SharePoint Tutorial - Customize a page with BLOCKS AND LAYOUTS

In this video, I'm going to show you how to edit a page in a SharePoint site. Now by editing, it's going to be simple editing. We're not going to have to know any coding. We're not going to have to have any developer tools. SharePoint gives us the ability to do some simple basic editing on a page without having to have any of those skills. And I'm going to show you how to do that and give you a little introduction and familiarity with those tools. There's two ways we can go ahead and edit this page. We can go up here in the upper left corner and you see this page tab. If we click there, it opens up our ribbon and the first button over here on the left says edit. Let's click that and it opens the page for editing. Now let's hit our back button and get out of there because there's another way we can go ahead and open the page for editing and that is to go over here to the right corner, click on our gear, and we see the edit page option there as well. And it does the same thing. It opens our page for editing. Now there's two tabs up here, format text and insert the format text. Well, it's pretty straightforward. It is a ribbon for formatting text. Let's go ahead and take a look at the insert tab. And there's a number of things in here that we can add like pictures, video app parts and web parts. I want to show you the web part just really quickly. And you see there are a number of web parts. There's a lot of them in here. And quite honestly, we could do an entire course on just about every one of these, but we're going to show you some very simple, easy basic ones that you can do without any pre-configuration. Let's go back to the page tab and we're going to add some text to our page. We're simply going to add a welcome line to the top and it's going to say, welcome to the social media team site. Now we want to save our changes. We have to save these changes before we close this page for editing. And up here in the upper left corner, you see this save button. Now the save button is divided into two parts. I want you to look here. You see the top part. You see where my arrow is. My little cursor, the top part is highlighted blue. And when I go down to the bottom, that's highlighted blue. The button has two parts. If we click on the top part, it's going to save everything and close this page for editing. If we click on the bottom, we have some additional options. We can save the page, which will save it and close it for editing. We can choose save and keep editing, which will save our changes and still leave the page open so we can continue to edit. Or we can choose to stop editing, which will discard all of the changes that we've made and close the page to editing. Well, we want to save our changes, but we can close the page for editing. And now you can see, there's the line of text that we added simply welcome to the social media team site. And now you know how to go and open up a page for editing in a SharePoint site. SharePoint pages are broken up into blocks. Think of it like a word document. You can have a header, a footer, and columns this page, and it may not look like it just the way we are, but it's actually broken up into three parts. We have a header where this text welcome to the social media team site is in. We have a left column, which this newsfeed web part is in. And we have a right column, which this document library is in. When I opened the page for editing, you'll see this a little bit more. Obviously we're going to go up here to the upper right and click on our gear and choose edit page. It opens the page for editing. And now you can see those blocks, just like I described them. We have the header, which is around the welcome to the social media team site, column left, which has the newsfeed and column, right, which holds the document library. We're going to go ahead and change the way this looks. We're on the format text tab. And if you go over here to the right side of our ribbon, you see this button that says text layout, take a good look at that icon. And it's exactly what we just talked about. It is a header and two columns. When we click on this button, it gives us a bunch of different layouts that we can choose. Let's go ahead and let's select one column and see. Now it just has one large column that fills the page and all of my pieces are below each other. We can change it to any of these. We can do one column with a sidebar and a small sidebar there. We can choose something like two columns with a header and footer. So there's our header column, left column, right. And we scroll down and there's the footer. We can do something like three columns, although three columns can get a little small. Now we're going to go ahead. We're going to go back to actually what we started with two columns with a header and everything's still in that first column because it got moved there when we changed to one column. Well, we need to move these back and actually we're going to swap them out. We're going to put the site feed in the column on the right and leave the document library in the column on the left. To do that, we'll click in this little check box here. And you'll notice now that once I checked that box, we have this blue outline around this web part that lets us know that we've selected that. And notice that my cursor has changed this four headed arrow. You're going to need that so that we can drag this into the next box. And it's simple. You just hold on your left mouse button and drag it over here. And I was able to go ahead and drag that into that column very easily. Now we still have our text here are welcome to the social media team site. And that is in column one. We simply want to cut that and we're going to go to the paste menu and choose paste. And you see, we lost all of our formatting. Unfortunately, that is something that's going to happen, but I can reapply those formats very easily. And that's how you can go ahead and change the page layout in a SharePoint site.