Be it at home or at work, we tend to place the items that are most important to us inconvenient and easy-to-find places, such as putting the keys next to the phone, adding a bookmark to our favorite sites in Internet Explorer, or saving a frequently used file on our desktop. Being able to create tabs or drop-down menus on sites, with links to important resources without the need for coding, is essential to organizations and their staff. This article will show you how to customize the Menu Navigator Web Part.

Bamboo’s Navigators provide this important function and much more. Our Navigators allow you to create custom menus, tabs, tree items, and a Site Actions menu to navigate to sites, pages, or lists within and across sites and site collections. These navigation controls can help you build a clean, user-friendly project management site, or any other type of site that requires customized navigation controls.

Add Text to a Navigators List Item

With Navigators, you have the option of adding a block of text to a List Item. To add the text, simply type your desired text into the block next to the Mega Content field. In this example, we’ll be adding text to the Blogs menu.

Once you have finished entering your text, click Save:

Return to the Web Part. You will now see the text you entered in the step above displayed when you hover your mouse over the Blogs menu tab:

Add a Table to a Navigators List Item

With Navigators, you have the option of further customizing your menu items by adding tables with different links to the menu item. In this example, we’ll be adding a table to the Downloads menu.

To add a table to a menu item, you will need to go to the block next to the Mega Content field and insert the table there. To do this, choose Editing Tools > Insert > Table:

To link each block of the table to a site, you will need to assign each block a destination URL.  To do this, simply select the block and choose Insert Hyperlink. From here, you will need to enter display text as well as a site address for each link. When you have finished, click OK:

Once you have finished adding all of your table items and associated links, you will see your table displayed in the block next to the Mega Content field, similar to the screenshot below:

Customize a Table under a List Item in Navigators

With Navigators, you have the option of further customizing a table you created under a menu item.  This includes changing the color, table width, and more. To customize the look of your table, go to the Editing Tools tab. From here, go to Format Text > HTML > Edit HTML Source:

Copy the HTML source code for your desired customizations to the Edit HTML Source. For this example, we’ll be using the HTML code listed below to adjust our text color and block width:

<table width=”100%” class=”ms-rteTable-default” border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ style=”text-align: left; font-size: 1em”><tbody><tr class=”ms-rteTableHeaderRow-default” valign=”left”><th class=”ms-rteTableHeaderFirstCol-default” rowspan=”1″ colspan=”1″><a href=”http://store.bamboosolutions.com/sharepoint-navigators.aspx” style=”color: red”>File</a></th></tr> <tr class=”ms-rteTableFooterRow-default” valign=”left”><th class=”ms-rteTableFooterFirstCol-default” rowspan=”1″ colspan=”1″><a href=”http://store.bamboosolutions.com/bamboomainweb/pmc-overview.aspx” style=”color: red”>Edit</a></th></tr> <tr class=”ms-rteTableFooterRow-default” valign=”left”><th class=”ms-rteTableFooterFirstCol-default” rowspan=”1″ colspan=”1″><a href=”http://store.bamboosolutions.com/bamboomainweb/pmc-overview.aspx” style=”color: red”>Option</a></th></tr> <tr class=”ms-rteTableFooterRow-default” valign=”left”><th class=”ms-rteTableFooterFirstCol-default” rowspan=”1″ colspan=”1″><a href=”http://store.bamboosolutions.com/bamboomainweb/pmc-overview.aspx” style=”color: red”>About</a></th></tr> <tr class=”ms-rteTableFooterRow-default” valign=”left”><th class=”ms-rteTableFooterFirstCol-default” rowspan=”1″ colspan=”1″><a href=”http://store.bamboosolutions.com/bamboomainweb/pmc-overview.aspx” style=”color: red”>Help</a></th></tr></tbody></table>

Return to the Web Part.  You will now see that the table created above will be displayed when you hover over the Downloads tab. The table will be displayed with the formatting changes you made above:

Are you ready to test drive Navigators in your own SharePoint environment? Jump over to the Navigators product page now!

Want to learn more about Navigators? Check out the rest of the series here:

• Navigators User Guide, Part 1: How to Use the Menu Navigator Web Part
• Navigators User Guide, Part 3: How to Customize the Navigator Menu by Editing the CSS
• Navigators User Guide, Part 4: How to Add Content to the Menu Navigator Web Part