Understanding lists

Objects hold everything — every person, every company, every deal you have ever touched. But day-to-day work happens on a slice: this quarter's wedding leads, corporate accounts to renew, deposits that are overdue. A list is that slice, saved and named. It is the filtered view you would rebuild in Excel every Monday morning, except it stays built — and it can do a few things a filter cannot.

What a list is

A list is a named set of records pulled from an object. Wedding leads 2026 is a list of People; Deposits to collect might be a list of Bookings or Events. Records join a list in whichever way suits the job:

• By hand — add a record to a list directly, the way you would copy a row onto a working tab.
• From a filter — everyone whose Source is Website and whose inquiry is unanswered.
• From an import — a spreadsheet of trade-show contacts becomes a list in one step.
• From a workflow — automatically, the moment a record meets a condition, with no one watching for it.

Crucially, a list contains the records themselves, not copies. The same guest can sit on three lists at once, and all three show her one live record — update her phone number anywhere and it is correct everywhere. Removing her from a list removes her from that working set only; the record is untouched.

List attributes and views

Lists can carry attributes of their own — fields that exist only within that list. A stage, an owner, a priority on Wedding leads 2026 belongs to the lead's place in that pipeline, not to the person herself. That is how the same guest can be Won in one pipeline and Negotiating in another without the two jobs colliding.

Views are saved ways of looking at a list or an object: filtered, sorted, as a table or a kanban board. A list of leads viewed as a kanban grouped by stage is your pipeline; the same list viewed as a table sorted by value is your forecast review. One set of records, several saved ways to work it — nothing rebuilt, nothing exported.

Lists are the last of the four core ideas. The final article in this section, define your data model, puts objects, attributes, records, and lists together and walks through setting up a real workspace.