How do you move Microsoft Lists from one SharePoint site to another?

Question

I am desperately trying to move a list from one SharePoint site to another. I've read all the forums, watched the YouTube videos, and nothing seems to be working.

I have a list that contains pictures in a column. For some unknown reason, Microsoft does not allow copy/paste in MS Lists, so that's off the table.

I tried creating a PowerAutomate flow to copy all the contents from one list to the other, but I'm met with an error message that image filetypes are not supported.

So, that leaves me in no-man's-land, with no reliable way to move my list except manually recreating hundreds of lines of data.

Does ANYONE know how to successfully move a MS List from one SharePoint site to another? All the support responses on answers.microsoft are useless so far. I absolutely cannot believe this is so complicated, just allow me to copy and paste and I wouldn't be in this mess.

Answer 1

The easiest way is to select "new" in target site site contents > list > from existing list and choose the site/list you want to copy. Other options are to save source list as a template, and create list from it in target site or copy the list using SP Designer or a 3rd party tool like Sharegate.

Answer 2

I just exported a fairly large list (4700+ items) and it opened in Excel ok. How big is the list because there is a 5k item limit which can mess up most operations? (The 50mB limit can't be changed as far as i know).

Another possibility is to connect the list to an Access database, and then export from there - or save a template of the source list without data, create a new list from that template and connect that to the database from the first step. It should populate with the data.

Answer 3

I tried both methods you've outlined here, but unfortunately my list cannot be saved as a template (with its data) because it exceeds the size limit. Do you know if there is any way to manually raise the size limit? I believe the default is 50MB. This is the closest I've gotten to actually getting the data transferred so I'm really hoping there's a way.

The other method of converting to an Excel spreadsheet does not work because when I export the list, Excel throws a generic error "An unexpected error has occurred. Changes to your data cannot be saved." and shows a blank spreadsheet.

I really appreciate your efforts, though. Any other ideas?

Answer 4

Msft makes simple things harder than they should be ... one way to include the content, is to save the list as a template and recreate it on the destination site.

Go to the source list > settings and copy the list guid "list=xxxxxx" from the url.

Append this to the site url, replacing the "XXXXX" with your list guid: /_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx?List=%7BXXXXX%7D

In the page that opens, fill in list name etc and check "include content".

In the destination site, open /_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx and upload the template there.

Go to add an app and look for the template to create the list.

The pointless Msft roadblocks you'll need to overcome for this to work are:

You'll need to be a site collection admin, and enable custom scripting for this to work, which requires SP admin permission.

To enable custom scripting, open the Sharepoint management shell (download it if you don't have it installed) and enter:

Connect-SPOService -Url https://xxx-admin.sharepoint.com (to authenticate)

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://xxx.sharepoint.com/sites/matt-test -DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0

Maybe an easier option which I sometimes use, is to export the source list's content to excel, and then create the new list from that, though you may have to play with image urls for them to show up. One tip is the excel data has to be formatted as a table.

Sharepoint Designer does indeed still work, and you could try copying a list from one site to another there. I don't recall if that works or not. You can definitely copy items though.

Answer 5

Hey webbrewers, thanks for your response. Unfortunately, I've tried both ways you mentioned -- creating a new list from an existing list and saving the original list as a template and building a new list from that template -- but neither of them actually transfers over any data. They can successfully transfer the headers, but that's it.

As for your other suggestions, it looks like SharePoint Designer hasn't been updated since 2013. Is it even still usable?

And ShareGate seems more like a large migration tool (pricing starts at $6k...), which would not be suitable for migrating a single list from one site to another.