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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
2 MIN READ

Create SharePoint lists from other lists

Chris McNulty's avatar
Chris McNulty
Former Employee
May 06, 2019

Changing the way business gets done – digital transformation – begins with great data. Microsoft 365 offers powerful tools for building workflows, automation and reporting – Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. But you need a great place to store all that data.

 

Every month, millions of users turn to SharePoint lists to store critical business data.  Lists are secure, easy to use, and high capacity, with up to 30 million items in a single list.  Today, across Microsoft 365, SharePoint lists store billions of rows of data to house information for scenarios like customers, audits or emergency room availability and more across Microsoft 365.

 

Now, we’re making it easier than ever to get started with a list – by leveraging other lists as a starting point.

Create a SharePoint list from an existing list

Lists are shareable, secure, mobile friendly, easy to use and easy to customize. And as we previewed at SharePoint Conference 2018, we’re releasing new abilities to let you create new lists from an existing list. To do this, you start from the Site Contents page.

 

You can create a list from all existing lists within any site where you’re an editor.  When the new list is created, the entire list structure is copied, including forms, formatting, and custom metadata columns.  Note: Content from the existing list will not be copied.

 

Creating a list from other lists

Next steps

Want to try this out now?  Head over to the https://aka.ms/sharepoint-bizapps for a https://demobuilderwebcpptxz.blob.core.windows.net/list-creation/startdemo.html.

 

We’ll start rolling out the new list creation experience to Targeted Release in mid May 2019.   You can share your feedback with us here on the TechCommunity, on https://sharepoint.uservoice.com or at the https://sharepointna.com.  As always, if you need more details you can find it on our https://aka.ms/sharepoint-bizapps. 

 

Thanks, Chris McNulty, senior product manager - Microsoft

 

[Update: April, 8th, 2020] "List from Excel" was previously shared in this blog post, but delayed from release. Thus, we removed mention of "List from Excel" as we prepare a unique announcement on "List from Excel" and pare this one down to solely highlight "List from existing list" - and minimize confusion to anyone reading this blog post going forward.

Updated Apr 08, 2020
Version 5.0
Product Updates

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  • LisaR5's avatar
    LisaR5
    Copper Contributor
    May 06, 2019

    Glad to see this being added. I cannot tell from the demo -- are the internal column names on the newly created table going to match the column display name? I've used "quick" methods to add columns to lists, but ended up with internal column names like t0gh and frankly the couple of minutes I saved creating the table have been more than blown by the time I spend consulting my column cross-reference table when I'm writing some code that reads/updates the list through the REST API. 

  • Anatol Noroc's avatar
    Anatol Noroc
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 06, 2019

    I have some questions for the "list from list" (as I see it a shortcut for saving the list as template then using the template to create a new list):

    • will this allow to create lists with content already (like save as template with content)?
    • Will it work with source list that have more than 5000 items? (it was impossible to save those lists as template)
    • How about using list from other sites/site collection (let's say within a site collections in the same Hub and assuming the same content types are available on both)?

    Thanks!

  • Ari Suominen's avatar
    Ari Suominen
    Brass Contributor
    May 06, 2019

    All your files should be on OneDrive or SharePoint anyway :smileywink:
    This feature was long waited. Helps a lot.

  • wroot's avatar
    wroot
    Silver Contributor
    May 06, 2019

    "you can select a table from your most recent Excel files in SharePoint or OneDrive"

    So, you can't select an Excel workbook from your local drive?