All you need to know about Microsoft Lists

all right welcome everybody um thanks for uh getting in today uh with a couple meet-up issues but hopefully people will be trickling in here over the next couple minutes but we'll kind of get started we've got a pretty full agenda which is great um really diving into microsoft lists so um with that i'm simply going to hand it over to nate and mickey to kick us off for the first half and then we'll kick off alex at the second go ahead awesome all right thanks jonathan and thanks everybody for joining let's share my screen here all right cool so welcome yeah my name is nate chamberlin and welcome to all you need to know about microsoft list i've got mickey with me here today and we both work at centric training in kansas city missouri so we've got our information up there on the screen and when we're not training people we both kind of have our our side things going on so i'll let mickey talk about hers uh here in a minute and then for me i just blog at natechamberlin.com so off to you mickey yeah thanks um so yeah i do centric training where i mainly focus on training and just strategy around our microsoft 365 program that we offer and um and then i also have a consulting company so on the side and weekends and nights all that good stuff i work with a variety of clients and building solutions for them or migrating them to the cloud or you know a variety of different things so yeah glad to be here today thanks awesome all right so uh i did something with our our topic here today for our intro so just a preview of one thing that you'll see today is the ability to use lists to create different views and so for our speaker profiles there you're seeing it both in the traditional list format that you may be most familiar with but then also a customized gallery view as well all right so we're going to start out with some basics as many of you are probably already familiar with some of these very beginning steps but when we get into some of the more specific topics be sure to ask questions you can use the chat if you'd like or if you want to mute that's fine as well but i'm going to get us started with the basic concepts then hand it off to mickey who's going to talk more about how we can integrate list with other experiences so nate for the basics and mickey for taking it to that next level so to get to list you can just start from office.com that's my favorite starting point for any app in microsoft 365 because it's kind of like your virtual desktop right so we use the app launcher in the upper left hand corner from there to get to just about anything including lists and i can also find lists embedded in sharepoint and teams and in fact if some of you are brand new to sharepoint and list you may not know that list kind of grew out of sharepoint that's kind of it's it's birthplace if you will excuse me uh so when we're creating a list from any of these locations from list from mic or from teams from sharepoint we get a few options and those are basically you can start from blank or if you want to import existing data let's say you've been using excel for years and you've got massive tables uh no sense copying and pasting 100 rows at a time you can just use the from excel option and now that being said that is the only option that you see when you're creating a new list that would allow you to import existing rows of data and everything else is going to be a blank list with maybe some conditional formatting built in different columns and things that we'll hear about here in just a moment but yeah you can start from blank from excel you can copy lists so let's say you do something every quarter then you can copy last quarters to start this quarters and then there's built-in templates now one fun thing that not a lot of people know about the templates is that if you start in list or sharepoint to create your list you actually have three fewer templates to choose from whereas if you start from teams you get three more and i can just zoom in here a little bit to show those to you but we've got incidents patience and loans if you start from teams all right so uh when you're thinking about lists when you're thinking about creating these using whatever method you just saw you have to kind of decide first of all who's the audience because by separating listen to a separate app we got the ability to basically create private lists just like onedrive is yours and sharepoint is ours lists can now also be yours or hours so if you start from the list app that's when you're going to get the ability to as you can see on the right hand side save a new list no matter which method you're using to create it to something called my list and so that's basically going to be private to you until you share it with someone else because you can still share just like something in your onedrive now ours of course would be if you created it from sharepoint or teams where the membership of that location is already uh expanded beyond yourself so starting with you know list being yours starting with the the one drive kind of side of things the list that you create and save to my list are actually stored on your onedrive site and not everybody knows that onedrive is basically built on sharepoint it's kind of its own little sharepoint site out there so even though you wouldn't go through onedrive to get to your list that's truly where they're they're living but you would still go through office.com click on list just the app and then you'll find your list there so those are private to you until you share and i'll show you that here in just a moment how you could do that whether it's the whole list or one specific item in a list now when we're talking about hours which mickey's going to show you a little bit later how to bring in a list uh to page experiences and teams and all of that you can access those from lists as well or of course sharepoint teams and just like i said anybody who's already part of that team or site already has access to it and most likely the same access you have to it all right so let's hop out let's get out of these slides and do a little bit of demo so i'm going to start here on office.com again that's kind of like our virtual desktop and i'm going to start by using my app launcher and going straight to the lists app so i'm not going to share pointer teams first there we go and i can already see some recent lists that i've been working on so i've got those here but i'm going to start just creating a new list and here's what we were seeing before but we're missing three templates right because we're starting from lists and not teams but we can create a blank list import existing copy or use a template okay so i'm just going to go through the beginning steps we're not going to do this whole thing but i'll go through the beginning steps and you can see that the ability to save it to my list maybe first meet up and now list let me do a refresh there we go all right so i'm choosing a template i can kind of get an idea of what my data could look like once i start populating it use that template and then right here only from the list app do you get the option to save it to my list or one of your sharepoint sites or teams okay so from here if i did save it to my list that's going to be private there we go and i can see at the very top my name in this demo environment is alex wilbur and i can see at the top i've got the the domain dash my that tells me it's onedrive.sharepoint.com personal so that's just a traditional onedrive url and then my username all right so it's stored on my onedrive site and from here knowing that it's private to me right now when i'm ready to share it let's say i add a bunch of items or i copy and paste them or import them or use power automate whatever the method is that i use to get data in there when i'm ready to share my private list with somebody you just click share at the top and this is kind of a nice feature that came with list that you'll see in sharepoint as well where you know it used to be with a list you'd have to you know break inheritance on permissions and go through the old classic settings to share a list but now we just have a convenient share button that looks a lot like uh what we see with just a file right so for my entire list in my onedrive site basically i click share i can put a name in here there we go and the options here are a little bit different than you would see when you're sharing a file i'll zoom in a little bit but basically we can give someone full control to the entire list so they're kind of like a co-owner in that way and they could do anything they want to it i can just give them the edit list access which is adding editing as you can see they're moving columns so still a high level but they can't really control the list at the extent we can and then editing just items or just viewing sometimes you want to give someone like report level access to your list and that would be that last one there so four different levels then i would notify isaiah and i'll go ahead and give edit list access let's say we're going to collaborate pretty closely on this entire project so isaiah i got that now just like with the file if you want to remove that at some point make it private to you again you just use the ellipsis manage access and then you can remove isaiah's access all right so i'll pause there and i'm going through a lot of introductory content are there any questions on anything that i've said so far so this being in your onedrive are there are there any like implications or limitations that you really saw that that come from you know creating this in a one drive yeah so i think the number one thing is going to be the same consideration we have with your documents which is if you were to leave the company or you know maybe promote out of the department we have some decisions to make if you're leaving the company your site's going to disappear eventually so we need to figure out how to copy that over to a shared location maybe now if it's just really for you to work through your own processes then not a big deal but if your team has come to rely on it because you shared it with 30 people it's a little bit different scenario there um so that's one consideration and then um let's see oh yeah and then if you promote out of the department same kind of situation you're going to keep your onedrive site so you could keep that connected to those 30 people but it's not ideal right eventually it's just going to be needed by somebody else somebody else is going to want full control to take it over but it's still tied to you individually my guidance to my users is that there's just because you're building it doesn't make it yours it's still corporate content and belongs on a shared site it is only yours if it's yours personally and if it were deleted the only one that would compare care is you then it can go on one drive that's great all right any other questions which i love all right let's keep going here then so i'm going to zoom back out just a little bit i could show you how to share one item but i just want to talk through it instead so we can move on but basically when you do start adding content to your list and this goes for both your list and like sharepoint or teams list you can share one individual item and some people don't realize that so i like to share that little tidbit because imagine if somebody you know submits a form because we can use lists for like form-like experiences where they're submitting requests perhaps you could share that one item with an individual for them to just look at and say hey somebody requested this could you review the details and let me know if you have any concerns so sharing one specific item to someone who may not be a part of your site or may not have access to the whole list right but now they can access that one row of data so we're kind of getting into some topics now that are going to start highlighting why you might want to choose lists instead of excel and i'm not saying one is better than the other but there's definitely a use case for both and if you do want that kind of row level separation for some of your your data this is going to be a clear front runner and sometimes when i when i say that i get a comment such as well why don't i just copy the row in excel and send that to somebody well that that row whenever we're copying and pasting maybe sending in an email for example that's static right and if the status of that row of data were to change let's say from pending to approved a link to that item would show that right you can click on it today it says pending click on that same link tomorrow it shows you it's approved but that excel row of data i'm going to copy and paste it again and send it so a huge benefit just giving people a live connection to a specific row of data or the entire list so mickey would you add anything to the my list before we move on to our list no not that i can think of i mean as far as functionality and limitations or lack thereof um they work the exact same way i guess i would say space might be consideration from a list perspective the amount of data although it doesn't matter where it's stored you can easily allocate more space to a sharepoint site than you could um technically the one drive safe so if the list got huge that might be a consideration as well so my number one this is why lists are better and i will say it so much better than excel and excel sucks for this is because lists have line item version control so if you have someone who's in an excel spreadsheet particularly if you have multiple contributors so someone comes in they make some changes somebody else comes in makes more changes somebody else comes in makes more changes and oops you need to go back and undo that first person's changes you can only do that by undoing everyone's changes by going to a previous version whereas with a sharepoint list not only do you get you know all the permissions and things that you're talking about here but you have line item version control so you can roll back a particular line item i have used it for when people come back to me and say i don't know why i was tagged with that task i don't own that resource and then i look at the version control and say well in may of 2019 you listed yourself as the owner of said resource so yeah um which doesn't i've used that so so the line item version control is a huge huge huge huge lifesaver for me both from an accountability standpoint um and just you know error control whatever you call it broken things yeah but definitely i guess in addition to that rachel you bring up a good point that um when we're comparing again lists in general no matter where they're stored to in excel that line out of control when it comes to power automate um is just far far above and beyond anything excel can do because you can do tons of work and stuff with that absolutely and even and if we're you know going to go beyond just the specifics of the list experience versus the excel experience um you know if you start talking about power bi integration or teams integration or any of this other stuff um oh i like the recycle bin that if someone does come in and accidentally or on purpose delete you know five lines it you can get them back from the recycle bin which again you can't really do with excel without go doing the version anyway i love lists i have a whole sharepoint page on my user site on why lists are better than excel i can send a screenshot i'll stop now send us a screenshot rachel i'd like to see it yeah that's awesome all right well let's uh switch gears a little bit and we're going to switch into shared lists where you're not starting on your own um excuse me you don't have to manually share as long as you're part of an existing site or team so for the rest of uh my piece anyway i'm gonna use this retail accounts list and the retail accounts list is part of a site called retail so i can see that from the url i see the url doesn't say my or alex anymore and i can see up here right above the list name that it's part of a site called retail so i get some context clues to find out right away if it's already shared with someone else now you may not always go through the list app to get here you may want to view this list in context of the site so from here if you did start and list like i did just click on the name of the site so right there where it says retail click on that takes you out to the site and then i've got my retail accounts link here so it doesn't matter which way you go from but this way makes it obvious that you're you're in sharepoint all right so here we are in sharepoint this list actually has data and just to kind of show some of the concepts that were just discussed if we select any particular item we use the ellipsis and go to version history excuse me all right the dry throat so you can see all the changes that were made to this particular list item going back to april okay every single change that was made and it's not showing me every field unless there was a change in it for example i'm seeing display ready was changed yes location was updated customer ready was changed to yes the specific uh fields that were updated as we went through time now if i want to restore one of those let's say for this one row of data for this one retail account i want to go back to version 9 that specific time stamp for that specific change i just dropped that down and choose restore if i just want to look at it to compare and see what the comments were or what the work was at that point and click view and this is going to open up that item and show me the different fields here as it was in that version all right and then just like with document libraries i could go through all the steps if anybody's interested but if you delete a specific version let's say it had sensitive information like a social security number but it shouldn't have or a credit card number but it shouldn't have you can delete one version of a list item and you can delete an entire item so if i delete an item from my list just like a document it goes to my recycle bin from where there we go i can restore so to select and restore it works for versions works for the entire list item as well all right so some other topics here what i'd like to kind of introduce is uh views and metadata and if you're not familiar with the term metadata it's just data about data so that's really what lists are right it's it's mostly kind of like a database field and we start with one column which is usually the key right it's the title field and it tells us what is this entire row of data about and so in this case maybe it's actually store name this entire row of data is about the retail account for northwind capitol hill and then every other column we created here has to do with that right so that's pretty basic but the the columns that we're adding here so like last order representative and anything else that we wanted to add is just additional data that we want to collect and usually we want to add that data for a number of reasons right to know who to seek approval from to know when we have to do something by maybe to do conditional formatting or create a view so whether it's a functional thing or whether it's an aesthetic thing we've got options just because we're using metadata so to give you some examples of what i just said whenever you're dealing with choices for example like this display ready and customer ready and it's yes or no or maybe customer status we can format those to make them stand out a little bit more and we can group by them and it's really easy we just use the column headers so i'm going to use display ready drop that down first i'll show you grouping group by display ready and now i've got a roll up right kind of my own little report view so i can say oh i've got three that aren't display ready and maybe i focus my work on those right or maybe i want to look at them side by side my nose and my s's and anytime you're doing anything i'm about to show you the grouping filtering formatting remember that you can save these as a separate report view so notice up in my upper right hand corner where i've got my all items view selected i've got all these other reports or views that i've created based on things i'm doing just like i am now right like grouping or changing formatting maybe changing what columns i want to see in a particular view so just keep that in mind as a possibility now in addition to grouping by that maybe you want to do a little bit of color coding right so let's use customer ready and we'll do just basically a yes or no right yes or no different colors so i'm going to go to my column settings i will do format this column and then if it's specifically a choice column we do get the ability to do choice pills which basically just puts a colored oval behind the the different options but if it's not a choice field you may just want to do conditional formatting so let's go ahead and delete the default rule and we'll say if customer ready is equal to yes then we'll make it yeah we'll just go with blue that sounds good i'm going to refresh since we're not seeing it right away when in doubt refresh and there's my three yeses highlighted so that's a very simple example but imagine that you know you could add multiple conditions and say if the item is overdue and the status is not ready right combine those two things and then visually you can see everything that's overdue and not ready instantly right so that's just one example of formatting and you can do it per column like that or you could do it per row so in addition to having column formatting we can go up to our view menu and format views and it's the same kind of concept you can do conditional you can do alternating and then basically create the same kind of rules and say if it's over a certain amount highlight the entire row in red so i'll pause there again any questions so far about the grouping or the conditional formatting that i'm talking about all right cool let's keep going so let's see checking my time here let's go down here okay so i've got in this particular view i've got a really cool ability because i'm using a people column that allows me to make a specific experience for you right so if i actually look at my view menu i've got my accounts as a view and remember my name is alex right now in this demo so i choose my accounts and because i have that representative column which is a real people column i can get my own custom view right these are the only accounts that i care about and then mickey's acting as isaiah today and if isaiah goes to this exact same view if i just send her this url then she's only going to see isaiah's items right excuse me so let me show you how i do that in case you haven't tried that before but for my all items view just by default view i can drop down representative and go to filter by and then there's an option here that's at me now if i go down i could find my name alex wilbur right and i could check that and click apply and create my own maybe private view if i wanted to if i didn't want it to be public for the rest of my team but the difference is if i choose alex here that's only ever going to show alex and if i did make a public view and isaiah visited it isaiah is going to see alex's stuff right so this is a static option whereas the at me is custom right it's going to be dynamic and if you log in and you go to a view where i filtered by at me you're going to see your items so imagine the power of that if it's like stuff you created stuff that's been assigned to you stuff that's your responsibility right or maybe if you're a manager uh all of your direct reports or things that you oversee right all right so we'll go ahead and do that we'll apply the app me and we get the same view option which uh we haven't saved but you know i've already created it my accounts so as we're making changes like this if you haven't worked much with views you can always just drop down the view menu save view as and then you're gonna be exactly where i was with that other one all right so let's talk about dates too so you've seen me do um and at me so i'm gonna do some conditional formatting uh we can also do rolling dates and i really like this in uh list versus excel too we can we can do it in either place but i like it here best but uh basically with our with our date views i've got a last order column and i just want to see things that are in the last three months recent orders basically and you can do this any number of ways think about things that are due in the next seven days forms that were submitted in the last four months you know anything that has to do with a rolling date like that in this particular case if i want to create something like that i unfortunately let me start from all items again but i unfortunately can't do it from here i can't drop down the the column header and go to filter by and have some kind of relative option so what i'm going to do instead is i'm i'll show you from the view that i created but basically you edit a view create a new view and then choose edit the current view and then there we go we'll go all the way down here and there's a filter section and in the filter section we just say show items only when the following is true and i'll zoom in a little bit there oops and i said last quarter is greater than or equal to today minus 90 right so about three months um and i know to use today in brackets like that because it tells me off to the side so if you forget that step just remember to read the instructions today or me now i just did an fyi if you're curious about that me that's the same thing i just did with the app me it's just a classic versus modern approach so you don't have to come here to do this but you could you can absolutely come here and use that instead of it at me but this is something we still need to do in classic so i took today in brackets minus 90 and as long as that last order date is within that range it's going to show up in this view all right uh mickey do you have anything to add so far on the the people or the the date views or anything or scenarios you can think of you want to share um yeah just one scenario that i'd like to point out from kind of what i've learned is um in that filter view when you're looking at dates i know i've had you know project solutions or contract solutions or something along those lines that you're trying to capture both before and after a time frame so you want you know like seven days or something like that um just be careful if you go over like three filters because of your and and or situation you want to remember your order of operations back in like middle school if they still teach that in school and don't know but um just making sure that your and and ors work in the way you may even have to sometimes maybe flip what you initially thought you built first and i don't recommend going over more than two or three because it just never seems to to work but you can see there as nate is adding more and more and more i think you can do up to like six or eight different filters but it's if you have that many filters my recommendation is use a calculated column or use power automate to sometimes you know to set some type of value or something and then filter off that value um for those of you that might be familiar with like excel if statements or something you know when you get into too many nested if statements um you can sometimes lose ultimately what you're trying to do so it's kind of the same concept great all right excuse me um so mickey mentioned something that's really great that i love and it's calculated columns and i like it so much that i created an hour-long presentation just on it because we could talk about them all day but calculated is just another column type and basically you know of course we can do mathematical uh calculations right we could say take this amount times this amount or this minus this but i like to use it for more than that and one of my favorite things to do is use it for dates where you can say days between days until something like that but i also like to just extract pieces of the date for example let's look at last order again and if i wanted to have a view that showed me all of the orders per year or per quarter or something you can do that using a calculated column so if anybody is interested i could give you a quick demo but otherwise we'll keep moving on but really cool usage case just to again create more than one view yeah and if you are familiar with excel formulas they're almost most of them are easily transferable with either no changes or very small changes into a sharepoint calculation so they're very similar to um to excel in that and i love them as well and use them all the time yeah i usually um so i i adore list in case you can't tell um i adore them um and one of the tidbits i usually tell my re tell readers users uh friends colleagues is that when you're building a list regardless of how you expect people to interface with it whether you're gonna put a power app on it or whatever or not is to build as much functionality into the list itself before you even talk about forms or things like that so if there are calculations that need to be made do them in the list in a calculated column you can do lots of them uh as mickey was saying i have found very few things that can't be done you know so and it's over but to build as much as you can into your list with your you know rules and things like that and then see what needs to be done if there's still functionality that you're missing then go ahead and consider a power app i'll admit i'm not a big fan of how complicated powerapps are and powerapps by the way hate me um and so i despise them in return because they hated me first um but you know build as much as you can into the list it's less you have to maintain in your power app it's less of a learning curve for your site owners so if you're building something on behalf of someone else it's much easier for them to maintain columns than it is to always go in and update fancy rules in your power apps and stuff um and and calculated columns are a huge huge huge piece of this um they can get really complicated it's hard but it can be done okay nate we do have a question to see a quick calculated demo um maybe you want to create like a month off of that last order date you got it all right so i'm going to go to add a column just like i normally would but notice there's no calculated type here so i have to choose more and then we're back in classic world where it all began and i'm going to call this column month okay and i've got my calculated type which enables me to add a formula so just make sure you choose calculated first or of course you won't see that and what i do and there's a hundred different ways you could do this or more probably but the way that i prefer to do this is a way that sorts well because i want to be able to use async and descending sort on this column and still have it work so because i'm going to use a text function again you could do this a number of ways but because i'm going to use text that means for my sort to work i need to start with the year right so i'm going to do year month and then spell it out so you'll see what i mean here in just a second but basically um i'll write the formula out here and i can also paste it in the chat for you here in just a moment but it's going to be text and then i find that column that month so that part's easy but then in parentheses i'm going to spell out the whole name of the month so i'm going to do four m's for the full name three m's for the abbreviated like j-a-n for g-n okay for january now i'm speaking in abbreviations close my quotations and actually i'm going to spell it out all the way there we go close my parentheses leave it as text and okay and there we go so this is how it's going to look i've got my um the name of the earth side of the year the month and then spelled out so when i sort i say a to z there we go i got my earliest first now i don't stop here i usually group by this so then i can expand and collapse based on the month so i would exp drop down the header again group by month and then i've got my nice report right i can roll that up and see since this is such a small list that's not very interesting but you can imagine if you had 3 000 rows of data how nice this would be to be able to roll up those very specific last order dates into a month or into a quarter right using something that you could see was very much like what we would do in excel just like mickey was saying so yeah let me paste that into the chat for you too and while i'm doing that any other uh questions on that it looks like allen had a question from before and i'm sorry alan that we i didn't pay attention to that but um he was just asking about how to um do the offline mode of the lists because i know that is actually a newer feature um on lists yeah you know i haven't really tried offline myself has anybody else in the user group tried that maybe not well sounds like we all have some learning to do not try it either yeah yeah okay so we'll look that up maybe we can follow up again that i haven't been traveling so that's normally when i do offline stuff as well i'm on a plane or train or whatever so yeah so alan had mentioned that it was just rolled out this month even so that's something that's fresh nice i knew it was better i was actually gonna question whether it's even fully rolled out yet or not because i don't think i've seen it um yeah early release tenants yeah i haven't seen it but we're usually on the later side of anything gets ruled out so i'm not even looking right so i'm inviting you back to next month there we go um so i'm gonna just wrap up my piece here by showing you a couple more ideas for views not in too much detail but just to get the wheels turning on some different ideas i mean you saw one when we did our intro which was a list view like you're seeing right now versus a gallery view where it was more graphic or more card like right so let me show you in this specific list if i just change my style which is up here at the top from list to compact list that looks a little tighter right i lost all those horizontal lines that maybe looked a little messy but there's also the gallery view which is what you saw in our intro slide and these gallery views can instead of just being a personal style for you can be built into an actual permanent view that you share with your team so for example i've got a grouped by representative view where i can see kind of what we saw with the date but i did something similar where i've got my i think it's display ready there we go where i can uh view you know still the representative as my first piece of info on those cards but i've decided to group those cards by yes and no on display ready all right so you can kind of imagine some use cases for that but really whenever you have like product images site images anything that's graphic heavy you can actually put that at the very top of the card like our intro side did so nice visual option and then one other view possibility here when you go to click create new view i'll just show you real quick you can choose the gallery you just saw or calendar and you can use the calendar view as long as you have a date field in your list which every list has created and modified but you'd probably use it if you had another field that's more important to you such as order date so now i can see on a calendar that on the 22nd um which is in the future so that's a fun date for last ordered right but anyway i've got that on my calendar and i can go out month by month and look for the other order dates and see that coho downtown made an order and i can still edit these items i just double clicked on that and i can change the details and everything but i'm navigating it in a calendar format all right um so mickey before i hand it over to you i just want to do one quick thing and that's create a small view which doesn't have as many columns so that it can be better utilized in some web parts so i'm going to create a new view call it summary it as a list format and create there we go and then i'm going to edit it and basically i'm just going to take out a bunch of columns here so just choose what's important so i'm doing a demo obviously but you would choose the most important pieces of data here okay then i'll click ok and now i've got my small view so i'll go ahead and hand it over to mickey who's going to talk to us about how we can take this even further and integrate it into our other digital workplaces yeah i love those smaller views because they're very handy for if you have like field employees or you know mobile access it's just a little bit easier to consume um if you don't see all those columns um you can still open the item as nate has showed numerous times to see all the actual real data on that so all right um so from a [Music] basic sharepoint uh list not sharepoint sorry list component um nate showed you what i would consider almost like an introductory or you know getting started um from that level then let your users get used to working in the list itself before you know because they're already making a big change from probably excel or something like that maybe even email or word you know whatever process you guys are using now um getting them used to lists um and working in them and changing out the views and editing items and looking at the version history and all that kind of stuff once you have your team has you know been a little bit more established and you're ready to take it to the next level there are endless opportunities when it comes to powerapps and power automates and even visualization when it comes to power bi and connecting um sharepoint lists to that as well so just to kind of do more demo and a brief introductory to some of those um i want to share with you here um all right so we're at the trying to remember what i've created okay so we have a help deck help desk ticketing system and one of the things that i love um [Music] nowadays with this kind of modern um and microsoft 365 groups is that we can take our ticketing systems that we've created over the years for those of us that have been in sharepoint um and we can take it to the next level because now the microsoft 365 groups um incorporate a calendar and they incorporate a shared mailbox and so you know your your end users can send an email um to a help desk mailbox and that email can then be generated and create an actual ticket in a sharepoint list and then you know go on from there whatever that flow looks like so kind of giving you an idea here of um what these ticketings look like you can see here um conditional formatting we've got some you know pills and different colors and things on this list we also have an assigned to column so that we're actually assigning those tickets and again once those tickets are assigned that can generate an email or some type of notification maybe it's a team's message or something along those lines well one of the things that i actually like to do with um the help like a true request or help desk ticketing system is to actually customize the form itself and when you are on an item you see here and we open and look at this item the form is compiled of all of these you know different columns now you can get really complicated and you can go into power um power apps and do a blue you know amount of things there and as someone who used to be an infopath designer back when that was relevant um you know powerapps has just kind of blown my mind as far as what the um capabilities are and i think even you know maybe it was rachel that mentioned before sometimes um it's just almost more complicated than i think it needs to be in some in some ways um so just showing here you can see i can actually edit the form itself and we used to do this through content types which still relevant um on that side of things but you can see here i can edit configure the layout or even customize with a power app so if i'm you know configuring the the layout here um you know i can change my columns and and where they're laid out and do some some coding and and some body and things obviously this isn't necessarily um it's light code not no code options and then just even more simply than that is sometimes i want to edit my columns and i don't want certain columns seen to the actual requester one of the examples is that we just did revamped our marketing request here at centric and um and so the users that are going to be making requests to the marketing department they only have a small amount of columns that we want them to fill in as far as the data that we're getting um so maybe it's description um we don't maybe want category or progress maybe we want priority start date due date but we don't want to assign to and we don't want notes because the notes are for the team that's going to actually be handling the request itself so as i kind of work through these items here i'm not deleting those columns i'm hiding them from the original um what we call the new form itself and so you can see here what it looks like now we've just got a very simple form for our users to enter in information and then our team on the back end once uh can go in and use the views to see those columns so you can see here priority in progress and even the assigned to didn't go away those columns are still there but if i was to put a button on a page or embed embedded this form and you know to all my company you can see i've got just a short amount of columns that we want to make sure that they're filling in um because they're not going to assign the ticket to someone or they're not going to you know maybe put a progress on there all the tickets are defaulting to new until the team members go and actually uh you know format all of that kind of stuff and to kind of give you another um example of that on this give website that i have here i've got a volunteer today button and so um you know by wanting to volunteer and so i'm going to click this little button on our sharepoint page it's going to take me to the list itself i can click new all right my name and i'm going to use alex for this because i've already volunteered so i'm signing him up and we'll just say he's interested in cats any any contribution or any volunteer um around cats is what he's interested in so a really simple form just two fields i click save as far as i'm concerned i'm done but from the hr team or the maybe the community engagement team or whatever the case may be there's actually a workflow working on in the background of this uh we'll give this just a minute here to get this workflow working of course hopefully this live demo works it did work this morning so we'll see um you can see here right now it's unassigned because what's happening is the manager and the department field is being brought in through the workflow itself you can see down here um that when isaiah who i'm playing today i'm interested in children and it brought in my manager in the department that i was in so those are two fields that i didn't necessarily have to fill in when i was making the initial requests because we already have access to those through our azure active directory and so i was able to pull those in through the power automate option looks like it's taking just a little bit long of course the demo guides are not with us today so uh but that kind of gives you a little idea of how to just change those forms um to kind of drive what it is you want your users to fill in and then you know if there's an additional second team or whatever or even approval process might work the same way um you can definitely customize those things without going through the whole power apps side of things the powerapps is great but sometimes it's just a little too much for it this is one of the best things that microsoft has done for lists from my opinion in a long long time because so again in my situation i am frequently building things for other people so i get people who aren't really sharepoint experts you know they need a tool i am the sharepoint expert so i build them a tool and i need to be able to hand it off to them right and if they're not a sharepoint expert it's not hard to teach a novice how to add a new column particularly since you can do it from the ui now you know i can teach them very easily how to go in and if you need to move it around edit columns right i've got a page you know that is like if you want to conditionally show and hide it use this exact syntax just replace these red parts right here i can do that with the most novice user and they can get their tool working they can feel confident competent um and i can easily hand it off to them you know power apps is not again powerapps hates me but you know whatever um but that's just not something i can do powerapps is super cool but there's no way i can hand off a tool with a power app to someone who's not a specialist they that i will own that for the rest of my time all right so this is this is honestly one of the best things um that they've done that and the new rules thing um are some of the best updates they've done to lists in a long time i love you microsoft thank you i um 100 agree with you rachel i can just remember my info pat days where i've created you know three or four different uh forms um the new forms the edit forms the customized forms you know for various things and this is really all i needed in probably 80 of those solutions um but because the tools that we had available to us were just so complicated and we had to they would just allow us to do a cascading field with this i would never have to touch power apps like ever again i i agree yep if anyone has me pull in that area i'm gonna i'm gonna vote on that one too so um consider me a second vote um for that capabilities as well you can see here our power automate has actually finished working while we're discussing some of that so you can see it pulled in miriam we both have the same manager but we're in two different departments there so just a little bit of information there one of the other things that rachel did mention here that i was going to get to is the new integration or i should say automation of creating a rule um in a sharepoint list we've always had the ability to create alerts and i still feel like those alerts can be relevant in some situations it's a really good way for your users to take control over the information and the emails that they're getting even if you've got some type of you know flow that's generating something or whatever the case may be um this is a second option in addition to the alerts um and it just kind of allows you to kind of dive in a little bit further um and get a little bit more specific there are limitations to this this isn't something that i'm going to create you know an entire workflow around um because it's a very simple thing and if you can create an outlook rule you can create a rule in your list so again this is a very user-based side of notification systems that they can customize that you wouldn't even have to do necessarily yourself um and it's really pretty pretty simple i think self-explanatory a lot of times you're just going to say when a value in a certain you know cell almost like excel has changed do something send me a notification or change something or whatever the case may be um obviously you can see we've got some other options here when a new item is created when something's deleted those are you know very similar to the alerts that we can do now um but more often than i know i'm finding that i use this as an option for most of my users you can see here it's a very simple statement choosing a column you know my name choose what that condition is you know is and then enter the values so this is where you want to make sure obviously the values match whatever that is and then as you can see this is where the limitations come from it's a very simple you know statement as far as what it's going to do so am i going to send an email to an individual and am i going to send an email to a group mailbox or something along those lines you can do either in this case um so keep that in mind but yeah just based on you know if i if i were going to use a different column type or data type um then my you know my options may change here if it was a number or if it was a date or something along those lines you can get greater than or less than or equal to in here if the data type is correct in the column that you've chosen but this is another way that you can empower your users to take control over what notifications and things that they're getting if the overall flow isn't working or maybe you have you know someone is on vacation and so someone else is filling in for them and you've built this whole long power automate and it's notifying that individual well now they're on vacation you don't want to change your flow um and so this would be a way for someone that fills in to actually get notifications um in the steps that they need to get notifications on so very very helpful in that when we are looking at that but i know that do you know if it's possible to put a null value in there or say like if it is not null so what i frequently have is you know a field that's empty when the item is created and then when it gets filled in with any value please go notify someone so what i'd like to do is have if it is you know not null send an email to somebody yeah i try i know what you're talking about because i've tried myself at this point in time that's not there but i foresee this growing um all the time for the same reasons that i use the rules the learning curve so and that again that one little piece i'm missing is the i need people to be notified when that field gets filled in i look at this when i when i talk to you know microsoft folks or when i talk to clients and things like that you know a lot of my clients are you know using like monday.com or something along those lines and so when i started seeing some of these capabilities on the sharepoint list i'm starting to see what monday.com can do and so i feel like you know that this functionality started gonna start to grow because they brought lists out from sharepoint made it its own you know application hoping that users more general business users will start using it to track information like they're doing on these other applications um that are you know costing companies money and but just gave a user way of controlling a workflow that didn't involve you know complicated steps so i mean power automates brings you into the into the whole concept of service accounts and things because you know what happens if the person who writes it leaves the company which is my big beef with power automate i mean it changes the most you know a basic one-step power automate has all these issues um so you know the more we can do with these basic hey i just need to know when someone fills in this field you know that sort of thing the rules i think are filling a huge gap um but i just need that one piece i need cascading fields and i need you know when a field is not null and then i would be happier i completely agree and those are two very common scenarios because i've even come across them multiple times myself as well um so going back to some of the other things that you can do with your list here you can see that i've built a very basic dashboard for this demo um and i don't have a power bi license so this is i mean i do have a power bi license in this environment but you know from a from a user standpoint or even from a site owner perspective you know they may not necessarily have that power bi license or may not know how to do power bi for that matter so we do have some capabilities here um on a sharepoint page itself to build in what are called web parts it's um the chart web parts and you can put really as many as you want on the page um you can see here i've just used that same web part three different times and pulled in you can from our ticketing system here pulled in some data just to get some visuals they said or some you know maybe a management overview or whatever it is that you want to call um from from this information now one of the things that i do want to point out is um if you are using one of these pages and see here trying to find my page that i was going to do i think it's here all right well we'll just create one real fast so if we look over here we have account managers list we have a retail accounts list and we have a product sales list the caveat around using these web parts is your list has to be kind of eligible for the chart um so if we create our dashboard here okay i'll just delete this i'm going to choose my web parts here type in chart there's our quick chart web part and what i've done on the page on the previous dashboard is i did make it a three column and then used that web part three different times but for this purpose um with some shading behind there so you've been focused on what it is here we're going to edit this web part and one of the things that i want to say is if you get data from a sharepoint list you may be surprised to only see one list listed even though this particular sharepoint site actually has three and the reason why is because the two of the lists don't actually have any values or any number columns in them so i can manually enter data in here but of course then you're updating that manual data on a regular basis so there is a lot of limitations to this but for those of you that don't have power bi this is one way to kind of get around that and still have it almost a dash 40 type of thing one of the things that i would recommend is using calculated columns to represent number values in your list even though your users are you know using a drop down menu maybe for progress or for status or something along those lines if you give it a number value using a calculated column that would more than likely then um make your list eligible for these charts which would then give you that dashboard kind of look so you can see here out of the three lists we only have one list that's eligible okay and we're going to select that list and then i'm going to choose what it is columns that have the data to display and again there's a lot of columns in this list that aren't listed here and it's because they're not a number of values so just keep keep in mind that that limitation there um and then our column label so what are we actually labeling do i want to see the postal codes probably not i probably want to see the store name um so that i actually get a little bit better visualization around all of that okay and then again you can sort these by sending descending or we'll do the ascending label that way our store names are alphabetical on that you can see here i've chosen a chart but we do have a pie chart option as well um and really i mean it's just a simple they're very simple charts um but they sometimes just get the job done if needed right so we'll just say these are our store sales targets or whatever your title wants to be once i'm done um with you know building out that dashboard and whatever else i need to then i'm just going to save that publish that out and then i can easily use these little things here to announce or communicate with my users and my company what this page is maybe i want to turn it into a news post so that it rolls up to the sharepoint home page for all of your users maybe i'm just wanting to add it to my navigation or something like that so that we can easily find it because it's just such a small team focused page but you can see here you know i've got just some basics hovering capabilities and seeing what these numbers are and things like that um now with our dashboard um i've also you know put in a couple of other things like meeting our top performers for the month um and then what i also did was i added a the the list itself in a web part but i also added the connector web parts with the list properties um what this does for us you can see here as i select an item in my list my little form over here is populating the data around that information so to what nate had mentioned before um if i wanted to change the view so that maybe only one or two columns show in this list view then i can display all the details around that item in a connected list property or um web part so i'm going to go ahead and edit this page again and just really quickly show you what that looks like as well you won't have the limitations as far as which lists are eligible for that that you do on these charts so you can see right there a list is the first web part that i used and i what i want to do is change my subject so that i can get these side by side here uh maybe a one-third right and again maybe we'll put some color behind there to get some some differentials so um we'll do our product sales list on this and again i probably want to shrink down how many columns i'm showing in this list form because really the purpose of this is um maybe it's like an id number or like a ticket number or something that you're actually showing in the list because when you then select on it that's when you're actually going to see the properties over there on the right hand side okay so we'll get over here and there's that list properties web part and so we have to make the connection so you can have multiple of these you can have them you know multiple lists on one page and then you just want to make sure that the properties are actually connected to the correct list that you're wanting so i'm just going to click connect and that's not working so we'll connect over here to a source choose our product sales selected item here uh this is where i can decide which columns i want to see on the form itself so maybe i don't show the notes column in the list maybe the notes column is here because it's maybe a big notes column or something like that okay all right so we'll go ahead and republish this page here now when i click on an item you can see there i can get some more detailed information around that there's not obviously a lot here in this list but you can see it's populating based on what item was selected on there all right it looks like yeah we have some um maybe a power bi i do actually have an example for power bi um let me just find that here so this is where i this particular this is something that i've done way before this power bi was created in power bi and connected to the sharepoint list itself i'm not really going to go into the details around that because it's a little more complicated but um then i embedded the power bi on a sharepoint page as you can see so we've got our my screen's freezing up here we go um you know we've got our our numbers and all of our different things and i could have drill downs you can see here if i embedded drill downs into each one of these images that would be available and actually functionable on the sharepoint page itself if i wanted to select uh you know one of these items i it does you know filter and work very similar to what a live power bi page uh would do um and so yes you can see here it's all they're all spinning and changing based on the selections that i've made so power bi does work um embedded on a sharepoint page and then even what we can do on on top of all of that is then we can bring in power bi into teams or and or we can bring in the sharepoint pages that we've done with the charts we can bring in the list itself um inside this power bi so for instance if i go into my general and refresh my report i should not see my there we go um so yeah so here's that sales report power bi uh it does take a while just a little bit to load up um that power bi dashboard there and i think we already have the list in here too let me see if i can find it but maybe not i'll just go ahead and add it over here so and you pick whatever um channel you want to display add your tab and there's again because we're talking kind of about sharepoint as well as lists um there's there's two different tabs that you could create for this so we're going to start with our lists so choosing the list and like nate had mentioned when you create a list from inside teams you actually get a couple of other templates that are available for you so i'm just going to click save and then i'll get my either create or an existing in this case so we've already built the list from the list apps that nate had done earlier otherwise we could create this list straight here from teams okay so here's our one example or we can copy and paste a link here to another list that we wanted to okay so there is our tabbed sharepoint list in there okay and again all the views and things that we've created you can see here we created a grouped view as well we could make that grouped view a default view so that when they come in here they see you know something along the lines of this versus you know all the data exposed row by row however you want that to be seen that's the best way is to do that through the views that nate i showed you guys how to use before the other option that we have because we didn't put a lot of content onto our sharepoint pages is our sharepoint application so if i want to actually show the page itself like maybe the dashboard page where you know it's got a couple of components on there um this is where i would do that you can see here i've got recommended i literally can click on pages that will just give me all the pages for this site um lists again this would just be another way i recommend if you're gonna show the list itself using the list app because it just displays better that way um or even a library for that matter but we're gonna use pages and we're just gonna show that dashboard page that we created and so this one in particular had the power bi on there but if it was you know our help that ticketing or whatever the case might be then you can see here we've got the actual embedded sharepoint page um from that and so i think so while we're while we're talking about power bi and things like that i'm going to go back to my things that you can do that don't require a license and stuff um one of the issues we have with power bi and at least in rockwell is that access to power bi reporting is controlled separately from sharepoint so which makes it a disaster for trying to put it on here so the charting is nice um but they're kind of simple um i put some stuff in the chats and some screenshots there's actually power bi integrated into your list in the integrate menu now um so you can do your power bi reporting directly from that list um it doesn't require special permissions or anything like that if you were going to try and put it in a teams channel you'd have to use a website connector tab rather than a sharepoint tab but if you need power bi style reporting with you know all the cool things there um but don't want to go into the whole power bi licensing and you know blah blah blah like i said in our case we have to manage access so just because you have access to my sharepoint site does not mean you get to see my power bi reporting which just don't go there don't go there but anyway um so in your list you can go to the integrate menu go to power bi build a report super easy right off that list um and share it and and what i like most about it is that the access is controlled by sharepoint so anybody who has access to your list has access to that power bi report so yay for people who are lazy don't have to manage that access separately i agree and and if you're still old school um maybe you don't want to try out power bi just yet um or you just love excel because your excel guru you can export these to excel and there is a data connection connected to the excel it's a one-way push um excel doesn't talk back to sharepoint or to the list for that matter so if you make changes in excel it doesn't change the list but any changes in the list if you set your workbook to refresh upon opening um that's another way because then there's a file viewer web part that you can put on a sharepoint page and then you know put it in teams or or display the excel you know inside teams um it's often so you can use it comes through um in a table so pivot tables charting you know all of your fancy excel um capabilities um can be used and i've even um done additional calculation columns in excel um you know as as a row and it doesn't remove like any time you refresh your content from what's happening in sharepoint into the excel if you've got additional columns in excel it doesn't remove those columns so you can you know whatever maybe a calculation or something that you can't do in it in sharepoint and you're just using it for reporting capabilities you could do that in excel too if you're not like a power bi wizard or whatever um so that just i know that's that's an option too you have to physically open the file to refresh the data the data gets stale immediately unless you you have to open the file file if your doesn't count or go under the data and click refresh all but yeah if you still have to open the file though no not necessarily not if you set the the file itself um to so that you can see the bar and they can you know as long as they have edit rights of course to the file itself there's um in excel there's a refresh all options so you can just force the refresh um inside the file itself another reason to use lists instead of excel just saying well yeah no this is the example is that you're still using the sharepoint list you're just visualizing the list in a dashboard using excel so if you don't have ai knowledge on that hey just as a time check hey john just to make sure i wanted to make sure that you know whoever if you i think you have somebody that's presenting today yep yeah so we we have a few more minutes so we'll let mickey kind of finish up alex uh needs about a half hour so we're right on schedule perfect awesome this is great i've had so much fun i've learned a lot i mean i i knew like the old list kind of deal but you know kind of seeing this all the new features is really exciting and nate was there anything that you felt like i didn't cover that you wanted to cover yeah no i think that was really great um it's just hopefully it's clear how much you could do list to me is like one of the most flexible things that's out there any questions so far i know we've gotten some throughout um everything but that's pretty much all i had when it comes to like formatting and such do you guys see you know best practices or you know ways of not making it crazy i mean you know the ones that you get as far as a template i think they do a good job of kind of separating out but then i've seen where you know an end user takes over and i'm like whoa this thing's like a rainbow there's nothing that's actually jumping up because everything jumps out do you guys have any like high level tips or things that you've seen that that help yeah i would just add you know it's nice that they do the the pills and everything for um the choice columns and all of that but personally i don't like exactly what you're saying is that every single thing has a color so just like i showed today i could have chosen uh pills for the yes no which is a very simple example but instead i just did conditional formatting and chose what i wanted to have color so some cases it makes sense like the priority sometimes just using little icons and things that's fine but yeah if you're doing any kind of color coordination or view formatting you have to pick per view what's going to be most important because you don't want to put everything that's important on one view yeah i would have to agree with that and one of the things that i've had conversations with users that have just gone crazy is um maybe spread them out across multiple views so to one day was saying you know what is it that this view is that we're focusing on is it you know open tickets okay which one of those are you know past due and which ones are high priority and those are the only two factors that we look at as far as visualization or conditional formatting inside that view then what's the other view that we're looking at maybe it's something different or you know whatever the case may be so maybe just having a conversation with the users that are getting a little crazy and asking them to maybe split them you know split those colors into various views um so that there's just maybe one or two things focused on each yeah i've started talking to people about about that because you know if you highlight the entire page of your textbook then it's all yellow now and you can't tell what's important so what i've started telling people is that for the fields where you want there to be those pills those colors what we're calling them go ahead and do that from the ui where it applies those colors automatically which is super nice um but if you don't want the colors in that field it then be car it becomes a real pain to have to remove them all the time so for those fields i tell people that they should instead create their columns the old way under list settings where you go to list settings create column and do it the old way because that way the colors aren't applied um and it's just because i'm lazy and it's easier than having to like click no color no color no color no coloring because i'm lazy um that's that's the advice i've been giving the same advice you know be choosy about what you use your color on um and then that determines how you should create the column or how much time you spend removing all the colors i just like to make the rainbows one other little tip that i would say is um if you have two or three different views and you find that maybe your users aren't using them um or they're not they don't know about them is link them on the left hand side so that they're actual links that they go to so for them they may not they may think they're all different lists for that matter i mean we can trick our users sometimes into thinking whatever we want um based on you know linking and things like that so great yeah so as anthony was mentioning we'll just from a time check we'll just we'll keep moving um and should be a little bit of time at the end for for more discussion as well but thank you nate and mickey uh for that section so uh in the in part two now alex is gonna jump in um alex and i are from obsidian um in the milwaukee area even though alex is not he's in a warmer climate so welcome alex to the group but he's going to kind of go into a few more things with you know the site templates and the scripting and some of the ways to apply some of these these lists um in different ways go ahead alex all right uh thank you for the introduction give me one second while i share my screen here all right so i'm going to be presenting on um using site templates and site scripts for site provisioning in modern sharepoint and my name is alex lorenzo uh i am a former healthcare administrator clinician who is now in the sharepoint development our platform development space um a little bit more about my background so essentially i was practicing for 10 years as a board certified behavior analyst primarily working with individuals with developmental disabilities usually age zero to 22 and in that capacity uh being a clinician and running the organization my organization started to expand and i wanted to always keep it paperless as it is a very data oriented data collection heavy uh practice psychology practice so around the time where i founded my company was when microsoft 365 started to uh grow and power platforms started to get implemented so i taught myself how to use that and incorporated that into our practice and our paperless technologies and that's how i got my experience with the power platform in microsoft 365. uh feel free to email me alex lorenzo obsidian.com and that's my linkedin so let's see here there we go so first of all site templates they are site templates and scripts you want to use them to automate uh provision of new or existing modern sharepoint sites so important to note that this is applies for modern sharepoint sites and you can customize the configurations right so what this does is that it ensures consistency uh across the creation of sites using you know business branding or application of themes or uniform lists that you want to have across every site that's created you could use site templates and site scripts to do such a thing now the documentation is pretty good on the microsoft website um you might see a lot of blog posts and everything referring uh referring this as a site design it has been renamed it is site template for those of you that have been around in sharepoint for a couple years you'll know that in the past it was site templates and then they came out with site designs and then now type designs have been renamed to site templates so you could do all the things that i mentioned with site templates and site scripts including triggering power automate flow so whatever you can't do or you're limited to not being able to do you could trigger a power automate flow from the running of a script that could then you know finish it finish everything off with the customizations that you'd like so some samples a site template consists of multiple site design website scripts site scripts have multiple actions in them that sharepoint what uh customizations to apply so microsoft has certain uh out of the box samples as of templates that you could apply now one thing to note here is that when you're applying a template they are specific to whether you have a site a team site or a communication site so you see that microsoft has event planning project management training and courses and training and development team site templates and these are are beautiful so you could always apply these or extract the site script of these site templates and modify them accordingly if you want to expand on them the communication site has uh natively crisis management department leadership connection learning central and new employee onboarding and you'll see here that you see a section for these are the ones that are from microsoft these are from your organization so we're going to go through using powershell to create a site script adding that site script to our site template and then navigating to this ui and applying the site template by clicking the from your organization and we should see it available there so as i mentioned before a site template contains one or more site scripts right and site scripts are made up of predefined actions that are executed after the site is created so a site a team site or a communication site is created they're created with the default microsoft sharepoint template for example topic is one of is is one of the default templates and then from there you can apply your own custom template or one of the microsoft defined ones that we just showed um so as i mentioned they most of them most of this the scripts affect the site itself but you could also trigger custom actions using power automate so let's say you've applied a site template and now you want to send the team's notification to an administrator that the site template was applied or this site was created you could do so or you could send a trigger to [Music] trigger pnp provisioning and do some more advanced capabilities and and sharepoint site modifications that you can't do out of the box with site scripts or site templates so how to apply the site template as we saw in the previous screen in order to get to that section you have to in order to get to the screen that shows the templates you have to click on the settings icon in the top right and then there'll be a link that says apply a site template and that's where we get to this screen again after the site is already created is where we'll see that so the anatomy of a site script remember multiple site scripts to one site template so a site script it consists of verbs and uh of verbs c and d lets right verb commandlets and a verb json json objects right and they what is a verb it's essentially an action telling the script what to do what to customize right these actions are applied in order so from top to bottom so we can see here that in this example this site script applies a theme called contoso explorers and then and then this verb it creates a sharepoint list called customer tracking in which that sharepoint list has sub actions so this verb is an action this verb is an action but then we have sub actions within the verb with other verbs right so now this in this sharepoint list we're setting the description we're adding a sharepoint field called the customer name we're adding a sharepoint field called requisition total we're adding a user sharepoint field type called contact and we're creating a multiple line of text called note site scripts are non-destructive in in application so what does that mean that means if i have a if i'm creating this customer tracking list and i apply this site script and now i and now i have these four columns of requisition total customer name user note and i apply it now if i go in and i edit my site design my site script if by editing the just editing the site script i don't change any of the sites where the site script has been applied where the site template has been applied um but let's say i edit the site script and i add another column or a few more columns now when i run that site template again on the sharepoint site it will simply create those new columns on that same list it's going to go it's going to see hey this list already exists so what's missing from it these four new columns i'm gonna go ahead and create it so it doesn't delete anything a site template does not delete anything when you apply it if it if you have a theme on a site and you're applying a new theme then it adds it creates the new theme and removes the old theme but it doesn't delete anything so they could be run again on the same site after provisioning as we just mentioned now what can you do what are the actions available within the site script so you could create new lists or libraries or you can modify the default one that's created with the site so you could add columns to the default document library you can create site columns content types and configure other list settings you could set branding properties like the navigation layout header layout header background apply a theme you could set the site logo you could add links to the quick launch or hub navigation at the top or the sides you could trigger a power automate flow this you know opens up tons of possibilities and you know as i mentioned before you could trigger an azure function that applies pnp provisioning template to the site um or you can make microsoft graph calls or send out a teams notification there's uh you know the possibilities are are infinite um so you could use your imagination for that the only gotcha of the triggering the power automate flow is that that uses a premium connector it uses the um respond or excuse me like the uh it uses an action of when a http request is received so that requires a premium license so keep that in mind you could install a deployed solution from the app catalog set regional settings for the site join that site to a hub site you could install add-ins or solutions register extensions you can add principles so users and groups to sharepoint roles the asterisk means that it's blocked for sites that are for private channels and you can set external sharing capability for the site now how are some ways you could do this so i remember when i first started json used to be very intimidating to me and uh i would constantly lose where the comma is supposed to go to separate one in one json object to the other so there's certain tools that are available for free that you can access that help in building out some of these scripts and manipulating the json so one way is that you could run a commandlet a powershell commandlet to extract the json no json object notation um specific to a list or so you can get the configuration of that list in json form you could get it for you could run the get spo site script from the web to get it for an entire site and then modify it accordingly and then you can use two you know free source free resources site design studio is one of them site design studio is a uh a web part that you would install onto your sharepoint site and then it allows you to build out site scripts accordingly same thing with the site designer what could you do so primarily so when dealing with sharepoint site scripts you are using powershell or the rest api to create your scripts and to group those scripts together and apply them and create a site template that site template again is what you're going to then apply to a sharepoint site so the smallest building blocks here that we have are the powershell actions the commandlets or the rest api calls so we could add sharepoint site design as you can see the command let's still have the old name of site design so you could just you know you're still using these commandlets but if you anytime you see site design it's referring to site script excuse me site template see i haven't confused myself there and uh you know site script is still the same site scripts so you could add sites templates site designs add site scripts um you could get the get the ones that exist already you can get any of the ones that are currently running you could you know get all of the site scripts applied to a website to a sharepoint site get the ones applied to a list you could grant sbo site design rights so that is um scoping which we'll talk about you could invoke so you could apply the site design the site template from directly from powershell we're going to go in and show you how you could show you in the ui how to do that and then you could revoke you can remove the scripts so essentially delete the scripts or site templates that you've created and um and setting them so in the pmp github their repository there is several site script samples that you could go in and take a look at or adopt or you know again a site template consists of multiple site scripts so you could get these site scripts and individually add them to pick and play and and pick and choose and add them to a site template and then apply that site template to a um to a site to a sharepoint site so we could see here we have you know joining the hub site uh triggering an azure function creating the or configuring the dynamic links to office 365 groups creating a formatted sharepoint list creating sharepoint lists that look up to each other registering sharepoint spfx extension and uh this one's a cool one the trigger flow right back site properties to sharepoint list you could apply the site template this triggers a flow that you know that that the site template creates a list that on that site that could store the properties that you're creating that you're customizing it could trigger a flow to then write back to that sharepoint list the everything that you applied so that way you can create your own version of logging or tracking some of the customizations that you've made to that site all right time for demo so in this demo we're going to create the site script using powershell we're going to add that site script to the site template that we're creating and then we're going to apply it to a site so i have my scripts here and we're going to have powershell so first of all alex if you make that just a little bit larger that'll probably help us is that better yep thank you you're welcome um so i have already connected to sharepoint online service using the um connect spl service commandlet so if you're going to follow along and you're in powershell be sure to connect to your spo service so next thing i'm going to do is that i have a site script right this site script is so for example uh in my organization my previous organization and my healthcare role we worked with um in our therapists would go out to children's homes and provide aba behavioral therapy to some of these kids and some of these kids had different deficits so some had language deficits others had um instances of problem behavior so hitting spitting you know you name it we've seen it we are what we do is that or what we used to do is we take data on these behaviors as they happen and then create interventions to apply before and after the behavior occurs in order to reduce the probability of that behavior occurring in the future so in order for that to work and to make sure that we're accurately capturing the what the behavior looked like and the scenario surrounding the behavior we collect what's called abc data so that's one list that we're going to create we're going to create an abc data collection sharepoint list because what we're going to do is that we're going to create a sharepoint site that is specific or group that is specific to this one client so that means our team can go in the clinical team can go in to that site and they should be able to you know store client documents from within the shared documents full document library but they could also collect data the abc data using the abc data sharepoint list and another thing that happens unfortunately we had the clinical role of collecting abc data then i was also as a co-owner in the administrative role of managing a business so one of the things that factored into uh managing these clients is that since we're in the homes and people live busy lives there are client cancellations can happen frequently so there's most as most clinical companies have there's cancellation policies so we need to be able to track when a cancellation happens so i'm going to create a sharepoint list also excuse me that creates that tracks uh client cancellation so one of the clinical team members can go in and anytime a cancellation happens they could go in and track it on the sharepoint list so i've got navigated to the microsoft documentation on site templates and there is a json schema reference and that is where you can get the sample of that you can modify of how to create this sharepoint list using the json schema so i have in my client cancellations list we are using a regular sharepoint list with a client name is a text field date time it is a daytime column field type calling named apartment start time appointment start time so when did the appointment that got canceled start who's the therapist that was scheduled to work with that client and any notes maybe cancellation reason right and then the other list that we're going to create is the abc data collection what is abc data it is antecedent what happened directly before the behavior b behavior what happened consequence what happened immediately after the behavior so we have the sharepoint list antecedent or sharepoint columns antecedent behavior consequence who is a therapist that witnessed it what time did it occur and the client name so we are going to now create this site script in sharepoint in uh powershell so what i'm going to do is that i'm going to after i have the sharepoint excuse me the site script set up i'm going to put it inside of a variable called site script paste it in so i'm going to put the site script inside this variable press enter and now i know it's in that variable how do i know because i could type in sitescript and it comes out again right now i want to create our site script so for that i'm going to use the add spo site script commandlet now it's going to add a spl site script with the con with the content being that variable that we just created this is going to be i'm going to call this script client data list because i'm collecting different types of client data and the description this is a description for creating a list that tracks client data all right now i'm going to press enter and now we've created the sharepoint site script and we have a id referencing that script so now we want to get that script because we can't just apply a script to a site we need to have it as a site temp put it in a site template so now i'm going to create the site template using the command link add spo site design the site template our ad spo site design command lit accepts an array of site scripts site script ids so in this case we're not using multiple site scripts we're just going to apply this same the site script that we just created we're going to add that to this new cited site template our site template is called clinical client site so when someone navigates to the ui and they see they go to uh organization templates they're going to see a template called clinical client site and this is web web template 64. so this is going to apply for team sites right if you put in 68 then it will apply for communication sites and then our description this is a site for storing clinical client specific documents all right i've added the id i've passed that in gonna go ahead and create the site template so now we've created the site template and we have our site id or excuse me our id for that site template all right now now that i've created that site template i'm going to go and create a here there we go i'm going to create a team site and i'm going to use naming convention so you know ideally your organization has naming conventions for creating groups or team sites um if not there's good great blogs and um you know ideas that you could go ahead and use to standardize that there's tools that help you with that at obsidian we have an internal tool called workspot that helps with having uniform standardized naming structure for groups or sites that are created so in the case of my old organization we used to have group client and then the client's initials because we don't want to have identity identifying protected health information so i'm going to create one for um john doe so and this is the second john though that exists in organization so i'm going to create a site name called group client john doe o2 this is um you know protected by hipaa information so i'm going to apply a sensitivity label of internal use only which is going to restrict external access to this site accordingly so now i'm going to create my site go ahead and add another one all right now i've created my site let's see so it looks like when you create a site and that way you don't get the prompt of applying the site template i think you get it maybe if you're if you create it in the admin center but either way this is just your out-of-the-box team site that's created but now if i navigate to the settings icon and apply a site template i could see in the from your organization section now i see my clinical client site that we just created we see the site template that we just created so now i could apply it and this tells you exactly what it's going to do it's going to create the list for client cancellations create the columns within that list create the list for abc data and the columns within that list so we're going to go ahead and apply it depending on how long your site template how many scripts are contained in it and how complex it is it could take longer but you could always see the progress while it's running at the top here and when it's done it'll this little notification will turn green and prompt you to refresh and you'll see the changes are applied so we'll give it a second here kind of while we're waiting for that um you know just i'll just add you know you know this this concept you know we thought you know going with the kind of microsoft list side of things is related in the fact that we see a lot of people have needs for like a common type of list added to you know kind of the same category of site you know be a project site a clinical client site something like that it's a lot of value you can get out of templatizing and kind of applying that when you're creating multiples of something over and over again so yeah that was an awesome overview i'm hoping this isn't a demo fail because i don't think it's taken this long to apply it um in the past here i'm hesitant to refresh here because i don't want to log jam it but while that's waiting i could go ahead and show you another site here so this site if i want to go and apply a site template so right now this is a [Music] communication site so i only see the communication site templates by default the one that's applied is topics this is the one that everyone's used to but you can now use one of these so if i want to go and apply the learning central one i could go and apply that template and this is going to apply the theme it's going to modify the page add the branding and so forth so as you can see here now since we're since this only this doesn't delete anything i could go and let's say i want to change this i want to add i want to change this from learning central to crisis management so i could go apply this template so this one might have a few more things a few more actions from within those scripts that make it take a little longer but now we see here that it has been updated so now let's go back to here we could see our site template has been applied so now if i navigate to site contents i have my abc data and my client cancellations sections sharepoint list and so lastly to summarize here let me so these sharepoint site templates can be scoped to specific users or groups so that only they see it by default everyone that could create a sharepoint site can see the site templates that are created until you scope them using the grant sbo site design rights command lit again the site templates are specific to the specific site type so modern team modern site templates so 64 for team site 68 for communication site some limitations only supported by sharepoint online uh we mentioned the commandlets only having are still having the old site design name um you have to have create sharepoint site permission to apply these the power automate flow trigger requiring additional licensing and the limitations on actions within site scripts or site scripts and site templates per tenant and in order to do this you could use rest api or powershell within pnp or mic or the cli and lastly some resources so the json as i mentioned before it could get daunting so you could use websites like sitedesigner.io sbtools.netfi app and um the site design studio to help you create some of these json object notations so here's an example of sbtools netlify app i want to go and create a sharepoint list it will prompt me to use any of the um sub actions or actions and fill in and then i could just download or copy now the other tools do similar things just you know site design studios you have to import as a web part all right and that is my presentation thank you everyone uh i'm not sure how much time we have for questions but uh thank you for uh attending yeah yeah i know we have a couple minutes um so but yeah thank you again for for showing that again this is like an endless uh amount of detail that you can really get into with these templates and designs you know it's it's going to continue to get easier to use i think from the microsoft perspective so like even those site templates they've been around a while but they're only recently really coming into the tool itself uh so you know it's good to see microsoft kind of continue to move that way you know for those that have used the lookbook that's out there you know that's kind of remote provisioning using similar kind of concepts and things like that that microsoft's moving into the product so i see them continuing to move a lot into the product but at the same time um you know it's it's not in there so you can do whatever you want right so yeah it's very extensible and and really can put you know real good governance like nate saying and you know consistency automation into your environment um especially when you get to bigger environments and reusable components it's great to use all right um so open floor um only probably a minute or two any any final questions though um for anyone that you want to throw out there for today all right well thank you all for joining um we should be back on track for kind of a november meeting um and most likely that's probably ignites recap um based on ignite being early november so that's probably where we'll end up there but as always let me or anthony or any of us and speakers or anyone know if you've got topics or ideas for upcoming meetings and discussions all right thanks everybody thanks alex that was awesome very much you

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Length: 113min 25sec (6805 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021