If you know SharePoint then you’ll know Lists have been around from the very beginning. Lists allow data to be captured, items to be tracked, data to be group and shared. Lists are a great tool with infinity use cases! Microsoft have been teasing us for a while about a new Microsoft Lists App giving users direct access to create and work with Lists without having to navigate around SharePoint. The Lists App is the ‘home’ of Lists.

In this video I do a quick walk through of the Lists functionality, showing some of the built in templates and talk about a few things I’ve discovered.

Lists can also be accessed in Microsoft Teams. Simply go to a Team, add a new Tab and choose Lists. You will be able to choose from the same set of templates or create a new list from scratch. Bingo! Now everyone in your Team has access to the List you have created.

You might be thinking, I have yet another place to track things. Do I use Planner? Do I use ToDo? Do I use Lists? I think the answer is use the tool that best suits the job. Here are some reasons to use Microsoft Lists over the other tools:

• Lists can be customised with columns of your choice
• Lists support column formatting and advanced JSON based styles
• List views can be customised with filters and group by
• PowerAutomate has extensive support for Lists
• PowerApps can be used to customise the List forms
• PowerApps can use Lists as a data source
• Lists support Item level permissions
• Lists can be exported to Excel
• Lists can be used as a PowerBI Data source
• Versioning (off by default)

This is just the start. There are numerous features that make Lists a more powerful choice.

You get some useful templates out of the box and options create a List from scratch, copy an existing List or create from an Excel spreadsheet (imports the data too). Lists support all of the features of Modern SharePoint Lists including conditional formatting and custom views.

Well done Microsoft, you’ve taken a trusty old friend from our toolkit, given it a fresh look and make it accessible to more people. Nice work!