Struggling with Microsoft Lists? Here's a better alternative

Email automation

Users can set up rules to automate emails based on simple conditions. The emails will trigger when a particular item is created, modified, or deleted from a list. This is helpful for teams to get notified of changes instantly.

Easy sharing in the Microsoft ecosystem

Microsoft Lists works seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. For example, users can create task lists that are directly tied to projects, making it easier to assign work. They can use Microsoft Power Automate to set up approval workflows, ensuring that items progress only after being approved by the necessary stakeholders.

Limited views

Despite offering a handful of views, Microsoft Lists falls short when visualizing advanced data. It doesn't provide views like Gantt, timeline, and form. As businesses scale and data becomes more complex, teams need versatile views to interpret their data effectively.

Lack of dashboards

While Microsoft Lists supports numerical values, it doesn't have the ability to display key performance indicators (KPIs) or generate reports like pie charts, line graphs, bar graphs, and funnel charts. This is limiting for teams like sales and marketing, who rely on numbers to measure the success of their initiatives.

Without dashboards, Microsoft Lists can’t offer the deeper insights teams need for decision-making, so users have to depend on Power BI to vizualize their data. This can be a taxing workaround, especially for users who don't want to have data scattered across multiple platforms.

Dependence on the Microsoft ecosystem

Microsoft Lists offers limited value as a standalone app for managing work—it doesn't have the necessary collaboration, automation, and visualization features that teams need to manage work from a single tool.

Lack of external integrations

Microsoft Lists is built primarily to work within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. While it can be integrated with a limited set of third-party apps, these integrations are often clunky and not as streamlined as those in other tools. If your team uses software outside the Microsoft family, collaboration and data sharing between platforms can be challenging. While tools like Zapier, Zoho Flow, or Power Automate can offer workarounds, these often require additional effort to set up.

Learning curve

For new users, Microsoft Lists can be overwhelming. While templates are available to make things easier, there is still a significant learning curve to understand how to structure lists effectively, particularly if you have a lot of data to manage.

Unlike modern alternatives, Microsoft Lists doesn't offer AI-powered assistance to help users quickly build and structure their lists based on natural language prompts, which can be a major hurdle for teams just starting.

Limited data types

Microsoft Lists supports basic data types, such as text, numbers, dates, and choices. However, it lacks more advanced options like links, formulas, or relationships between task items. For teams that need to manage complex data, the limited data type options can be restrictive.

Automation

Zoho Tables offers native automation to send emails and create and update data. It's straightforward and works on simple triggers and actions.

Bidirectional relationships

Users can create bidirectional relationships between tables with the link field instead of writing complex database queries. When data in one table changes, it updates automatically in all connected tables. Additional data fields like look up and roll up make it much easier to manage interrelated data.

Smart collaboration

Zoho Tables fixes siloed teams with advanced collaboration features. It has live cursor tracking, meaning users can see when others are actively working on the same table. Collaborators can comment on records, tag one another, and keep track of updates in real time, promoting a more interactive environment. Managers can even assign different levels of access to their team members and create custom views for various stakeholders. This level of control allows for more secure and effective collaboration across teams.

Cutting-edge mobile app

The Zoho Tables mobile app has all the features of the web app on top of mobile-specific features like uploading voice notes, picture-in-picture mode, OCR scanning, and base creation using Siri. These mobile features make it easier to manage tasks on the go. The best part is that Zoho Tables' mobile application also acts as a no-code solution builder on its own when compared to Microsoft Lists' limited mobile experience.