There is a known problem in SharePoint: 5,000 Items List View Threshold. Actually any SharePoint list can have up to 30 million items and a library can have up to 30 million files and folders. See more SharePoint capabilities and limits. The important moment is you cannot have more than 5k items in a single view (explained here). So obviously you’d need to create a custom view with a filter that would show less than 5,000 items and you are good (here Microsoft explains how it works and provide more options to manage large lists). But there are scenarios where we have to use PowerShell to deal with large lists.

Scenario 1 (most frequent): List is close to 5k items view threshold, and business wants you to remove items based on some criteria and keep the list (e.g. remove older items, or completed items etc.). Optionally business wants you to archive older items into another list, and keep original list short. It is too

Scenario 2: users did not create a smaller views in advance and now stuck with the list not functioning without ability to edit/create a custom view. This could happen with a regular list or library, or

Scenario 3: overflow of the access request list. This is a particular case of the scenario 2. In SharePoint site we have an “access request” functionality. If a user have no permissions to a site, and tries to open this site – he/she will get “Access denied” page with an ability to request access to a resource. These requests are saved in a special hidden list. Sometimes when you have too many requests – this list grows to 5,000 requests and you cannot go to the list to approve/decline new requests.

All these scenarios require us to use PowerShell. Here is the technique.