Introduction and start page

0:00 Here I'm on Microsoft365.com. On this website or in any app, in the top left-hand corner, you'll see this waffle icon. If you click on this, this will show you all of your different Microsoft 365 apps, and here I see SharePoint. Let's click on this icon. This drops us on the SharePoint start page, and you'll use this page to get back to the SharePoint sites that you care about. Here at the very top, we see news from sites.

0:33 This includes all of the latest updates from the different SharePoint sites that you're part of. Later on in this tutorial, we'll look at how you can publish your own news, so it shows up here. If we scroll down a little bit more, we'll see another category with frequent sites. Think of this as the SharePoint sites that you go back to time and time again. So here, these are likely the sites that you're interacting with the most.

1:02 Within each one of these SharePoint sites, you'll also see recent activity related to those sites. If we scroll up the page over on the left-hand side, we'll see two additional categories. Following is a curated list of sites that you care about. Here, if I scroll down a little bit, let's say that I really care about this communication site, but I may not necessarily go back to it all that often. I can click on this star icon.

1:29 Now if we go up, here we see it's now pinned on this list with following. So, in a sense, this is a pinned list of sites. Down below, you can also click on See All to see all of the different sites that you're following. Here, I can see my list. I'll click on Back. Under Following, we have another category called Recent. And this is a list of all the different sites that you've visited recently in chronological order.

1:56 With all of these different views, you have plenty of ways to get back to the SharePoint sites that you care about. Over on the left-hand side, we have this SharePoint navigation menu, and you'll see this on any SharePoint site. At the very top, if we click on this Home icon, this will bring us right back to where we are right now, the Start page. Over on the left-hand side, we can click on this icon, and here too, we can also get back to our frequent sites and our followed sites.

2:22 The exception though, you can't get back to any recent sites from here. If we click on this icon, you can see an aggregation of all the news from all of your different SharePoint sites. Right down here, you can view all of your different files across your SharePoint sites, and this is ordered by Recency. Right here, you can also get a recent view of all the different lists that you've worked with on SharePoint. Then at the very bottom, if we click on this icon, we can create new content.

2:47 For example, we can create a new news post. That way, you can have news show up on the Start page. Right over here, you can set up a page, a site, you have different office document types, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on. Let's click out of this. At the very top of the page, we have a search field, and you can use this to search for sites, files, and people across all of SharePoint. Of course, for an item to show up in search, you also need permission or access to those different items.

3:13 Let's say, for example, that I'm looking for the employee handbook. I could type in employee, and here, one of the files that shows up, it's a Word document, it's called the employee handbook, and I could click into it and access it. Now that