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Connect Contacts list to Powerapps

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

As far as I understand it is not possible to connect a SharePoint contact list to Powerapps, is that right?

If so, are there any workarounds to this? I have "inherited" a SharePoint solution that is kind of a student administration system, and the basis for it is a SharePoint contacts list containing all the students. So basically, in a lot of my forms I need to use dropdowns for selecting students, but can not find a way to do that since I cannot connect to the Students contacts list.

So question 1 is: Are there any recommended workarounds?

Question 2: Is it possible to convert the contacts list to a normal list without breaking the entire solution?

Question 3: Are there any benefits of using a contacts list vs an ordinary list?

I am tearing out the little hair I have left trying to figure this out.

Best regards

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Building Power Apps

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timl 37,287 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

I've just connected a contact list to my app. There's a trick to this. The first step is to work out the name of your contact list - you can do this by looking at the web address of your contact list.

If you now add a connection to SharePoint, you'll see a textbox at the bottom of the 'choose a list' dialog. If you manually type in your contact list name, you should be able to make a connection.

Can you give that a try to see if it works?
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi
Had my hopes up there for a moment, but no. There was a problem adding your data source. List not found. This is the name of my list from the web address: Alle%20elever

This is what the list looks like in site contents. Is your list also of type Contacts list?
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timl 37,287 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

It's ashame that didn't work. Yes, my list was a contacts list.

I think the main difference is that your list name has a space in it. %20 is the escape character. Perhaps you could try entering the name like this to see that makes any difference:

Alle elever
timl 37,287 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

I've just tested this by creating a contacts list called Alle elever. I could connect to it from PowerApps by typing in the name of the list with a space. I also noticed that I could create an app on this contacts list by using the PowerApps menu item. Perhaps this is something you can experiment with.
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Well i tried that way too, no go. I realy cant figure out what is wrong.
But I guess its got something to do with the name as you pointed out, because I made a copy of the list, and put in one entry, called the list AlleElever2, and that works. Strange. So no I have to figure out what kind of problems i get into if I change the name of the original list. Do you know if there is a way to figure out which dependencies a list has? Anyway, I am a bit more optimistic now that you have showed me its actually possible 😉
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I replied to your other message before I saw this reply. I dont know what happened, but it actually works!! Now I might be able to fix up the rest of my solution. Thank you so very much!
timl 37,287 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Great! I'm pleased you got this to work 🙂