View all site content

- [Instructor] When you visit a SharePoint site, you don't necessarily see everything that's on the site here on the home page or even in this list of contents here. The site developer or site owner makes choices about which particular site features are available here on the home page or listed here in the quick launch menu. And that's an important decision, because this page here is prime real estate. Everyone who comes to this site except through a specific link to a document or a library comes here to this site. So the site might have five document libraries and 20 custom lists, and you don't want to crowd 'em all onto this page. You want to make sure that the items that are listed here and the items that are displayed on the home page of a site are items that you want to feature, items that users need to have fast access to. And you want to make sure that the home page itself retains an uncluttered look. Your site might also have libraries you don't want your users to casually access, and in that case, you simply don't list them here. There's one document library listed. There may be others. But if content isn't visible here, then how do you get to it without either bookmarking the URL or memorizing where that content is? The answer is here, this link that is Site contents. Now, you'll occasionally visit a site where there isn't even a Site contents link, which makes it harder to find items that aren't explicitly listed. Which is the reason someone would do that. However, you can always try going to the settings gear in the upper right-hand corner, and you'll usually find Site contents here. It's easy to remove here, less easy to remove from the settings menu in the upper right. And both of these links go to the same place. When I click Site contents, what I get is a list of everything that's in the site. So for example, Budget Documents is a document library in this site, but it's not available out here for easy access. Because that library is a little bit more hidden away. In addition to the contents of this site, sites can also have subsites. When we create sites today, we're not usually creating sites that are subsites of other sites. That's pretty unusual. But if you're working at an organization that's been using SharePoint for awhile, the way we formerly created SharePoint sites was in a hierarchy. So all but one of the individual sites in a SharePoint collection would be a subsite of something else. But if you look and there are subsites, they'll be listed here again, more a legacy feature than a feature that we currently have today. So if you knew, for example, that you needed to go to Budget Documents library and it was here, you can always go to Site contents to see everything that's in a site. Site Pages refers to the individual pages in this site. For example, the home page is going to be listed in our Site contents under Pages. If I'm thinking about adding something new to a site, which we'll talk about in SharePoint Online Essential Training: Beyond the Basics, the course that follows this one, it would be important for me first to come into Site contents and see if it was here. And don't forget that there are other ways to find content. This feels very much like traversing through a Windows directory, where we're saying, "Okay, let's go look at the Site contents, and then let's go look in a document library. Or let's go look in our Site Assets library." And we check and see what's there. "Oh, here's another folder." But if I really want to find something and I know that it's in this site, then I have a search box. We'll talk about that next.