Breaking up a big list to avoid limit view threshold on Sharepoint Online

Question

I am finding workarounds to this limit view threshold issue in Sharepoint Online. I already read the recommended steps by Microsoft (Managing a Large List and Library in Sharepoint) and saw that the previous IT manager did all the steps in there.

I am thinking of breaking down this list into separate libraries. Have anyone of you able to do this? Or I am better of with the retention policy for SPO?

Thanks!

totoy

Answer 1

Managing a big list in SharePoint always been a challenge, as per personal experience data analysis in the list is very important, so as per the data analysis and behavior of the columns instead of maintaining multiple lists we can split the list items into multiple views with the some condition.

For example if you have a choice column with "Yes" and "No" value. We can create two views something like below :

View 1

• With "Yes" condition and created or modified columns

View 2

With "No" condition and created or modified columns

Or split even with more views depends on the various metadata and their frequency of updates.

View filter logic should be something like below :

For view 1:

Column 1 eq "Yes" and created >= [today] - 3

For view 2:

Column 1 eq "No" and created >= [today] -3

Notes :

In the above filter displaying data which were created for the last 3 days with yes and no values. This is just for example, you can change it as per your requirements.

And so on....

The bottom line of the above approach is, at any given point of time view will have less items (less than 5k).

For details implementation please refer the below article :

List view threshold error(5000 items issue) in SharePoint On-Premise/SharePoint Online

Notes:

• It's recommended to implement a archival policy on the list which should move the old items to archival list periodically.

Answer 2

You can store up to 30 million items in a SharePoint list. When you modify the view, such as filter、sort、group, the number of items contained in the current view must be less than 5000.

In my point of view, you could split the items into multiple list to avoid limit view threshold on SharePoint Online.