Forum Discussion
Confused about Microsoft Lists
Hi GraemeNZ - these Lists are an extension/improvement of SharePoint Lists. You'll find the same experience when creating a new list from a SharePoint Site. The Lists as an app provides a central dashboard to access all lists you have permissions to and a way to create new lists that you can keep for personal use or save to a site. Soon, there's also supposed to be an iOS app and offline access.
I agree that it has caused a lot of confusion for orgs and end users. I think to get all the additional functionality like Rules, conditional formatting and form editing that it had to be kind of pulled away from just SharePoint to its own app. After embracing Planner for the last couple years and still finding it lacking, I'm really appreciating the flexibility of Lists.
An example would be collecting data with Forms or Power Apps(or just using the embedded form) and having the data populate in a pre-formatted Lists view. Within the List, you can have Power Automate tasks that trigger when you change the status of a list item. For example, an email that goes out once you set a list item status to complete. Or, you can access the list to manually trigger PA tasks/approvals.
I can think of plenty of scenarios where you can make business solutions where Lists can be your document storage, task/project management, mini-relationship manager, and database for Power BI, all-in-one.
- Hi Cody_XIV. Thanks for your reply.
If I understand it correctly, can't you already do all this within a SharePoint List? So what's the advantage of the Lists app?The structure and visual approach of Microsoft Lists and how it works with Teams, is much more accessible and understandable to newer users. It really allows SharePoint Lists to "come out" of SharePoint and shine on its own as a tool to rival Asana or Wrike. A lot of people are seeing it mostly as a task manager, but it's super important to remember/inform people that it's information tracking. Potentially all data in an organization can fall under the category information.
