I’m very happy to see Microsoft Lists starting to roll-out. The new functionality and a shift to its own dedicated app help to lower technology barriers for citizen developers and better position Microsoft Lists in the Microsoft 365 landscape of apps. In this blog post I am going to walk through creating a new List using an existing Excel spreadsheet.
Start by navigating to Microsoft Lists, click “New list” and then click “From Excel”.
Either upload the spreadsheet from your computer or use an online file from OneDrive / SharePoint. In this example I am using an existing file stored in OneDrive.
My example spreadsheet does not have any tables and cannot be imported until it does. Microsoft Lists provide the opportunity to update or “customize” the spreadsheet during the import process. This is a great time to perform data validation!
We further customize the Excel table to assign List column types to spreadsheet columns. In my example, I set lookup columns to “Choice” and date columns to “Date and time”. Click “Next” to continue.
Provide a name, color, icon and storage location (OneDrive aka “My lists” or SharePoint) and then click “Create”. I am using “My lists” in this example.
Once the import completes, the new Microsoft List is ready for use and a new entry is created in my “Recent lists” for easy access.
Tip for power users: select the star icon to favorite a list.
Thanks for reading.
NY
