One of the latest products from Microsoft is Lists. It is, I will say, an upgrade of the old, boring SharePoint Lists, but with a better look and a new found ease to use built in. Microsoft Lists is part of the Office365 suite. It can be found from within a search of your apps, as shown below.
When selected, we end up here:
As you can see, we are on the SharePoint site. We have four options for creating a new list. They are as follows:
- From scratch (a blank list)
- From Excel
- From an already existing list
- From a template
For the sake of example, we will use the template, Work progress tracker.
Before we make a final selection (does this template suits us best?), Lists provides a preview of what we will get with the template:
When we hit the Use Template button, we are directed to name this particular list, add a description, and choose a color and icon.
Once we click Create, here we are:
We can then customize the list to accommodate the needs of our project. Let’s say that we need to display the following data points:
- Task name – we will use Work item for this
- Description – we will use it as is
- Task Cost – we will create this field
- Start Date – we will use it as is
- Due Date – we will use it as is
- Assigned to – we will use it as is
- Progress – we will modify this field
Firstly, we rename Work Item to Task name, as shown.
Next, we will remove fields which we are not going to use (those of Category, Priority, and Notes).
Now, we will modify the Progress field. This field has default values as shown below:
Let’s select Edit.
We want to have the following options without the ability for the user to add any others:
- Not started
- In Progress
- Completed
- Abandoned
We will modify the values as shown.
Now we must create the new field, Task Cost.
We choose the appropriate currency. I live in Croatia, so I’ve selected Croatian currency (Croatian Kuna).
Finally, we will reorder our fields like this: Task name, Description, Task Cost, Start Date, Due Date, Assigned and Progress:
When we are done with the reordering, we select Apply.
Now, we can begin putting items in our List as shown.
It’s probably not ideal to have to add items one by one, so we use Quick edit:
The result is something like:
Before I conclude this article, I’ll demonstrate how to delete a list:
This is just a little piece of what can be done with Microsoft Lists. Much more can be done with this powerful tool, and it is definitely very, very useful.
Nenad Trajkovski 