Tracy van der Schyff

#Office365Challenge Beginning of August the new “modern look” list features were rolled out to First Release Tenants. Join me as we take at look at what has changed, what is better and what they still need to work on a bit.

A lot of these changes to SharePoint has upset people, including me. But I have to admit – in my work I support Agile Development. Why? Because you can get to the desired state – faster. If you look at the definition below, you’ll understand that we (the users of SharePoint) are the self-organizing / cross-functional teams. Important here is that we give feedback to allow for continuous improvement.

“Agile software development describes a set of principles for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. These principles support the definition and continuing evolution of many software development methods.” Read more…

When navigating to one of my current lists, I was greeted with a nifty screen telling me things have changed and what I can expect. The following changes were highlighted:

1. Details pane
2. Automate Tasks with Flow
3. Build Custom apps with PowerApps
4. Easily Change and Save views

I’ve already seen the changes to the document libraries, so it was not as much of a shock as the first time I opened the new document libraries.

Today we’ll focus on the changes to menus and the general look and feel:

When an item is selected, this is what you’ll see at the top: Edit, Share, Get a Link, Delete and an ellipses dropdown to Alert Me. Follow and Share is still visible in the top right and below that you can see items selected and the Info Button to open the panel:

When no items are selected, these menus will be different, you now have New, Quick Edit, Export to Excel, Flow and the Ellipses opens to PowerApps and Alerts. You will also now see the dropdown to the views available (All Items):

When selecting an item, the Details Pane is now displayed on the right  – allowing you to make changes here. Most fields are editable here except the multiple lines of text (these have always been rebels in my eyes). For these fields I have to click on the “pen” to edit.

When you scroll down in the Details Pane, you will also see the following:

• Recent Activity
• Sharing
• Information

Clicking on the ellipses next to the item still opens the dropdown menu we are used to. The items on the menu now includes:

• Open
• Edit
• Share
• Get a link
• Copy field to clipboard
• Delete
• Alert Me
• More
• Details

From tomorrow we can start looking at the Views, Flow and PowerApps.

So what is the biggest change you might ask? The Ribbon. Or the lack thereof, I’d say.

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but where applicable, to the overall Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint.