Happy 2020!

What I am going to document here might be straightforward for certain people but wasn’t obvious to me when I started doing a very silly List template copy in MS Teams. Hence this post!

As part of my work, I am in a Microsoft Teams, let me call it Team 1, where I have a SharePoint List, let me call it TrackerList, added as a tab. This list helps our team add certain requests with their details and attachments.

As you might be already aware, it is a simple task to add a new List as a tab – Link

Now, comes the interesting bit. I had to manage the same task in another Team, let us call it Team 2, where this same TrackerList’s template was needed. Since, I was not a SharePoint / Teams regular user, I was in a spot.

So, as usual, I started analysing the options.

OPTION 1: I started with this link from techcommunity.

1. Go to the underlying SharePoint site for Teams in the Teams where my Original Tracker List was there.
   

   

2. You will be taken to your SharePoint that drives your Teams. on the Site Navigation pane on the left side you can see your TrackerList file.
3. Click on that to Open your SharePoint List, click on Export to Excel and save the query.iqy file.
4. Open the file and Enable the data concern in the security pop up window as long as it is allowed in your machine (some firewalls and companies don’t allow this) and source of file is vetted.
5. Now, you have the excel sheet with the data from SharePoint.
6. Go to Table->Design-> Export the table to a SharePoint List.
   

   

   

7. I gave the Link to my SharePoint that drives Teams2.
8. I was able to use the Next and Finish to publish it with a New Unique name to that end point (provided I had access)
9. Go to Team2’s SharePoint backend.
10. Now, you can’t see that it in the site Navigation pane
11. But you can see it in the Site Contents.
12. You can try adding it to Site Navigation Pane using Edit.
13. But after all this, you can’t see it in the below flow when you want to add this List as a tab to your Teams 2.
    

    

14. Now, I don’t know why this happens. May be there is some meta which is needed. if you create a new List from this SharePoint base link, then it appears on Site Navigation by default and then comes in Add List as Tab workflow as well!

OPTION 2: Let me try create a new List from the import the freshly created List in the above option 1

How to achieve this?

1. Create a New List Item but then I wasn’t able to copy it from a template!
2. Dead End

Start over:

1. Go to Site Contents instead
2. Create a New List
3. you get a new Window now where you are by default in your own Site and can see the different Lists created or imported from Option 1.
4. you can choose to create a list from the previously exported Lists!
   

   

5. Now go back and try to add this list in Teams 2.
6. Oops. Doesn’t appear still

OPTION 3: Let me try now using the imported list in the Site Contents and somehow create a new List.

Instead the steps are actually too simple!

1. Go to Site Contents instead
2. Create a New List
3. you get a new Window now where you are by default in your own Site and can see the different Lists created or imported from Option 1.
4. you can choose to create a list from this – BUT DON’T as we saw in option 2 that doesn’t work
5. you should scroll below to the other Teams, Team1 and the specific list you need will be there.
   

   

6. Select whichever lists you need and click Create.
7. Done – you will have the same template without the data created for you!

And, I am happy saving 2 hours copying templates and recreating them.

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Now you may ask me a question what if my sample template and SharePoint List is in another Tenant!

I don’t have an answer for that yet. I somehow think Option 1 and Option 2 together should solve it, with some support from Microsoft end to say why MS Teams, Add SharePoint List is not showing the List added in that fashion. May be some metadata is missing when added like that.

Hope this helps!

Yours Half-brained,
Trilok R