Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists is the Microsoft 365 application for tracking structured information — issues, assets, requests, events, inventory, and anything else that fits in rows and columns. It runs on the same list engine SharePoint has always used, presented as a standalone app with ready-made templates, saved views, conditional formatting, built-in forms, and rules that send notifications. Organisations use it to replace scattered tracking spreadsheets with one structured record that several people can update at once.

Part of the SharePoint reference · Limits verified against Microsoft documentation · Last reviewed 1 September 2026

What Microsoft Lists does

• Structured columns. Text, number, date, choice, person, lookup, yes/no, currency, image and calculated columns, each validating what can be entered.
• Saved views. The same data as a grid, gallery, board or calendar — filtered and grouped per audience, saved for everyone or just for you.
• Conditional formatting. Colour and icon rules per column or row, so status is readable at a glance without opening anything.
• Built-in forms. A form collects entries from people who never open the list itself.
• Rules. Simple if-then notifications when an item is created, changed or deleted, with no flow-building required.
• Version history and comments. Every change recorded and reversible; discussion attached to the item rather than an email thread.
• Templates. Ready-made structures for issue tracking, asset management, onboarding, event planning and recruitment.

Common uses

• Help desk and service request tracking
• Asset, equipment and inventory registers
• Project task and milestone tracking
• Employee onboarding and offboarding checklists
• Event planning, room bookings and schedules
• Risk registers, incident logs and audit trails
• Employee directories and contact lists

What changed with the mobile apps

Microsoft retired the standalone Microsoft Lists apps for iOS and Android in mid-November 2025. New installs were blocked from September 2025, the apps were pulled from both stores in November, and existing installations stopped working. Microsoft’s guidance is to use the mobile browser experience instead, which it describes as more functional and still receiving updates.

Nothing happened to the data, and nothing happened to the platform. Lists continues to work in a desktop browser, in a mobile browser, as a tab inside Microsoft Teams, and everywhere SharePoint surfaces list content.

How Microsoft Lists fits into Microsoft 365

Lists rarely stands alone. Knowing which product owns which job is the difference between a tidy Microsoft 365 estate and five overlapping trackers nobody trusts.

• SharePointSame engine. A list saved to a team or communication site is a SharePoint list, visible in both experiences, and reaches the intranet through the List web part.
• OneDrivePersonal lists created under My lists live in the creator’s own storage rather than on a shared site — which matters when that person leaves.
• Microsoft TeamsAny list can be pinned as a channel tab, so a team works the tracker without leaving Teams. The list still lives in the connected SharePoint site.
• Power AutomateWhere rules stop. Approval chains, multi-step routing, calls to external systems and scheduled digests all start from a list trigger.
• Power AppsCustomises the item form beyond the built-in form, or builds a full app — including camera and scanning scenarios — on top of list data.
• ExcelThe entry and exit point. Import a spreadsheet to create a list; export a view back to Excel for modelling.
• PlannerThe nearest neighbour and the most common mix-up. Planner runs tasks to completion; Lists keeps records that persist.

Lists compared with Excel and Planner

Almost every “should this be a list?” argument is really one of these two comparisons.

Limits and thresholds

Two kinds of number appear below and they behave differently. Hard limits are enforced by the service — cross one and something breaks. Recommended limits are performance guidance you can exceed at a cost.

What the thresholds mean in practice

• Design views before the list grows. A default view that returns everything will break somewhere past 5,000 items. Filter it on an indexed column from day one, not after the error appears.
• Index the columns you filter and sort on. Title, Created, Modified, Created By and Modified By are the usual candidates. An unindexed filter on a large list fails even when the result set is small.
• Watch the 100,000 mark for permissions. Above it you can no longer break inheritance at list level, which constrains how a large register can be secured.
• Rules run out before processes do. Fifteen is enough for notifications and not enough for a workflow. Move to Power Automate rather than working around the cap.
• Rules have edges. They cannot be built on multi-line text columns, you need Contribute permission to manage them, and notifications arrive from no-reply@sharepointonline.com — worth allow-listing before people report them as spam.

Putting list data on an intranet page

A tracker that only exists inside the Lists app gets used by the team that built it. Getting it onto the intranet homepage, a department site or a hub is what turns it into something the wider organisation actually reads.

SharePoint’s built-in List web part does this natively: drop it on a page, point it at a list, choose a saved view. For most trackers that is the right answer and there is nothing else to buy. Its constraint is presentation — the web part renders the standard list grid, so the tracker looks like SharePoint rather than like the rest of your page. There is limited control over layout, typography, card treatment, or how the data sits alongside the surrounding design.

Common questions about Microsoft Lists