How to move item between sharepoint lists – Office 365

Today my client ask me a question: How to move items between SharePoint lists? In this case it was Office 365. Strange, I never had a need to move items between two lists. I made the movement of the documents but did not list items. Ok, let’s play with it. Off course, we can use SharePoint designer and workflow, and then we can just create a source item in the destination list and then remove the source item from the parent list. Well, It’s too much work for me… Is there’s something else we can do? Well, there’s a very simple method that was already in old on-premise SharePoint versions. As far as I remember we can do this since SharePoint 2007, and it works well in SharePoint online in Office 365 also.

So how to move items between SharePoint lists ? First we have to go to site settings and then we have to select the “Content and structure” option under site administration.

Content And Structure
Content And Structure

In the result we will see entire structure of our site. Just like below:

Content And Structure
Content And Structure

Now we have to select an interesting source list for us and then select an item. We can also select multiple items, which makes this future very useful! There will be a menu available to us with three possible operations: copy, move and delete. In our case, we are interested in “Move” operation. Let’s select an interesting item and press “Move”.

Site Content Actions
Site Content Actions

Then we have to select a destination list to move items between SharePoint lists. When we press ok we should see the processing logo, just like below

Performing Move Operation
Performing Move Operation

Just a few seconds later and we will get our item in the destination list. There’s one important thing in this. You have to remember that those two lists must be exactly the same! If they are not, SharePoint will update the destination list with missing columns.