How to Create Ratings Columns in Microsoft Lists with the New UI

If you are a fan of Microsoft Lists, you might have noticed a new feature that makes it easier to add ratings columns to your lists. Ratings columns allow you to collect feedback from your users or team members in the form of stars or thumbs up/down. They are a great way to measure satisfaction, popularity, or quality of your list items.

In the past, adding ratings columns to your lists was not a straightforward process. You had to either go to the classic list settings and enable ratings from there, or use PowerShell to activate ratings on modern communication sites. I wrote about this limitation in a previous blog post.

Microsoft Lists Rating Column

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How to Use Microsoft Lists Image Columns in Adaptive Cards

Adaptive cards are a great way to create interactive and engaging experiences for your users in Microsoft 365. You can use adaptive cards to display data from various sources, such as SharePoint and Microsoft Lists, in a rich and customizable way.

However, using images stored in SharePoint in adaptive cards is not an easy task, as images can be stored in different locations with different ways to access them. For example, you may want to use an image, stored in a list image column, but how do you get the direct link to the image file that can be rendered in the adaptive card?

Microsoft Lists Image Columns in Adaptive Cards

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How to Add an Image to a Microsoft Lists Image column using Power Automate

In a previous post, I wrote about the changes Microsoft did to the Image column in Microsoft Lists and how that change had an impact on how things work now in SharePoint.

In this article, I will show you how to bypass a limitation of the Power Automate connector, which does not support the Image column from the UI yet. The solution is to use the SharePoint REST API to fill in the field as a workaround.

Microsoft Image Column Power Automate

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How to Turn Off Attachments in Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists is a powerful tool that lets you create and manage lists of data, such as tasks, issues, contacts, inventory, and more. One of the features of Microsoft Lists is the ability to add attachments to list items, such as documents, images, or other files. This can be useful when you want to provide additional information or context for your list items.

However, attachments in Microsoft Lists are not meant to be used as a replacement for the SharePoint document libraries. There are some limitations and drawbacks of using attachments in Microsoft Lists that you should be aware of:

Disable Microsoft Lists Attachments

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Where are Microsoft Lists images stored in 2024?

Microsoft Lists is a powerful tool that allows you to create and manage data in various scenarios. One of the features that makes Lists stand out is the image column field, which lets you upload an image directly from the form, without having to use a hyperlink column and manually upload the image to SharePoint.

But where are these images stored? And how can you access them if you need to? In this blog post, I will explain how the image column storage has changed over time and what are the implications for end users and developers.

Microsoft List Images storage

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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.

Microsoft Lists view formatting

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New Calendar Views for Microsoft Lists

In May 2023, Microsoft announced some exciting new features for Microsoft Lists, such as custom forms, new and faster interface, rating columns by default among others. Some of these features are expected to start rolling out in February 2024, but some of them have already started to land quietly in the Lists app.

New Microsoft Calendar Views

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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.

Group and sort a Microsoft Lists view by month

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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.

Microsoft Lists formatting field length

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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.

Fix Microsoft Lists image preview

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I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.