Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team.
Today, we are pleased to share the next round of Lists innovation, as announced at this year’s Microsoft Ignite event (Oct.12-14, 2022) – including new integrations with Power Platform, mobile updates, new features in the Lists – MSA Preview, and more. Our team is constantly addressing feedback and requests, as you’ll see in all the announcements below (and anytime you make your voice heard in the Lists Feedback Portal).
To start, join Lists PM, Steven Jia, below as he shares and demonstrates the latest Microsoft Lists value and innovation announced during Ignite – and then continue to scroll below for more details about each announcement:
Also, catch the on-demand session, “Embrace a new way of work with Microsoft 365” (OD23 – published Oct.12.2022). This session includes Lists innovation, alongside OneDrive and Project/Planner announcements – with Steven co-presenting with his peers Mukul Kumar (Project/Planner) and Irfan Shahdad (OneDrive). It’s a wonderful audio-visual summary of all collaborative work management disclosures across Microsoft 365.
Note: Click on the roadmap ID link per announcements to best track Targeted Release dates and additional information on the public Microsoft 365 roadmap; all will be active as of 9:30am PDT, October 12th, 2022.
Microsoft Lists mobile app updates
Announcing Lists MSA on iOS preview, available in TestFlight
You can now use your Microsoft account (MSA) to create and share Lists on your iOS device via the TestFlight app. Our team has been using Lists for iOS here at Microsoft to plan morale events, gifts, roadmap items, travel expenses, and more – and we love it! We hope you enjoy it, too. And invite your friends and family to join in. Microsoft Lists awaits the taps of your fingertips – a fully functional information tracker while on the go.
Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview for iOS devices. Left-to-right: Home screen with favorite and recent lists, create new experience with ready-made list templates, and working with others across various list items.
Learn more about the Lists – MSA Preview for iOS, sign up and sign in to the Lists – MSA Preview: lists.live.com.
Lists supports Android tablet devices
You asked, we delivered. Microsoft Lists for Android now fully supports a variety of tablet form factors. Rotate your device to your heart’s content to see content optimized for portrait or landscape orientations. And get an optimized experience to see more as your screen real estate grows.
Access your lists and list items on your larger Android tablet devices. Microsoft Lists for Android now supports various screen sizes and form factors.
Roadmap ID: 98196.
Learn how to use Lists for Android and get the app today.
Lookup column supports yes/no, choice, and multi choice + formatting
Lookup columns allow one list to refer to and pull in data from another list. We are pleased to expand the column types that are now supported when pulling data into a list via a lookup column: Boolean (Yes/No), choice, and multi choice. Formatting from the original list also now comes along for the ride, which allows you to keep data and presentation consistent across your lists.
Use Lookup columns to pull in information from other lists - now supporting more column types to retrieve from. The above example pulls information from the “Lists tweets” list and populates each planned tweet into the Lists feature tracker – making it easy to stay in sync across engineering and marketing workstreams as we prepare for launch.
Roadmap ID: 100503.
Learn more about creating relationships from list to list with Lookup columns.
Calendar view – week layout
Calendar views now support viewing your information one month at a time or one week at a time. You can also now reschedule items by dragging and dropping them from the Unscheduled pane right to the date on the calendar view – the Date column automatically gets updated. Now you and your peers can best visualize how campaigns, new hire orientation activities, and social outreach spread across the weeks and months.
Calendar view now supports viewing your information one week at a time.
Roadmap ID: 100504.
Learn more about creating a calendar view for your list.
Packaging | Microsoft Lists + Power Automate + templates
Lists ready-made templates are getting several new capabilities. To help improve automation of information, approvals, and more – you now have the option to install pre-created Power Automate flows whenever you create a list from select list templates. You'll be prompted to install the included Power Automate reminder flow after the list has been created. This, too, will apply to Lists rules when your needs are more simple notifications out to specific named individuals.
And to sweeten the deal, you’ll soon be able to do all of the above within your own custom list templates – more design surface to create and publish powerful business solutions in the form of easy to create lists from a powerful template.
Flows packaged into out-of-the-box List templates
Some list templates now include pre-created Power Automate flows that help you keep information up to date and accurate. The following list templates will have reminder flows available to install as you create your list: Work progress tracker, Content scheduler, and Recruitment tracker.
Some list templates, such as the Work progress tracker shown above, come with flows that are automatically created when you create a list from that template.
Roadmap ID: 88906.
Learn more about using Lists with Power Automate flows, including how to manage a flow that was created from a list template.
Approvals integration
Some list templates will begin to leverage integration with the official Approvals in Microsoft Teams app. This will allow you to assign an approver for each list item. When you are assigned as an approver for a list item, the request will appear in your Approvals app in Teams – or can be approved directly within the list.
Easily assign someone as an approver and have that action carry over to Approvals in Microsoft Teams, or as pictured above within the list itself.
Roadmap ID: 100502.
Rules packaged into out-of-the-box List templates
You can create rules to automate tasks such as sending someone a notification when data changes in the list or a new file is created in the library. You'll choose a condition that triggers the rule and the action that the rule will take.
Some list templates will soon come with rules pre-packaged into them to help you keep you and your team members notified of changes to data in the list. This is just another way to help keep data in Lists complete, accurate, and up to date.
Roadmap ID: 100499.
Rules packaged into custom List templates
Just like the last feature above, you can expand your custom organizational templates by packaging rules right into them - alongside the ability to pre-program the list schema (columns), formatting, and more.
Roadmap ID: 100500.
Create a list from Comma-separated Values (CSV) files
Lists enable organizations and teams to store and visualize rows of data to share and collaborate on scenarios like inventory management, status reporting, deal milestones and more. They are easy to use, secure, with a high capacity of up to 30 million items in a single list. And often contain data plus means to describe and visualize the data.
You can now create new lists from data inside CSV files –often used for exchanging complex data between different applications. In Lists, select the “From CSV” option when creating a new list. When you use the Export to CSV command in a list, you get a special CSV file that includes information about the list you exported. That means if you import that same CSV into another site, you get a list that has the same column types, formatting, and data as your original list.
Adjust the column types before you import the CSV table data into Microsoft Lists.
This is a great way to improve portability and save time when using or reusing richly formatted lists and their data.
Roadmap ID: 100501. And learn more about importing and exporting list data from and to Excel.
Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview update
We already mentioned that the Lists – MSA Preview now supports iOS devices using TestFlight. But wait, there’s more.
The Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview is a lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app designed for small business and individual use in conjunction with your Microsoft account (MSA). Put your business and individual productivity into hyperdrive. Test out the Lists – MSA Preview to store all your information related to events, clubs, gifts, applications, vacation planning, and more. Keep track of it all in one place.
What’s new for the Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview
We hope you’ve been enjoying the preview. Whether you’re a new tester or have been using it since we began the preview, we wanted to highlight some of the recent innovations added to the Lists – MSA Preview:
- Introducing Board view
- New ready-made templates (Recipes, Gifts, and more)
- Co-authoring within individual lists
- Undo and Redo to correct any mistakes
- More easily delete an individual list
- Access Lists - MSA Preview on your iOS device; planned for Android as well
Co-authoring in Lists | Work with your peers in the same list at the same time and visualize where each other is working.
Board view is ideal when you want to track items as they move forward in a process or workflow. Moving items through stages is as easy as dragging and dropping across vertical columns.
Calendar view is getting the ability to colorize your list items as you click forward and back through each month.
Try it out and let us know what you think. Don’t be shy. There’s in-product Feedback to let us know what you like, where things could improve, and any feature suggestions you have for Microsoft. We review all.
Sign up, sign in and try the Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview today – on Web and iOS device: lists.live.com.
Additional resources
- Microsoft Lists resource center (blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more)
- Microsoft Lists adoption center including Lists Day-in-the-life guides
- Microsoft Lists help and ‘how to’ pages
- Microsoft Lists look book
- Microsoft Lists workshop (now on-demand)
- Microsoft Lists on the Feedback Portal – let us know what you want next.
In closing…
Microsoft Lists builds on the trusted SharePoint information platform – bringing new user experiences and capabilities to the existing foundation, for work and life. The value of existing integrations with the Power Platform continues and expand when you need to further customize list forms with Power Apps, design robust workflows with Power Automate, and analyze your data in Excel or Power BI.
And for developers, the power and value of the Lists API extends custom solutions to connect the list data as a source via Microsoft Graph. It’s all a part of Microsoft 365, within a service level agreement you can rely on for enterprise-ready security and compliance while designing lists as core content within your governance plans.
Track what matters most. And we hope you have a great Microsoft Ignite.
Thanks, Lincoln DeMaris – Principal Group Product Manager – Microsoft
Microsoft
