Microsoft Lists

What is Microsoft Lists

• A fancy view on SharePoint lists… making SharePoint lists actually useable.

• Can view the Lists inside your Teams site.

• It will have a mobile app.

• May be nicer than everyone working on the one Excel spreadsheet - and the Quick Edit option is quite nice.

What Lists can’t do

• Have related data (apart from lookup to User)

• Can’t have comments on list items! Wow what a limitation. You can in Microsoft Planner (but not in Microsoft ToDo

Very First Impressions

• The icon is fugly

• It’s just SharePoint

• It will be a bit better (less like just using SharePoint) when the mobile app comes out, I hope.

• Alerts seem good

• Like anything, it could get unwieldy when you have too many lists.

Lists Basics

• By default lists are in your personal site on SharePoint but you can store them in a SharePoint site.

• List can have a Colour, Icon, Name, Description.

• You can customise the default form by hiding fields.

• Start with a template and customise from there.

More List Tricks

• Create a List, stick it in a Team’s SharePoint site then add that List to your Team site.

• The ability to style columns looks amazing, but the advanced options may difficult for newbies (but there are simple options also).

• Conditional visibility of fields!

• The Lists app shows your very very old SharePoint lists and they look ugly.

Creating Lists

• From Template (easiest)

• Blank List

• From an existing List

  • Eg to copy the template into another site… but with no data.

• Import from Excel

  • Needs to be from a Table

  • Then you can choose the type of field

  • But it will NOT automatically create the values in choice types

List Formatting

Basic Options

• Style of formatting

  • Choices

    • pretty basic

  • Pills

    • a bit nicer

  • Conditional Formatting

    • Full AND / OR options

  • Dates

    • Pretty cool to format based on Today, Before Today and After Today

  • User Images

    • To get User images you need advanced mode - so start with a Template

  • Column alternating Rows

  • Column conditional formatting

• Beware you can really make a mess!

• The styles look basic at first, but click More styles to get full formatting options

• You can add icons to choices, pills and dates.

• The colour options are terrible. There is only orange, not red for fill, but you can have a red border and red font, so maybe just use that.

• The pills options for Status on the Issue Register look good

Advanced Mode

• JSON

List Columns

• You have full SharePoint style columns, including Managed Metadata

• I can’t see how to edit column formulas after you create them

Views

• Views or filters are just like you would expect from SharePoint

  • Grouping is great. Including totals if needed.

Sharing Lists

• By default Lists are created in My Lists and only visible to you.

  • But you can share it to anyone else in your team

• Individual List Items can be shared

  • Then it looks like a form record, not a list, if it’s sent to Outlook. If sent to Gmail the link goes to the list with a single line visible.

  • This could be really handy dandy

• You can also set an expiration date and password on individual list items.

  • And you can share them via a link to anyone.

  • However, you can’t set the expiration date and password and share it with a named user, which is a bit limiting.

  • Even though you can email it to a person outside the team the edits are by Guest Contributor only.

• But if you share to a known person, they need to sign in to their Microsoft Account (eg live.com outlook.com skype.com) and then they can edit the record.

  • They get a form view first.

  • They can export to Excel

  • They get a Power Apps menu

  • They get more menu options on the list item

  • They get to set up alerts (it did not work for me though)

  • They can see who has access (beware!)

  • They can delete items! Beware!

    • If you have to recover, and the item is in My Lists, go to the One Drive app and then see the Recycle Bin there. But then it loses the item history!

  • Even though it says they can edit the columns, and share they can’t

  • Edits show up from that person’s email address

• Note that the people who get the share can see the View names and can edit the columns. So be careful when setting up your view names.

Alerts and Automations

• Alerts a really simple to create on date columns.

• It’s really interesting that this creates a fully fledged Power Automate Flow behind the scenes. If you want to edit it you need to delve into the flow.

• Extending Flows you can do sooo much! The possibilities are almost endless.

Resources

• Teams, Planner, ToDo or Lists - https://youtu.be/0gIt21Pby3Y

• Microsoft Lists Masterclass - https://www.clouddrivenbusinessacademy.com/microsoft-lists