Enhancing Data Management with Microsoft Lists Forms and Form Formatting

Microsoft Lists is a great tool for data collection in your organization. With the introduction of Microsoft Lists Forms, the process has been refined, offering a more targeted and user-centric approach. A key advantage of this new feature is the selective exposure of fields to users, safeguarding the full data schema of your list.

Despite this advancement, the feature does not differentiate the data input by the user from the subsequent additions made by someone with full list access. The fields are displayed side by side, which can lead to a mix-up of user-input data with that intended for the list owner.

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By João Ferreira Apr 17, 2024 Formatting, Forms 0 Comments

How to Fix a Missing Column in a Calendar View Formatting in Microsoft Lists

If you are using Microsoft Lists to create and manage your calendars, you might have encountered a common issue: not seeing all the columns the list contains when trying to format the calendar. This can be frustrating if you want to use specific columns to apply different colors to the calendar events.

The reason for this issue is that the calendar view does not include all the columns by default. It only shows the columns that are relevant for a calendar. If you have other columns in your list that you want to use for formatting, you will need to add them to the calendar view first.

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By João Ferreira Jan 29, 2024 Formatting 0 Comments

How to group and sort a Microsoft Lists view by month

Microsoft Lists is a powerful tool that allows you to create and manage data in various ways. You can use lists to track issues, tasks, contacts, inventory, and more. One of the features that makes lists so versatile is the ability to create different views of your data. Views let you filter, sort, group, and format your list items according to your needs and preferences.

One common scenario that many users face is how to group their list items by month. For example, you might want to see how many tasks were completed, how many issues were resolved, or how much revenue was generated in each month. Grouping by month can help you identify trends, patterns, and outliers in your data.

In this blog post, I will guide you step by step through the process of creating a list view that is grouped and sorted by month in chronological order. You will learn how to create calculated columns, use formulas, and adjust sorting options to achieve the desired result.

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By João Ferreira Jan 5, 2024 Formatting, Views 0 Comments

How to detect the length of a string with Microsoft Lists formatting

One of the things that I like to do at the beginning of every year is to review some of my Microsoft Lists and create new views or refine some of the existing ones. This year was no exception, and while I was working on one of my lists, I decided to fix a problem (more about it here) that had been bothering me for a long time but in the process, I found another annoying issue.

My goal was to split a string and I jumped immediately into the length function; however this function only measures the size of an array, not the length of a string. This means that if you want to apply some conditional formatting based on the number of characters in a text field, or if you want to split the string in half you are out of luck.

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By João Ferreira Jan 4, 2024 Formatting 0 Comments

How to fix and format an image column with preview in Microsoft Lists and SharePoint

One of the first column formatting samples I did for SharePoint and Microsoft Lists was a lightbox to preview the image stored in the Image field, this way the user is able to see the picture in high resolution without the need to download it or open it in another tab.

This sample is available in the PnP GitHub repo and had several revisions, unfortunately all of them stopped working as some of the image field properties are no longer there. Thankfully there is a new method to get thumbnails from the image that can be used to replace the old properties.

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By João Ferreira Oct 26, 2023 Formatting 2 Comments

Mastering list view formatting: How to format selected items in Microsoft Lists and SharePoint

Lists can help you to keep track of tasks, projects, and important information. However, as lists grow larger and more complex, it can be challenging to navigate and make sense of the data. That’s where list view formatting comes in.

With the ability to customize how lists are displayed, list view formatting allows you to present data in a more meaningful and visually appealing way. One of the most useful features of list view formatting is the ability to highlight selected items, providing an instant visual cue that draws the user’s attention to important information.

This blog post will guide you through formatting selected items in views, using two different examples to illustrate the process.

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By João Ferreira Apr 3, 2023 Formatting 0 Comments

Formatting grouped list headers with user profile pictures

Grouping a list in SharePoint or Microsoft Lists, makes it easier to view and analyze the data as the information is aggregated by one column.

In this article I’m explaining how you can group a list and format the header of the group with the creator name and profile picture to make it easier to find the information.

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By João Ferreira Feb 28, 2023 Formatting 0 Comments

How to format a Microsoft Lists Calendar view

Modern SharePoint and Microsoft Lists calendar views are available for some time now and I covered the creation process already here in the blog.

What I’m explaining in this post is how you can easily format the calendar with colors to better identify the items throughout the month.

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By João Ferreira Feb 4, 2023 Formatting, Microsoft Lists 14 Comments

Create solutions for Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists is revolutionizing the classic lists from SharePoint, bringing new configuration and customization options that allow any user to transform tabular data into things like To Do lists or Kanban boards without the need of writing code.

I’ve been doing a session where I explain how to take advantage of Microsoft Lists to implement complete solutions for Microsoft Teams and in this blog post you will be able to find all the list formatting shown during my sessions.

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By João Ferreira Jun 29, 2022 Formatting, Microsoft Lists 0 Comments

How to create a To Do list using SharePoint and Microsoft Lists view formatting – Part 3

After all the work you’ve done to implement the To Do list in Microsoft Lists is a bit disappointing not being able to share it with others.

If you are reading this article after going through the implementation or if you jumped all the configuration steps directly to here let me tell you that once you execute the code I’m providing in this article, all users will be able to take advantage of your new To Do list.

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By João Ferreira Jan 12, 2022 Formatting 0 Comments