A List View is a saved filtered list on an object — Accounts I Own, Open High-Value Opportunities, This Week's Cases. It applies a filter, sorts the results, and picks which fields show up as columns.
Three visibility scopes:
- Visible only to me — personal list view, just for the user who created it.
- Visible to all users — public list view, available to everyone with access to the object.
- Visible to certain groups of users — shared with specific public groups, roles, or roles-and-subordinates.
Whether a user can create a public list view is gated by the "Manage Public List Views" permission on the object. List views drive Lightning Kanban, list view charts, mass actions, and even mass quick actions — many features layer on top of them.
Important: list views always respect the underlying sharing model. A user filtered "All Accounts" still only sees the records they have OWD/role/sharing-rule access to. You can't use a list view to bypass sharing — it's a presentation layer, not an access grant.