Hands-On Microsoft Lists book review

Hands-On Microsoft Lists: Create custom data models and improve the way data is organized using Lists in Microsoft 365 by João Ferreira and Rene Modery.

Microsoft Lists is an application in Microsoft 365 that people can use to track their work. I was interested to discover how Microsoft Lists compared with SharePoint Lists and Microsoft Dataverse and to learn its capabilities so I can decide if and when I could use Lists with the Power Platform.

I often use Excel Online in OneDrive for Business for simple table data collection apps and use Dataverse for more complex data. Microsoft Lists appeared to me when it was announced as a more powerful replacement for SharePoint but I needed to find out more which is why I read this book. I was also interested to compare Microsoft Lists with Dataverse for Teams.

The book is well structured, starting from basic concepts and building lists and then views and forms becoming progressively more detailed.

The initial chapter describes the user interface for Lists in the Lists app, in SharePoint, and in the mobile app. The second chapter is all about creating a list and handles the issue of where the list is created either in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, or Teams. I found this was well explained and sorted out the confusion I initially had about where Lists are stored. I do like that you can easily associate a colour and an icon with a list. Microsoft has standardized a lot between Lists and Dataverse so the method and options for adding columns to a list was very familiar. I didn’t know that columns could include validation formulas or that calculated columns are supported. However, the formulas do not use Power Fx and the formulas such as DATEDIFF are not the same. I was not able to test using the Microsoft Lists mobile app as it is not yet available on Android.

Creating a list from an Excel spreadsheet is probably one of the common activities I may use and this was explained very well in the book. I did find creating a list from an existing list confusing, I did think it was just adding a list to my lists but it is actually a copy of the list and its columns but not its data.

Chapter 3 explained the core features of Lists. I do like the automatic generation of filters based on the data types defined for each column and the out-of-the-box gallery view. This makes a list very usable straight after creation of the list with no further customization. Rules were a surprise feature although I was confused between Automate with rules vs Power Automate and I do not know when I should use Rules over Power Automate.

Microsoft Lists comes with a number of templates. I compared these templates with the equivalent templates in Dataverse for Teams. The Microsoft List templates are surprising useful, they do not contain the same level of functionality as in Dataverse for Teams but for many scenarios they are perfectly suitable.

Chapter 4 discussed collaboration through sharing, comments, and rules. These features had been outlined in Chapter 3 with Chapter 4 adding detail. I would use this for reference when you need to use these features.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discussed creating and customizing lists, views of list data, and forms. I thought this was well done in the book; explaining how to create and format views. Conditional formatting was something that I was not aware of and the book explained how to use conditional formatting well. I found the reference to the columns in the Planned IT Projects list when these columns were not explained earlier in the book: the book created a list for tracking Leave Requests in Chapter 3.

I do think that although JSON formatting sections were comprehensive, I can’t see myself using JSON. It might have helped giving some use cases for using JSON formatting, for example I think adding icons and handling time zones might be relevant but it was hard to tell. There were some examples for adding action buttons but this seemed excessively complex to achieve relatively simple results that are much easier to do with Power Apps. I found myself wondering how much will these advanced features be used and it conflicts with the easy to use approach of Microsoft Lists. I think the idea of having to use Visual Studio makes me think hard as to whether Microsoft Lists is an application I want to use.

Chapter 8 discussed customizing the form for creating and editing data. The chapter then introduced using Power Apps to customize the form.

Chapter 9 was probably the most interesting for me with using Microsoft Lists with the Power Platform. It is a shame that Microsoft Lists uses the SharePoint connector and that you have to copy and paste the URLs to the lists into the trigger step. The book should also have explained that when using the For a selected Item trigger that you need to add a Get Item step to retrieve the data for the selected item. Again I found the use of the Planned IT Projects list confusing with unreferenced columns. It would have been better to use the same list throughout the book. The book needs to explain how to use Person and Choice columns with the Power Platform. I also expected to see content on using Microsoft Lists as a data source for Canvas apps rather than Power Virtual Agents.

I was really surprised to not see any mention of the Visualize the List with Power BI feature that automatically generates a really good report that you can publish back to the list and is then available for the command bar. This is a great feature that allows you quickly generate a summary set of visualizations with AI powered insights.

In summary, the book is a good introduction to creating and configuring Microsoft Lists and for those who want to customize and administer Microsoft Lists. For my purposes it didn’t answer the questions I had on using Microsoft Lists with the Power Platform and I would have liked to have a discussion on when to use the inbuilt capabilities of Microsoft Lists such as Views, Forms, and Rules against using the Power Platform. I also found little to help me to decide whether to use Dataverse for Teams or to use Microsoft Lists. One final point; the title is a little misleading as there are no data modelling in this book.

You can purchase direct from Packt https://www.packtpub.com/product/hands-on-microsoft-lists/9781801075046 or from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Empowering-Organizations-Power-Virtual-Agents/dp/1801074747