are two news articles that I've posted to this site.
• 02:51 And then finally at the bottom, we have a My Files section.
• 02:54 So, any files that we have within this site, you can access them very quickly and
• 02:59 easily from here, so a super useful little menu bar.
• 03:03 Now, let's just jump back into our site again and
• 03:06 take a look at this secondary menu.
• 03:08 So this menu just here is what we call the Quick Launch menu.
• 03:12 And it allows you to dive in and dive out of different parts of your site.
• 03:17 Now, I will say that when you're looking at your practice site, it's probably not
• 03:22 going to look exactly like mine does just here because I've added in lots of things.
• 03:26 I've added in some lists, I've added in some libraries.
• 03:29 I've done a certain amount of customization.
• 03:31 And I'm going to show you how to do all of these things as we go through the course.
• 03:36 What you should see at least, is home, conversations, documents, notebook, pages.
• 03:42 You won't see any of these, but you will see site contents and
• 03:46 recycle bin and these are all links to different things.
• 03:50 And right to the bottom, we have a little edit button as well.
• 03:54 So if I decide that I want to rename any of these pages, I can,
• 03:58 simply by double clicking and changing the display name.
• 04:01 I can do things like reorder, so I can move up, move down.
• 04:05 I can do things like make them sub links, or
• 04:08 I can remove items from this quick launch menu as well.
• 04:11 And we're going to be doing a lot of that as we go through this course.
• 04:15 So everything in this menu is editable.
• 04:18 Running horizontally across the top, we then have another menu.
• 04:21 This a very menu driven system.
• 04:24 And this menu will change depending on the part of SharePoint
• 04:27 that you're currently in.
• 04:29 So, because I'm on the homepage when I click the New button, it says you can
• 04:34 create a new list, document library, page, news post, so on and so forth.
• 04:39 I can see the page details if I want to.
• 04:42 And if I'm interested in data analytics for this particular page, I can pull up
• 04:46 a nice little analytics viewer that's going to show me things like page views,
• 04:51 page viewers, average time spent on pages, things like that.
• 04:55 And because I'm the only one using this site,
• 04:57 then this isn't particularly insightful.
• 05:00 But if you have a site that has many different members,
• 05:02 this can be super helpful.
• 05:04 And then finally in the middle the main bulk of this page,
• 05:08 is made up of different web parts.
• 05:11 I'm going to talk about web parts a lot later on in the course.
• 05:14 I can add news to this homepage, I can see all of my recent activity.
• 05:19 I can add some quick links to important sites in the top right hand corner, and
• 05:24 I can also store documents in here in a document library and easily access them.
• 05:30 And everything on this page is customizable.
• 05:32 You'll see that we have an edit link in the top right hand corner,
• 05:36 which will allow us to add and remove different web parts and
• 05:40 rearrange everything that we see on here.
• 05:42 And of course, we can also customize the theme, the look and
• 05:46 feel, the colors that we're using, and brand and
• 05:49 style the entire site to match our organization or our project.
• 05:53 Now, you will find as we click on different parts of the SharePoint site,
• 05:57 there are different menus that come up.
• 05:59 But I'll talk about those and when we get to that.
• 06:02 But for now, that is your basic navigation when it comes to your SharePoint site.

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