This post was most recently updated on March 12th, 2023.

2 min read.

Another day, another fun little task in SharePoint Online… :)

This time, I needed to be able to migrate 10 or so lists with some very specific fields and plenty of content from one site to another one. What’s the best way to do that now?

While PnP templates have supported exporting contents for a while now, you can still run into some issues with them – namely, fields of type “person” (or rather, “user”) are not supported, and I didn’t feel like scripting a migrator either to move the content after applying the schema, so what do?

Problem

Table of Contents

There are a couple of ways to achieve this, but the old and tested method of using SharePoint list templates wasn’t, at first, available on modern SharePoint communication sites. But that’s actually just a ruse by Microsoft to encourage you to use their new (and admittedly, very sleek and convenient) Microsoft Lists. You can actually still use the good-old templates too!

Even though it’s a bit hidden, the templates work pretty much just as they’ve always done – you just need to figure out a way to enable them, first :)

Solution

I’ll explain how to enable saving a SharePoint list as a SharePoint list template on a modern SharePoint online site, communication or otherwise, below!

Time needed: 15 minutes

How to enable saving a list as a template on SharePoint Online?

Make sure you have sufficient permissions
If your site is a Group-backed site, simply make sure you are the owner of the site.

If the group doesn’t have a Microsoft 365 Group associated with it, a site collection administrator will do.
Enable Custom Scripting on the site
To have access to the list templating functionality, custom scripting needs to be enabled on the site.

There’s a guide on how to do that here:
https://www.koskila.net/how-to-enable-custom-scripts-for-a-sharepoint-online-site-collection/
Navigate to list settings
You’ll need to open the list settings next. You can find it under the “Gear” icon in the SharePoint / Microsoft 365 UI’s top bar.
Select “Save as template”
This won’t be available unless custom scripting has been enabled!

When it is, you can access the “Save list as a template” option under List Settings.
Save the list as a template
Figure out a nice descriptive name for your list – you’ll need to recognize it later.

Download the list template to your machine, as you’ll need it momentarily!

Okay – so now you’ve got the template. How do you use it?
Upload your template to the target site
Ok – we’re getting close. Now we need to get the generated template to the target site.

Navigate to the list gallery (“List templates” under “Web Designer Galleries”), and upload or drag your template file to the list.
Now you can create a new list based on the template, including the contents!
The newly uploaded template should now be available when you create a new list using the out-of-the-box experience in SharePoint. Enjoy!

Boom! Great combination of classic 00s’ technology and the cutting edge stuff right there. Well, mostly the classic stuff, even if in modern view… Anyway, you know what I’m saying.

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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