Microsoft has just launched what it refers to as an “MSA Preview” of a new, lightweight version of Microsoft Lists, which is linked to a Microsoft account.
The full version of Lists has been around since 2020 in the form of a Microsoft 365 business plan app, but this new version is aimed specifically at small businesses and individuals. It’s built “off the core of Microsoft Lists,” but introduces a number of new features including tabbed views, inline images, and the ability to share from within a Person column.
The lists you create can be accessed from anywhere, shared with anyone, and made in collaboration with others. Each list can be viewed multiple ways (as a grid, gallery, calendar, etc.), ready-made templates are available, and you can quickly import data from Excel. As well as inline images, Microsoft allows you to add videos, PDFs, and other document types to each list.
The use cases for Lists, according to Microsoft, fall into a wide range of categories including job applications, employee onboarding, house or apartment hunting, charitable donations, college applications, internal events, recipes and menus, gift lists, monthly book clubs, vacation planning, collections such as wine or art, and home and auto maintenance. In other words, anything that can be a list, and especially if it’s a list you intend to share with others.
The Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview is available for free worldwide, but only the first 200,000 people signing up (using a Microsoft account) are guaranteed to gain access. With access granted, you can create up to 50 lists, with each list containing up to 1,500 items/rows and 200MB of attachments/storage in the preview version. That’s sure to increase if and when Microsoft decides to launch the app properly, at which point Android and iOS apps will surely also appear.
