In the previous article, we have seen SharePoint Announcement lists in details. In this article, we will explore SharePoint Link Lists in details and try to understand the importance of Link list and when we can use this. In this article, we will see the below points.

• What is Link List in SharePoint and what are the advantages of it?
• Why not use a custom list instead of a link list?
• How to create link lists in SharePoint?
• Summary

What is Link List and what are the advantages of Link Lists?

The default columns available in these lists are -

• URL - This is a hyperlink type of column that stores the link and its title text.
• NOTES - This is a "Multiple Lines Of Text" column type. This is used to maintain the description of the ink.

Apart from these columns, you can create your own columns based on the requirement.

Consider a scenario where you have an organization intranet set up and you have to navigate through many pages or document library while browsing to the site. Then, what you can do is that you can create a Link list and store all the reference links to this. You can keep this link list web part on the home page with the title “Quick Links”. This will give you the bookmark like experience.

See the below snap for reference.

Here, you can see that a user can navigate to these links just by clicking to the given links. This can be placed anywhere on the page.

Why not use a custom list instead of a link list?

Although, it is correct that we can use a custom list instead of the link list, but using a link list, we have several non-functional benefits associated with it.

Link list comes with different icons which help us to identify the link lists from the site contents. You can look at the example below.

Here, you can see that we can easily distinguish between link lists and custom lists just by looking at the icons.

When we open the custom list, it has an option to add a new item. While in the case of Link list, we will have the link text as “new link”. This creates an impression on the users who use it.

Apart from this, we have some useful predefined columns, such as NOTES and URL. So, we do not have to create these columns manually again, to maintain the links list.

How to create Link Lists in SharePoint?

In order to create a link list, please follow the below-given steps.

Step 1

Open the Site Content page by clicking on the "Settings" icon and then clicking “Site Contents”.

Step 2

This will open the "Site Contents" page. Click on the “Add an app” icon from this screen.

Step 3

Search for the link into the search box and then click on the “Links” icon link.

Step 4

Enter the name of the link list and click on “Create”.

Once you click on the “Create” button, it will add the link list to the Site Contents with the given name.

Step 5

Step 6

Once you have filled the correct data, then you have to click on the “Save” button to save the link.

Note
Most of the lists have Title column by default. This is the list which does not have any TITLE columns available by default.

Summary

So, in this article, we have seen the process of working with link list available in SharePoint. We have also seen what link lists are, why we should use it, and how to create and configure the link lists in SharePoint. Apart from this, we have also seen why we should not use custom lists over link lists.

In the next article, I am going to talk about Promoted Links in SharePoint. If you have any question related to this article or any of the articles, do comment below.