In July 2020, Microsoft rolled out its anticipated Microsoft Lists templates. Keeping track of projects and organizing workflows in Microsoft 365 is now easier than ever.
The smart Lists app is surprisingly easy to use. You can access Lists directly or embed a list within Microsoft Teams. Alternatively, you can create a list from the Lists app in Microsoft 365. With many companies looking to increase team collaboration, Microsoft Lists is, unquestionably, a tool for its time.
Below, we reveal just what you need to know about Microsoft’s smart information tracking app.
How Does Microsoft Lists Work?
Specifically, Microsoft Lists allows you to create, update, and share lists with anyone. With preset lists, you can either create your own or customize a ready-made list.
As mentioned, you can access Lists as an app through the Microsoft 365 launcher or on Microsoft Teams. It’s even possible to create a list in Microsoft Excel and then use the import feature to transfer your document to Lists.
Because of the recent global pandemic, more and more employees are working from home and away from the office. Presently, 20 major companies have given permission to their employees to work remotely in the long term.
Lists allows you to create, update, coordinate, and share information with members of your team even when you’re away from each other. This makes tracking information like asset purchases, inventory, event itineraries, or travel schedules more efficient, saving your business time and reducing workplace frictions.
Microsoft List Templates
There are ready-made templates included within the app to help you get started on making lists. From there, it’s easy to customize your list based on the tasks at hand. Below, we highlight some of the templates included; each can be modified as necessary.
- Asset manager: Used to keep track of physical assets, you can customize the asset manager to include the date of purchase, serial number, costs, subsequent repairs needed, and additional notes about the asset.
- Recruitment: A simple way to manage the hiring load, this template saves Human Resources lots of time. With the ability to easily organize the candidate’s name, position, interview times, social media profiles, and resumes, the whole team can be kept up-to-date on potential new hires.
- Onboarding: The same can be said for the employee onboarding template. Managerial staff can keep track of team meet-and-greet events, onboarding tasks, and work items.
- Issues: The issue template is great for organizing and handling issues that arise in the normal course of business. You can assign authorized personnel to each task and utilize special priority codes for each.
- Work progress tracker: Looking to organize that massive workload for a client? The work progress tracker can easily assign projects, set start and due dates, manage tasks, and track progress.
- Travel: Frequently on the road? The travel template can help manage trips, hotel and airline costs, and HR approval for expenses.
Customize Microsoft List Templates
As mentioned above, you can customize lists to meet your team’s needs. Chiefly, the most popular features include color formatting; asset, routine, inventory, and contact tracking; column editing; permissions customization; and mobile list management.
Meanwhile, the share setting can allow certain members access to specific lists to help prioritize tasks within an organization.
Overall, Microsoft Lists facilitates collaboration, even when employees work remotely. Specifically, this productivity app allows employees to share incidents, brainstorm solutions, and implement strategic fixes while working from diverse locations.
If you’d like to learn how Microsoft Lists can help your business preserve financial viability and increase productivity in a volatile marketplace, contact us for an expert consultation today.
Speaker Coach in PowerPoint gives smart, real-time feedback so you become a more confident presenter. Try it now
Organization fosters success. Know what you need to do and where you are headed with the perfect list template. A busy schedule can be overwhelming. Break your schedule up into manageable tasks with a printable to-do list template. List everything you need to do, and feel a sense of accomplishment as you check tasks off one-by-one using a checklist template. Take control of large projects by listing important deadlines and delegate important tasks with a project list template. Keep track of your valuable merchandise with an inventory checklist template in Word. Grocery list templates can eliminate return trips to the store in the middle of cooking to purchase forgotten ingredients. Create custom templates for checklists to cover all your personal and business needs.
Free list templates from Microsoft go beyond helping you to organize your life. Choose a checklist template to provide important steps and tips to help you achieve your goals. Find the perfect list template for Microsoft Word from nearly 200 different customizable options.
This new feature will support the addition of custom list templates from your organization alongside the ready-made templates Microsoft provides to make it easy to get started tracking and managing information.
Key points
- Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 70753
- Timing:
- Targeted release (entire org): will roll out in mid-July and complete by mid-August 2021
- Standard release: will roll out in mid-August and be complete by early September 2021
- Roll-out: tenant level
- Control type: user control / admin control
- Action: review, assess and educate
How this will affect your organization
This feature will give organizations the ability to create their own custom list templates with custom formatting and schema. It will also empower organizations to create repeatable solutions within the same Microsoft Lists infrastructure (including list creation in SharePoint, Teams, and within the Lists app itself).
End-user impact:
Visual updates to the list creation dialog and the addition of a From your organization tab when creating a new list. This new tab is where your custom list templates appear alongside the ready-made templates from Microsoft.
View image in new tab
Admin impact:
Custom list templates can only be uploaded by a SharePoint administrator for Microsoft 365 by using PowerShell cmdlets. For consistency, the process of defining and uploading custom list templates is like the custom site templates experience.
To define and upload custom list templates, admins will use the following site template PowerShell cmdlets:
The visual updates for this feature will be seen by end-users in the updated user interface (UI) when creating a list.
The From your organization tab will be empty until your organization defines and publishes custom list templates.
View image in new tab
What you need to do to prepare
You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.
Learn more:
PowerShell Cmdlets documentation for custom list templates
Message ID: MC267581
Microsoft Lists is a new app that is available with Microsoft 365. With Microsoft Lists, you can create a list to organize information. Store, share and collaborate with others in a clean list format. Now you may be wondering “What makes Microsoft Lists unique? It sounds like a spreadsheet.” There are a few things that make Microsoft Lists unique. First, you can visualize data in multiple ways. For example, you can view the list in a standard grid, also known as, a list format that does indeed look much like Excel. You can aso view the data in cards or gallery view: Another great feature of Microsoft Lists is the ability to customize the alerting when something changes. For example, you can set up a rule to receive an email every time something on the list changes. Don’t worry, we’ll get into how to set up alerts later on in the article. Another feature of Microsoft Lists different from spreadsheets is the ability to validate data before being saved. Is a column required? Is it a date? With Microsoft Lists, you can verify data before it’s saved.Visualize the data
Custom alerts
Validate data before saving
You may be wondering, what’s the difference between Lists, Planner, and To-Do. Planner and To-Do are designed specifically for task lists. Microsoft Planner is a team-based task management solution while To-Do is for personal tasks. Microsoft Lists is more robust. It allows you to track inventory, recruitment, or patient tracking. Microsoft Lists is a lot more robust than Planner or To-Do so be sure to use the right app for the right task.
The evolution of SharePoint Lists
Microsoft Lists is really the next evolution of SharePoint Lists. On the backend, they live in the same place. The difference is Microsoft Lists has a new front end interface.
Without further ado let’s jump into creating our List.
In this article, we’re going to build a content scheduler directly into Microsoft Lists. We’ll create a list, add columns with validation, and set up automated Teams messages when an item is created. Finally, we’ll trigger an automated email to ourselves every time a new item is created.
- Go to //portal.office.com
- Log in using your Microsoft 365 credentials.
- Click the waffle icon in the top left corner.
- Select Lists.
From the lists homepage, you can access a few things very quickly. You can:
- Click the New list button to create a new list.
- Click the star in the top right corner of one of your lists to flag it as a favorite or not.
- View recent lists or My Lists (which will show all your lists).
- Quickly share a list with someone else by hovering over the list > clicking the ellipsis (…) and clicking Share.
- Customize the name, color, and icon of the list by hovering over the list > clicking the ellipsis (…) and clicking Customize.
- To delete a list go to the My lists view > hover over the list you want to delete > click the ellipsis (…) and click Delete.
1. Click New list
2. Click Content scheduler.
3. Click Use template.
4. Enter a Name, description, choose a color, an icon, and select where you want to save the list. Then click Create.
The default template has a couple of columns that aren’t important to me. So let’s hide them. Hiding a column will remove the column from any views and forms, so it’s a great way to remove the default columns.
1. Click the Content files column > Column settings > Hide this column.
I recommend performing the same steps for the Author column.
Adding columns is just as simple. Since all of my publishing is done on Medium let’s add a column called Publication that has a preset list of publications where the editor of our list can select one from the list.
1. Click the Add column dropdown which appears as a header to a column in the list all the way to the right. Click Choice.
2. Enter a Name, Description, enter the publication options that you are a writer. Then click Save.
Now add two more Yes/No columns named: “Alt Text on Images” & “Plagiarism Checker.” These columns will be checked off to verify you have added alt text on images and performed a plagiarism checker before submitting it to a publisher.
There’s a couple of ways to begin adding data to the list. First, let’s look at how to open the form and create one list entry.
1. Click New in the top left corner of the browser.
2. Fill out the form with your article details then click Save.
Mass editing is a quick way to update multiple items in the list.
- Click the Edit in grid view button.
2. Double click the field you want to edit.
One of the great things about Microsoft 365 is everything is built around working together. Microsoft Lists is no different. We can easily share a list with a coworker to begin collaborating.
1. Click Share
2. Fill out the form entering the person’s name, the permissions level, and write a message to send to the people you’re inviting to collaborate. Then click Grant access.
The user will then have permission to open your lists and will receive an email informing them of their new access!
Removing permissions is just as simple
1. Click the I in the top right corner.
2. Click Manage access.
3. Click the down arrow next to the user you want to stop sharing with.
4. Click Stop sharing.
Now we may want to format a column to show when an article is about to be due as well as when an article is passed due. Let’s set up conditional access on the Content Title column.
1. Click Content title > Column settings > Format this column.
2. Click Conditional formatting.
3. Click Add rule.
4. Click Choose a column and select Draft due by.
5. Click Choose a comparison and select is on or before.
6. Click Choose or type a value and select Today.
7. Click Add condition.
8. Click Choose a column and select Status.
9. Click Choose a comparison and select is not equal to.
10. Click Choose or type a value and select Draft needs approval.
11. Repeat steps 7 through 10 and add status is not equal to Ready to publish.
12. Repeat steps 7 through 10 and add status is not equal to Published.
13. Click the A with a pencil under Show list item as and click a red color.
14. Click Save.
We don’t really need a column total in our content scheduler but let’s total the number of items in our list.
- Click the Content title column > Totals > Count.
Let’s face it, grids are boring. Cards can be a lot easier on the eyes especially if your items have images. Let’s convert the list view to the grid view.
1. Click All Items in the top right corner.
2. Click Gallery.
Or you may want to export the data to view it in Excel. It’s no problem for Microsoft Lists!
1. Click Export to Excel in the top bar.
2. Save the IQY file to your Downloads folder.
3. Open the IQY file you previously downloaded by double-clicking it.
4. In the Security Notice, click Enable.
5. In the Import Data window click OK.
Now you can view your data in Excel. Quick note, it isn’t syncing back to your lists. Any changes you make in Excel won’t be saved back to your list.
Once you start using Microsoft Lists they can grow pretty large. One of the great things about Lists is the ability to filter and find exactly what you’re looking for.
1. Click All Items in the top right corner.
2. Click one of the built-in filters, for example, Grouped by content status or Unpublished content.
But wait there’s more! You can customize the lists further using filters.
1. Click the funnel button in the top right corner.
2. Select one or more of the filters.
Alerting is a great way to stay up-to-date when your list or list items change.
To receive an email when an item is added to the list
1. Click the ellipsis (…) in the toolbar at the top of the list.
2. Click Alert me.
3. Select New items are added under the Change Type section. Then click OK.
To test your alert add an item to the list and check your email.
To receive an alert on a particular item change
1. Right-click the item you want to be alert on.
2. Click Alert me.
3. Update the alerting then click OK.
Remove alerts
1. Click the ellipsis (…) in the toolbar at the top of the list.
2. Click Manage my alerts.
3. Click the alert you want to delete.
4. Click Delete Selected Alerts.
Now we want to receive a Teams message whenever a new item is added to the list.
1. Click Automate in the top bar.
2. Click Power Automate.
3. Click See your flows.
4. Click New in the top command bar. Then click Automated— from blank.
5. Name the flow “Send a Teams message when an item is created.” Then click When an item is created > Create.
6. Get your OneDrive URL by clicking the waffle in the top left corner. Then click the ellipsis (…) next to OneDrive. Finally, click Open in new tab. From the OneDrive tab copy the URL.
7. Paste the OneDrive URL into the Site Address field. Select your list in the List Name field. Then click the New step button.
8. In the choose an action window click Microsoft Teams.
9. In the Microsoft Teams window click Post a message (V3) (preview).
10. In the Post a message (V3) (Preview) select the team, channel then enter your message.
11. Click Save.
Test your new automated message by creating a new item in your list.
That should give you an idea of what you can do with Microsoft Lists!
Page 2
Microsoft Lists is a new app that is available with Microsoft 365. With Microsoft Lists, you can create a list to organize information. Store, share and collaborate with others in a clean list format.