Today, we’ll discuss the promoted links/web part in modern SharePoint pages and focus on the following topics.
- What are promoted links?
- What is the use of promoted links in real time?
- How can we use promoted links in SharePoint modern page?
- Example of use cases
- Summary
What are the promoted links?
Promoted links help us (of course, one needs to be in a SharePoint Administrator role) to build attractive user-friendly navigation in the site home page. This feature lets us create links to content which we want to feature. We can assign images to the links and easily organize them from the Promoted Links List, which is automatically created when you add the app. It is a great way to spice up your site, make it more user-friendly for your end users. It is also known as “SharePoint Tiles”
A simple example of promoted links is "Getting started web part". If we create a classic SharePoint site by default, the getting started web part will be added to the home page.
What is the use of promoted links in real life?
Let's say we have department specific document libraries named Finance, Human Resource, Legal and Procurement, each department has certain specific documents into their respective libraries. Now, the user wants to navigate to these document libraries from the site home page and the links should be configured with the relevant images (logo) for more user-friendly – then promoted links web part is the way to go.
Now, coming to the implementation part – it is very straight forward to configure in a classic SharePoint page but there is no direct way to configure this web part in SharePoint Online modern page (this is the purpose of writing this article). In classic SharePoint, if we create a promoted links list and add an entry to this list, then if we add this promoted links web part in the home page, we can achieve the above scenario.
How can we use promoted links in SharePoint modern page?
Already I have created a promoted links list in my site with a sample links entry.
Now, I will try to configure this promoted links list as a web part in my site home page. Open the page in edit mode from the top right corner, click on the + button to add the new web part in the page, search with “List”, then we'll be getting the following items.
Now click on the “List” as highlighted, we will be directed to the below section.
Click on the edit web part button then we’ll be getting the “List” dropdown list, there we cannot see the “Test Promoted Link” list in the dropdown.
As per this
SharePoint user voice, it is confirmed that we cannot use the promoted link web part in SharePoint modern page.
Then what is the alternate way to achieve the same?
This is not exactly the same but the closest thing to “old” promoted links is the “Quick links” web part in modern SharePoint page.
Let's say we are going to configure the links for Human Resource, Finance, Legal and Procurement and for these we have created separate libraries.
And also we have uploaded some relevant images(logo) to the “Test Pic Lib” picture library.
Now we have the prerequisites ready – let us configure these inside the “Quick links” web part.
Open the site home page by clicking the edit button from the top-most right corner or direct from the URL like below,
https://sp.sharepoint.com/sites/TestSite001/?Mode=Edit
By default in a modern site, there will be a “Quick Links” Web part, we can add links there or we can add a new “Quick Links” Web part, now I am going to add a link in an existing web part and rest all link we can do yourselves. Click on “Add links” from the Quick links webpart.
Then we will be getting this page.
Now, select your link as per your requirement. Here, I have selected the site; however, you can select any of these.
Select Finance (as an example), then click on Open.
Now in the configuration window – Give the title as you like and select “Custom Image” radio button then click on “Change” button.
After clicking the “Change” button select the respective picture(logo) from the picture library and click “Open” button.
Now we can see the below window. Here we can give the alternate text and description (not mandatory)
Finally, we can change the layout of the web part to tiles or as you need from the below available options,
Finally promoted links in the site home page look like below,
Example of use cases
Now, if we click these image “Procurement”, “Legal”, “Human Resource”, and “Finance", we’ll be landing in the respective location.
Summary
In this article, we have learned what promoted links/web parts are and how to configure this in modern SharePoint sites.