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.
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.
Hi. Thanks Kelly_Edinger for your explanation. I can now see that having a central 'dashboard' of all my lists is helpful. I hadn't realised that all the lists I have used automatically populate on that dashboard. This will definitely help our users find things.
I've been exploring Planner and finding it lacking, so haven't made a push to implementing it - (I've just had a play with some concepts within a small team). Would you mind elaborating on the issues you've had with Planner, and how you've found Lists has been better?
The main impediment for our organisation with Planner is that dates for tasks always revert to US format, and that's going to be a huge point of confusion for our managers who are not very good with IT. If they can see it working in a way which is intuitive, helpful and saves time, they are pretty good at adopting new processes, but otherwise...
Hi GraemeNZ - the issues that we've run into with Planner is that we can't add our own fields. For project management, we like to be able to add a people picker field for the PM. With the new calendar view in Lists, it's easier to see the whole month, where Planners calendar view leaves a lot to be desired. It's also easier to add granular/specific reminder dates and emails with Lists, and you can embed Lists on any page in a Comms Site, where Planner can only be embedded onto a Teams site page. Hope that helps!
- Kelly_Edinger do you have any suggestions to bring in color coding for categories on Calendar view of a List. I'm trying to create an organizational calendar using Lists and the calendar view is great but would like to see color coding.
Hi SusanMcClements - sadly no. I'm hoping that MSFT will make the move to include our conditional formatting in the calendar view, but so far I don't see it on the roadmap. The traditional calendar with calendar overlays still exist, but who knows for how long. I wish I had a better answer for you. Maybe someone else in the community can jump on this thread with advice for both of us.
