Use Links List to Add Navigation to a Page

Say you have a lot of lists and libraries on your site. How do you easily allow people to navigate your site?

What I’m going to do is, create a List, then use web parts on a page to display the list items in groups.

Create a new Links List
Site Actions –> View All Site Content –> Create –> Links
I named my list Navigation.
Once you have created the list, click on the List tab in the ribbon, then select Create Column.
Column name: Category
Require that this column contains information: Yes
Type each choice on a separate line: Fruit and Veggie (you can enter whatever you want)
Click OK.

Once you have setup the list, add a few items to it.
Simply click +Add new link to add an item.

As you can see here, I’m adding a link to my Onion library, description is Onion, and my Category is Veggie.

I went ahead and added two more items to the list.

In the next step, I’m going to create a new web part page to house the navigation. You can use an existing page and skip this step.

To create a new page
Site Actions –> View All Site Content –> Create –> Web Part Page
Click Create, then on the next page, you will want to give your page a name.
Then select the layout you want to use. For step, I select the first layout listed.
Lastly, select a Save Location for your page and click Create.

When the page opens, you will have some web part zones on the page. These zones are used to add web parts to.
Click Add a Web Part, the ribbon will change to display the available web parts. In the Categories section, select Lists and Libraries, then select Navigation (or whatever you named your Links List). Once selected click Add.

Now we want to edit the web part to filter what is displayed, and change the web part name.
To edit the web part, move your mouse over the top right corn of the web part. You will then see a small triangle appear, click on it. This will bring up the options menu for the web part. To edit the web part, click Edit Web Part.

Look at the right side of your screen, you should see the web part proprieties window.
In the Appearance section, I changed the name to Veggie.

Scroll up a little.

In the List Views section, click on Edit the current view. When the Edit View page opens you will see an option that allows you to add or remove columns from the web parts view, and others. Scroll down to the Filter section. The first dropdown box, select the Category field, leave the next dropdown to is equal to, and then type in the next box the value you want to filter by.

Scroll to the bottom, and click OK
Once you return to the page, you will now see that the web part is filtered by the value we entered into the filter section of edit view page.

To add another web part, edit the page again, and follow the above steps to filter by another value.

Final product.

Let me know if you have any questions.

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