Use a Custom SharePoint Form as the Default “New Item” Form

When creating new list items in SharePoint, you can actually point to a custom form URL instead of the default one — and no, I’m not talking about Power Apps Custom Forms.

I’m a huge fan of Custom Forms, truly. They’re powerful and flexible, but sometimes they introduce extra complexity in management, deployment, and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).

If your only goal is to provide a custom user interface for item creation, you can skip the Power Platform layer and directly tell SharePoint to use any custom form you like.

Demo Video

Why This Is Useful

Many organizations need lightweight UI customizations — a simpler layout, company branding, specific help text, or prefilled fields — without going full Power Apps.

By changing a single property, you can make your custom form the default experience when users click “Add new item” in a list.

How It Works

Every SharePoint list has one or more content types, and each content type includes a property called NewFormUrl.

By default, this property points to the system form (e.g., NewForm.aspx). But you can override it with the URL of your own form.

📚 Official Microsoft documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dev/schema/contenttype-element-newformurl

Step-by-Step Setup

Follow these steps to configure your list:

1. Create and customize your new SharePoint form.
   This can be a modern page or a static HTML form stored in the same site.
2. Save the form and copy its link (just the relative URL part).
3. Run the following commands in PowerShell 7:

Connect to your SharePoint site interactively
Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://TENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/SITENAME" -Interactive -ClientId "clientIDToConnectViaPnP"

Retrieve the list content type

$Ct = Get-PnPContentType -List "LISTNAME" -Identity "Item"

Set the NewFormUrl property to your custom form

$Ct.NewFormUrl = "SitePages/CustomForm.aspx"

Apply the update

$Ct.Update($false)
Invoke-PnPQuery

LinkedIn relative post

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/federicotosetto_sharepoint-sharepoint-activity-7407695318173122560-d6cX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACKJlEABegKcSpQKizAvOzyH46f6JvcIZbM