In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:
- Sort and filter list items to quickly view relevant data
- Use column formatting to visually organize information (e.g., color-coded priorities)
- Set up approval workflows for list items using Power Automate
- Create automatic email notifications based on list activity or specific conditions
- Set up alerts for individual users when list items are changed
- Create reminder flows to notify users about upcoming events or deadlines
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to use SharePoint lists more powerfully and efficiently with automation, formatting, and personalized alerts.
Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s tutorial on working with SharePoint online lists. I’m going to be showing you some tips and tricks to help you get more benefits from your lists. We’re going to be using a vacation request list to see the tips and tricks in action. You can change the sort order of your list by clicking on the column header that you want to sort by. For example, if I click on requester, I can sort in alphabetical order.
I can also filter the list by clicking on the column heading and selecting filter by. If I select first, I’ll see all the employees’ top priority vacation requests. To clear the filter, simply click on the clear filter button and you’ll see all the records again. Formatting helps your data stand out. Let’s add colors for each choice of vacation priority.
Click on the drop down beside the column name, column settings, and format this column. Click on Choice pills edit styles. Click the font icon to change the color. Once you’re happy with the colors, click on save. We can easily enable the employees to send their vacation request for approval by clicking on automate, configure approvals.
Here, we’ll enable it and click on apply. You can see the history of sent approvals and their status in Microsoft Teams by going to the approvals app. You can also pin the approvals app to the left hand menu for easy access. You can have an email automatically sent to someone when an item in the list is created, modified or deleted. To do that, click on automate, rules, create a rule, and we’ll choose when a new item is created.
Click on always and we’ll add a condition. So we’re going to say if the value of the requester is Cindy Gordon, send an email to her boss. Then click on create and you can close the screen. SharePoint users can set up alerts for themselves. They can do this by going to the three dots and click on alert me.
After a few seconds, you’ll see a screen where you can choose a number of items like alert title, who you’re going to send the alert to, the delivery method, email, text message or URL, SMS, and you can choose the change type. So we’ll leave it at all changes and we’re going to choose to send an alert when someone else changes an item created by me and we’ll ask for a weekly summary so we don’t get a lot of alerts and click on okay. We also have the ability to set a reminder through going through the flows. Set a reminder. We’re going to choose first day.
So in the unlikely event you forget your vacation is coming up, you can be reminded. So this flow uses a number of apps and once they have a green check mark beside them, you’re ready to go. Click on continue. You can name the flow, and we’re going to choose to be reminded two days in advance of the first day of our vacation. Click on create.
Click on then. Now we’ll receive an email notification two days before our vacation starts. In conclusion, we’ve looked at optimizing the functionality of your SharePoint list by using formatting, filters, sorting and various notifications. You now have some good ideas that can be applied to your own lists. Thanks for watching.