SharePoint lists and latest features
Discover why lists are so useful, using video pages, a new design experience, version history improvements and more
SharePoint Online (SPO) is more than just a convenient place to store files. In this article, we discuss SharePoint lists and the upcoming new forms experience. You’ll also find our usual summary of updates that we hope you’ll find useful or interesting.
SharePoint Lists – the 'Swiss Army knife' feature of modern SharePoint
Lists are one of the oldest features of SharePoint and are widely used across the University for data gathering, often together with other Microsoft 365 services such as Forms and Power Automate. Modern Lists have been rebuilt from the ground up, keeping all the excellent features from previous versions but updating and enhancing them to bring them into line with the modern SharePoint experience.
We’ve set out a few of the reasons we like Lists, perhaps you’ll find them useful too!
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Lists can be just for you or can be created for your SharePoint site audiences. Create, share and manage them using the ‘Lists’ app in your Microsoft 365 ‘waffle’ at the top left of your screen.
- Lists have convenient item-level access controls, so that list contributors can only see or edit their own entries. This SharePoint Maven article explains more about enabling item level permissions in SharePoint.
- New list templates help you build a list quickly and efficiently – visit List templates in Microsoft 365 to find out more.
- New approval functionality is coming soon. Approvals in Lists has more information about this handy feature.
Lists are continually being improved so do keep an eye on this termly SharePoint article series or visit Microsoft's features roadmap to find out what's coming. And for ‘how to’ guidance, check out Microsoft’s guide for creating a list.
SharePoint features available now
Microsoft regularly makes updates and improvements to SharePoint. It’s not easy to narrow down the most important but here are some we hope you’ll find useful:
- Updated SharePoint list forms with new and attractive modern features and intuitive customisation options allowing users to fill out forms on any device.
- Dedicated video pages to highlight and showcase specific videos in your site with lots of configuration options.
- A new, easy-to-use, design experience using page templates to create attractive modern pages for a variety of uses.
- Improvements to document library version history limits – enabling admins to set an appropriate level of recoverability and auditability for their organisation balanced with storage usage considerations.
Features rolling out soon
Microsoft’s roadmap for SharePoint is always there to find out more about plans for new or updated features. Keep an eye out for these features which we heard will be available in the next few months:
- A new SharePoint Page designer experience similar to the ‘design ideas’ functionality in PowerPoint with useful suggestions and designs.
- Collaborate on SharePoint pages and news items with co-authoring.
- New content panes for SharePoint pages allowing you to quickly drag and drop rich text, media and other items directly into your page designs.
- Use custom images as section backgrounds in SharePoint pages and home pages.
- New banner web parts for SharePoint pages and news.
SharePoint Online support, help and advice
The SharePoint Online pages on the IT Help website are a great starting point and includes lots of useful information for using SharePoint Online and finding help and training.
The University’s SharePoint Service Home site also includes an extensive help and support section as well as frequently asked questions.
We recommend joining the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) on Teams and following the SharePoint Online User Group channel where you can share your experiences or tips and tricks for using SharePoint Online with others across the University and find informal support.
Did you know?
You can fine tune your site and content so that it reaches the right audience with this permissions and sharing guide (PDF). Three routes - one aim - Sharing items in SharePoint also has some useful tips.
