Ah, Microsoft Lists. The latest noble attempt to create a flexible, user-friendly tool for collating information and managing tasks. Yet, despite the promise of digital efficiency, these Lists often morph into a tangled web of SharePointy confusion and frustration. As organisations adopt Microsoft 365 and increasingly turn to this tool, I feel like its legitimate to ask the question: Does the brittle nature of Microsoft Lists inadvertently stifle adoption? The answer, regrettably reveals more about Microsoft’s approach to software than its ardent advocates would like to admit.
TL:DR – Microsoft Lists hold great potential for improving productivity, yet their fragility hampers user adoption. A plethora of issues, from simple conditional formatting problems to cumbersome PowerApps integration, contribute to a poor user experience. Adopting a systematic troubleshooting approach combined with user feedback mechanisms could rectify many of these failings. In the end, you would imagine that addressing these shortcomings wold be in Microsoft's best interests if they truly intend to foster long-term user engagement with Microsoft Lists.
Contents
- The SharePoint Effect
- The Lists Experience Grief or Gain?
- Lack of flexibility
- Issues, Issues Everywhere
- Example: Import a Calendar to a List to make it more useful
- A roadmap to what?
- Top 5 Pain Points for End Users
- Top 5 Pain Points for IT Admins
- The Feedback Loop is just an Echo Chamber
- Is it Really Worth It?
- Best Practices for Trouble-Free Implementation
- Useless mobile app
- A Mixed Bag of Promises
The SharePoint Effect
It seems in order to create a simple list we must first understand the broader ecosystem of SharePoint. A platform hailed for its document sharing and collaboration capabilities, SharePoint has nevertheless evolved into a labyrinth, riddled with complexity. Central to its inadequacies are decades of techical debt and resulting issues that people report plague SharePoint deployments.
The Lists Experience Grief or Gain?
Fast forward to the introduction of the new Lists experience, which aimed to revolutionise the way we compile and interact with data. Since its unveiling in May 2024, users envisaged enhanced performance, and microsoft trumpeted well-integrated features, and a semblance of usability. Instead, they found themselves entangled in a series of inane bugs and a UI that feels more like punishment than productivity. Certainly the initial user experience is pretty.
Lack of flexibility
But what if you wanted to import a .csv into an existing list, or export one, or create one to augment a calendar. Im afraid you are out of luck. No deviations from these rigid single choice opportunities are allowed. Yes you can import a .csv but only into a new list. What? You wanted to add more information later? Too bad.
Issues, Issues Everywhere
Issues abound, it seems, evoking frustration while trying to build the simplest list. It’s almost tragically amusing that users can be thrust into a vortex of confusion simply from a failed form interaction. Add to that the glaring troubles surrounding conditional formatting, where simple opertions seem to defy all logic, ending up with a completely broken column or view or both and you can hear the collective groan from the user base. Is this what progress looks like? It is almost enough to make one question the fundamental principles of software development.
Example: Import a Calendar to a List to make it more useful
First off Microsoft Lists doesn’t natively support importing .ics (iCalendar) files from a feed for these events.
An alternative would be to set up a Power Automate 'Flow' that monitors the calendar and pushes the events into a list but this seems like overkill, and requires Power Automate expertise and ongoing maintenance.
So what is the best approach. It looks like the easiest is to convert to CSV then import then modify the list. This is easy but cumbersome. Then you can create a new list from your CSV, and map the column data types and import status during the import.
What would make this better would be some more advanced CSV import capability, such as the ability to reimport. But as it is theres nothing like this available.
A roadmap to what?
The need for Microsoft to improve these products and resolve these persistent issues can’t be overstated. Users, ever the resilient lot who cling to some semblance of hope, are voicing their protest or avoiding the technology altogether. Sharing additional grievances could potentially culminate in meaningful change, if it were possible to get past the army of nonsense responders in the offocial support sites. This is surely a completely broken feedback loop that desperately needs to be reconnected to evolve Lists into a platform worthy of its users’ trust.
Top 5 Pain Points for End Users
- Fragile custom views – filters and formats break easily with minor edits
- Slow UI rendering – especially on large lists or with grouped views
- Flaky conditional formatting – JSON layouts often stop working
- Confusing permissions – hard to know who can see or edit what
- Poor mobile experience – limited functionality and responsiveness
Top 5 Pain Points for IT Admins
- SharePoint dependency – tightly coupled to SharePoint backend quirks
- Brittle data model – no schema enforcement or relational structure
- Limited Power Automate support – triggers fail or require workarounds
- Versioning issues – can't reliably track changes or roll back
- Migration and scaling challenges – hard to move or grow beyond limits
The Feedback Loop is just an Echo Chamber
Is Microsoft genuinely listening, or are we merely contributing to an echo chamber filled with platitudes? I dont want to know how pleased the responder is to have not helped me by answering a different question or not knowing the answer at all. I really don't.
Is it Really Worth It?
The question now lies in whether the proverbial juice is worth the squeeze. The promise of improved efficiency through Microsoft Lists is reminiscent of software from thirty years ago promising to re-engineer the corporation. It didn't. This doesn't either.
Best Practices for Trouble-Free Implementation
For those brave souls still willing to trudge through these trenches, adopting systematic troubleshooting strategies is paramount. This mostly involves not adding any unnecessary customisations at all, and using only the out of the box templates and functionality. It’s like reductionist science, simpler in theory than in practice, but, one can hope, ultimately functional.
Useless mobile app
It works, and is published but its unwieldy, and a bit like viewing a large poster through a letter box. I dont think I can recommend it at all.
A Mixed Bag of Promises
Ultimately, Microsoft Lists has promises of unprecedented efficiency which are shrouded in the cruel ironies of execution. As users grapple with the inherent brittleness of this tool, the path forward remains murky.
