Have you tried Microsoft Lists yet? Did you know they’re really just SharePoint lists? That means you can connect to them using the SharePoint connector in Power Automate… even when they’re in the private “My Lists” area!
As of this writing (late August 2020), you may or may not be seeing Microsoft Lists in your Microsoft 365 tenant. But even if you don’t see the icon in your “waffle” menu, you might still be able to access them using one of the following methods:
Go to your OneDrive for Business, where the URL should be something like https://YourOrg-my.sharepoint.com/personal/YourName_YourOrg_com/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx. Simply replace onedrive.aspx with lists.aspx and see if you get the new Lists UI…
Or, go to any existing SharePoint List, and append to its URL ?env=WebViewList. From there, you can click on Microsoft Lists in the header to get to the above Microsoft Lists experience (you might have to refresh the page, and we’ve seen some tenants where this doesn’t work yet).
Using Power Automate with Microsoft Lists
Now where does Power Automate come in? Sometimes you may wish to store data privately for later use within a flow. An example might be storing event IDs to synchronize calendars. Or storing some status values related to a specific process, where those statuses don’t necessarily need to have visibility in a standard SharePoint list. Or think about using it as a way to create “variables” which persist from one flow instance to another. Here’s how to do it…
To create a private list that lives in your personal area of Microsoft 365, choose My Lists as the location when you’re creating a new list. This list won’t be visible to anyone else unless you share it, just like files in your OneDrive.
In Power Automate, you can refer to your private list using the standard SharePoint list actions, like Create Item and Get Items. In all SharePoint actions, you’re first asked for the site address. You’ll find that your “My Lists” site isn’t listed, but you can click on Enter custom value, then copy the URL from your My Lists page (https://YourOrg-my.sharepoint.com/personal/YourName_YourOrg_com) and paste it in.
After entering the site URL (up to but not including the word Lists), your personal lists should appear in the List Name dropdown for you to select from.
Then just use your personal lists as you would any other SharePoint list, but especially for those cases where no one else needs to have access to that data.
0 Comments