Creating Rules for Microsoft Lists – A Simple Alternative to Power Automate Flows

Somewhere between the classic Alerts functionality and Power Automate flows, we find the ability in Microsoft Lists to create rules for lists. Rules allow us to do some pretty basic – but VERY common things.

Creating a rule for a list is fairly straightforward. In the toolbar at the top of the list view, click on automate, and Create a rule.

There are only four options right now, but I expect this will expand. Microsoft is getting better at building what I think of as “bridging functionality”. Rather than the old days, where almost everything useful required a developer, there are now multiple options along a spectrum to accomplish many things.

The four options today are Notify someone when…

1. A column changes
2. A column value changes
3. A new item is created
4. An item is deleted

Note that #2 and #4 weren’t even possible not that long ago. We had to do all kinds of hocus-pocus for #2 and there simply wasn’t a “hook” for #4.

If you think about it, a huge number of SharePoint Designer workflows were built over the years JUST to send email notifications. This applies the 80/20 rule (one of my favorite rules – aka the Pareto Principle) to those use cases.

When you choose which rule you’d like to use – and I love how the graphics make it much easier to decide – you land on a screen where you just need to select a few values to set things up. If you’ve ever created a rule in Outlook to shuffle emails from specific sources into folders, you’ll recognize this type of logic.

The screen is also “list aware” – it knows which columns might make sense for each slot and what its possible values are. Here, I’m asking the list to notify me when the Category column is (equals) “(1) Category1”.

For the notification, all Person columns in the list are available.

As you can see, there’s little thinking involved: the columns are available in a dropdown when you need them.

Once you’ve set up a rule or rules, you can manage them from the same dropdown.

The ensuing screen shows you all the rules you have created, allowing you to delete them or just turn them off. The “Off” toggle is excellent to have when you’re loading content or making bulk metadata changes. You can stop the flood of notifications easily but equally easily turn the rule(s) back on.

Under the covers, this capability undoubtedly uses the web hooks for list items. This means the notifications will be fast and painless.

By the way, you may be wondering what those notifications look like. Truth is, they are nothing fancy. But they probably look better than 80% of the notifications you ever built in SharePoint Designer workflows over the years. This is another area where I expect the capability will expand, allowing some level of customization for the emails.

So the next time someone asks you to write a flow just to send an email when list items change, make sure to think about using rules instead. They will be amazed how fast you solve the problem.