Hi @green-account-75240, I think if I understand you correctly:
There's still a way to set the fields that display in a list without any records in the datagrid. If you click on the Edit layout (paintbrush) icon, you can choose which fields you want to display.
I appreciate you can't visualise that data without a record, but I think the best thing to do there is add in one temporary record to see how it looks.