Office and SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Integrating SharePoint with Excel, Outlook, Access, and Word

2.2. Creating a New SharePoint List Based on an Existing Template

Now that you've read through the descriptions of the many available SharePoint lists and understand the variety that SharePoint provides out of the box for those built-in lists, it's time to see how to create new list instances from these base lists and even add columns or views. The steps for doing so are common to all lists.

You may have assumed that you can add list objects directly to the site home pages as shown in these earlier figures, but SharePoint only lets you add web parts to a site's home page. So how does a list become a web part? You begin by instantiating or creating a copy of the list from a list template.

Think of list templates as patterns used to make copies ...