Microsoft 365 is at the forefront of innovation in the workplace – both in-office and remotely. Its broad range of tools has revolutionised the way we work since its conception as Microsoft Office in November 1990. Since then, we have seen it become the world’s leading choice for interactive work tools, with an incredible $125.8 billion in revenue this year alone.
One of the recent tools that they have added to their ever-growing repertoire is ‘Lists’.
Lists (as the name suggests) allows you to create lists to organise your information. You can also share lists and collaborate on said lists with others. Yes, I agree that it sounds like everything that can be done in a spreadsheet list but Lists has many benefits that make it unique.
What makes Microsoft Lists unique?
Lists allow you to view your data in a range of different ways – a standard format like excel, a card format, and a calendar format. You can also define what part of your list is visible to others or not. This allows you a lot of control over how to present your information. Let us take a look at some of the reasons you may use Lists.
Lists can be used for a multitude of purposes – most frequently as an issue, inventory, or asset tracker. Again, I agree it sounds similar to applications like Microsoft Planner and the To-do app as they also track issues and teamwork. You can use Lists to track team and solo tasks, but Microsoft planner and To-do specialise in this and they have views that are specifically catered for those uses and Lists does not. Lists have much broader uses as explored.
Lists within Teams is essentially an evolution of the original SharePoint lists.
As part of this evolution, we will see many new features capable of changing work practices exponentially.
One of the new features of this evolution of SharePoint lists – we are going to get a lot of new things – is the introduction of the Microsoft List app within 365 that will aggregate all the lists you have. Hunting around and remembering what SharePoint site has the list you are trying to get to is a thing of the past. This will be a one-stop-shop to see and create new lists.
Another new feature is the mobile application for Microsoft Lists. You can author, create, and edit new lists all on your mobile app!
It also offers prebuilt templates that are rich and robust for event and asset management, tasks, and more.
Microsoft Lists offers an experience within the flagship Microsoft Teams app, (the ever-growing platform focused on a better quality of collaboration, communication and productivity). Lists allow you to create new lists and edit them inline, all within Teams. There are other features of Lists that allow it to improve workflow and levels of productivity within your business.
Lists can connect to Power Automate and Power Apps – Power Automate allows data to be automatically added to Lists. It can then post over to Teams – letting the team know about the new data. More on this later in the blog series where we will explore the Power Automate function further.
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