Introduction to building a prompt library in Microsoft Lists:
An AI prompt library in Microsoft Lists can be a powerful tool whether it’s shared across your team or just for you.
If you’re part of a team that’s starting to adopt AI, you’ve probably run into the same problem everyone runs into. Everybody’s using it a little differently, nobody’s saving what actually worked, and the results are inconsistent from one person to the next.
You could find yourself with consistency and organization issues even if it’s just you. You’re using AI constantly, but every prompt lives in a different chat, a different note, a different half-remembered conversation. Nothing’s organized, and you keep rebuilding prompts you’ve already written.
Either way, the fix is the same. You need a prompt library. A great tool for creating prompt libraries is Microsoft Lists.
Setting Up the List
Lists lives in Microsoft 365 under All Apps if it’s not already pinned to your waffle menu. From there, you can build a list from scratch or import one from an existing Excel file or CSV.
If you want to save time and use my template, you can download it by filling out the form here.
For a prompt library, five columns cover most of what you actually need:
Prompt Name. Lists gives you a Title column by default; rename it to Prompt Name, and it’s ready to go.
Prompt. Select a multiple-lines-of-text column, not a single line. Prompts can get incredibly long. Multiple lines of text allow the full prompt to be displayed instead of being truncated.
Category. A Choice column with a few starting options: Communications, Engagement, Design, or whatever categories match how your team actually works. Each choice can have its own color, making the list easier to scan at a glance.
Use Case. A short text column that gives you a one-line reminder of what the prompt actually does, so you’re not opening every single one to remember what it’s for.
Target Tool. Another Choice column, this time for which AI tool the prompt is built for: Claude, ChatGPT, Nano Banana, whatever’s in your stack. Turn on multiple selections here, since many prompts work equally well across multiple tools.
Status. A simple red, yellow, green tracker: Archived, Needs Review, Active. This is what turns a static document into something you actually maintain over time.
One column you don’t have to build yourself: Modified date. Microsoft Lists tracks this automatically. You need to turn it on through Add Column, then Show/Hide Columns. If your team is collaborating on the same list, Created By and Modified By are worth turning on too.
Adding Your First Prompts
Once the columns are set up, all you need to do is fill out the form that populates when you click the “+ New item” button. Name it, paste the prompt text, tag the category, add a quick use-case note, select the target tool, and set the status.
The best way to see the value of this structure is to actually fill it in. Once you’ve got even five or six prompts, filtering starts to matter.
Filtering and Views
With a Category column in place, you can filter the whole list down to just what you need in the moment, only prompts tagged Needs Review, for example, so you know exactly what still needs attention.
Better than filtering every time, though, is building saved views. Create a view for Communications, filter it to that category only, save the view, and now that specific slice of your library is one click away. Do the same for Engagement, or any other category your team uses.
Get the Starter Template
If you’d rather skip building out your own list, you can use the one I created and just import it to get you started. Again, you can grab it here; no need to set up a single column yourself: [link]
Conclusion
AI is getting messy. New tools, models, and methods are emerging weekly. Creating a prompt library in Microsoft Lists can help you organize your prompts and generate more consistent results using AI.
Until next time
Jordon
