Blog Post

Microsoft To Do Blog
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New features come to Microsoft To Do

Polly Davidson's avatar
May 05, 2020

New features in To Do

We’ve been a little quiet on the blog recently, because we’ve been hard at work delivering updates for you. We thought we’d take some time to let you know all that we’ve been up to. Let’s start with our brand-new smart lists rolling out this week. 

 

See all your tasks in one view 

One of your top-requested features is here - we now have both All and Completed smart lists. Head to your settings to turn them on. Once you do, you’ll notice that it’s not just one long list of tasks – instead, you can see them divided by list. If you’re only interested in your work-based tasks, you can close all the other sections to concentrate on your relevant lists.  

See all your tasks in one view

Doing your performance review and want to see everything you accomplished recently? Head to the Completed smart list and you’ll have an overview of everything you’ve checked off, again divided by list. 

Updated Today and Week view 

One of our most exciting new updates is rolling out now, starting with Android this week and coming soon to other platforms. We’ll now give you a Today, Tomorrow, and Week view in your Planned list. Our lives are complicated. We have work, home, that side project, and much, much more. It’s not always useful to see one long list of tasks, without any context. Now you can group by list, so you can see everything due today from each different list. If you don’t want to see your home tasks while you’re at work, then you can close that section, and reopen it when you get back home. We hope you love the new look as much as we do. 

 

See your notifications on the iOS app badge 

If you like to have that little red number on your app icon to remind you that there’s a task to accomplish, then you’ll be happy to learn that we now have three options for the app badge – tasks that have been added to My Day and not completed, all tasks that are due and overdue, and turned off for those who prefer not to be reminded. 

 

Print your lists 

From this week, printing is now available on all platforms. So, if you prefer taking a paper list to the grocery store or keeping a physical copy next to you while you work, now you can. Want to email a copy to someone? Save it as a PDF and add it as an attachment. You can print a list by clicking on the three dots next to the list’s name and selecting Print list. 

You can now add tasks to the top

Change how you add your tasks 

Our original idea with To Do was to replicate pen and paper, where you keep adding new ideas to the bottom of the list. We heard from some of you that this was frustrating when you had a long list and that you wanted the option to have your new items appear at the top. Now you can decide which option suits you best. Head over to settings, where you can decide whether you want to add a new task to the top or to the bottom of your list – and whether you want starred tasks to stay where they are or move to the top. 

 

See your completed tasks more easily 

Finally, we haven’t just given you a Completed smart list, we’ve also made it a lot easier to look at your completed tasks within your lists. You told us that you didn’t like to see your completed and uncompleted tasks mixed together and that hiding them took too many steps. We listened, and now you’ll find all your completed tasks at the bottom. So, if you like to mark your checked-off grocery items as incomplete for your next shopping trip, it’s now a lot easier to access them.  

 

That’s it from us, thanks for all the feedback. We really appreciate you taking the time to let us know what you’d like to see from To Do. We can’t wait to hear what you think of the latest updates in the comments below or over on Twitter and Facebook 

Updated May 05, 2020
Version 2.0

80 Comments

  • wroot's avatar
    wroot
    Silver Contributor

    Just tried these new All and Completed lists and they are not very useful for me because they group Flagged emails, and task by lists/groups. So to see all recently completed task i have to jump between these grouped lists. Same with All. I guess i will continue using just Tasks, enabling completed there and sorting by completed.

  • jsjogren's avatar
    jsjogren
    Brass Contributor

    I want to switch between my Work account and my private Account as in OneDrive. 

  • ShaiSc's avatar
    ShaiSc
    Copper Contributor

    First of all, thanks for the update! There are some really nice things there.

    Though I have two remarks:

    1- Latest change where you moved the completed tasks to always be separated also broke sorting the completed tasks. Now it acts like the old Wunderlist. So for example if I want to un-check just a few specific shopping list items from a long list, it's very hard to find them.
    This was actually one of the best improvements in To-do and now it's gone.
     
    2- I think it might be a powerful thing to be able to quickly add tasks to the "My Day" list from the new smart lists. For example if I'm browsing the planned or the all list a small + icon on each task to add it to the my day view can really help
  • wroot's avatar
    wroot
    Silver Contributor

    What about the web version? I see some of updates coming to it, like grouping of Completed tasks in Today view or new task at the top. But for a few months there is some bug it seems that steps are showing truncated when you first switch to another view and click on a task. Always have to click on some other task and then back to get the full text of steps. Also, was able to copy links out of steps at some point, but now it either copies one word or whole step. Have to create separate steps just for the links to be able to easily copy them (were they even clickable at some point?). Web version seems to be going backwards. Chrome.

     

    Will have to check that Completed view and i hope the sorting is right. Now i just go to All tasks, enable completed, sort by date completed and tasks are all over the place. Like it shows completed: today, yesterday, week ago, today, weeks ago.

  • Peter Schott's avatar
    Peter Schott
    Brass Contributor

    Not a bad change, but I miss the ability to sort those completed items alphabetically. I use one list as a "shopping list" so I can easily untick items I'll buy again. Now they're all over the place in the "Completed" section with no ability to sort.  I remember Wunderlist behaving this way and hating it there as well.  This makes the app a lot harder to use for a simple purpose.  Re-adding items just means I get multiples and kind of defeats that purpose.

     

    Please bring back the ability to sort Completed items.

  • Adrian-G's avatar
    Adrian-G
    Copper Contributor

    Thanks for the work behind the scenes on the latest update.  Do you think it will be possible for tasks from MS Planner to move to other lists in MS To Do?

  • diegomachado's avatar
    diegomachado
    Brass Contributor

    Please natural language and an integration with the Outlook calendar this is important now to get to the feet of other task apps. I loved Wunderlist and now I love Microsoft ToDo.

  • xmido's avatar
    xmido
    Brass Contributor

    Now please

    1. let us attach images like covers to a task.

    2. When I copy paste  multiple lines into a subtask create a new subtask for each line,  this behavior should be in all platforms - web and windows app and mobile.

    3. Chrome extension to add tasks to Microsoft Todo

    4. Organize My day by context folders and have some tasks pinned to myday everyday instead of re adding it each day again and organize it yet again.

    5. When I search for a tag, show tasks grouped by list and show completed separate not mixed in.