Picklist value Enabling / Disabling

[richard.valdez]

there should be a selection in a picklist to Enable or Disable a Value. currently if I want to remove a value from a picklist I would have to delete it causing the value to be removed from all historical records. deleting a value in a picklist causes audit history problems. a real change control system would allow you to do that. so having a selection to disable it while keeping it on the list would be great. this will also allow you to re-enable it in the future if needed. I've had to resort to creating all picklists in a workspace and creating an enable/disable check box and a second picklist pointing to the workspace with filters for only enabled. this is clunky and unnecessary if there was one selection within a picklist. yes I have tried Modern UI and there is no difference with Classic vs Modern for Admin functions so please do not respond with that canned reply.  

[sven.dickmans]

This issue can be prevented by adding a new workspace that holds all available pick list values and using pick lisst that do not use a fixed list of values, but a dynamic list based on records from a workspace:

In my tenant, I created the workspace Pick List Values with a few fields:

I use this workspace to manage all possible values of all pick lists. The List Name groups all entries that belong to the same list. Value 1 will store the value to be selected while value 2-4 can be used for multi-level filtered pick lists when needed. Now, when adding a new pick list, I can filter for a given list within the workspace by adding a filter condition:

In addition, when defining the field to use the pick list, I select field Value 1 and set the type Filtered:

With this setup, I can archive records in my workspace Pick List Values without impacting existing data. Thanks to the filtered pick list fields, the values will not get updated while the archived values cannot be selected for new records any longer.

As a bonus, I can now use import / export functionality to update my pick lists across multiple tenants.

[sven.dickmans]

I forgot to mention that this setup with a dedicated Pick List Values workspace also enables filtering in the list of values by (co)ownership: you can grant access to defined values by using the item ownership control.

[richard.valdez]

yes this original idea was to get away from having to create another workspace for picklist values with a picklist filtering for a specific field in that workspace. I too created this setup and this is way more complicated then it needs to be if the picklist manger just had the ability to enable/ disable a value. seems to be a theme with this software to over complicate everything.