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Microsoft To Do vs Outlook Tasks
Is Microsoft To Do replacing Outlook Tasks? Or how do they work together? Is Outlook Tasks being retired? I'm a Technology Adoption Analyst who co-leads our Champions program and we want to make sure...
WillDeHaan hey, good questions
Why are there 2 places for To Do tasks?
Outlook tasks have been around for a long time and there would be users who still use it and the features are slightly different.
Is there a best practice or best overall tool to use for this? Is To Do a better tool to push to our end users since it integrates with Planner and Teams and Outlook?
I'd be promoting To Do for individuals.
- It has its own handy features (lists, grouped lists, smart lists, list sharing, tags, recognised dates, My Day etc)
- It's integrated with Microsoft Teams
- It surfaces your Planner items
- It surfaces flagged emails
- It has a dedicated app with mobile widgets
Hi WillDeHaan - they work together. To Do tasks will show up in Outlook and Outlook tasks will show up in To Do. You can also configure To Do to bring in your flagged emails and Planner tasks. The idea is to bring all of your follow up items into a single place to manage. Using Microsoft To Do with Outlook Tasks - Microsoft Support
How to use To Do in Outlook with Microsoft 365 for your productivity advantage - OnMSFT.com
Hope that helps.
Thanks for your response! Why are there 2 places for To Do tasks? I'm finding this can be confusing to know which tool to use. Is there a best practice or best overall tool to use for this? Is To Do a better tool to push to our end users since it integrates with Planner and Teams and Outlook? Will To Do eventually catch up with the capabilities Outlook Tasks has?
I'm enjoying the different takes on this. Great conversation starter, WillDeHaan!
- Well, to make it more fun, there's 3 because you can also access tasks in Teams "Tasks by Planner and To Do" - my least favorite place to work with them, but if you're in Teams for your normal workday, you can work with them there.
- But you have to click on the link to see the email and it opens in (ahem) THE WEB BROWSER???? I mean...the mind boggles how that's an improvement. Also, you could previously right click on a task and easily had 20 options of functionality (including printing the email, changing the name of the task, color coding, finding similar emails, etc). Now, there are five, none of which go beyond just shuffling the items around to different lists. It's just laughably worse. If I were on the development team, I'd be embarrassed to roll that out.
- I totally agree with this issue!. I can't for the life of me understand the thinking behind it. so you type an e-mail in outlook for windows, then you flag it so it creates a Task in ToDo under flagged e-mails. When you open it late from ToDo for windows you have to click on the link and it takes you to Outlook online which has less than half the functionality. Completely agree with your statements.
WillDeHaan hey, good questions
Why are there 2 places for To Do tasks?
Outlook tasks have been around for a long time and there would be users who still use it and the features are slightly different.
Is there a best practice or best overall tool to use for this? Is To Do a better tool to push to our end users since it integrates with Planner and Teams and Outlook?
I'd be promoting To Do for individuals.
- It has its own handy features (lists, grouped lists, smart lists, list sharing, tags, recognised dates, My Day etc)
- It's integrated with Microsoft Teams
- It surfaces your Planner items
- It surfaces flagged emails
- It has a dedicated app with mobile widgets
- I need to disagree with this recommendation. The To-Do view in tasks has not been successfully implemented in the To Do app.
Currently, there is no method to combine all tasks from multiple Office 365 accounts in To Do. The To Do app is also missing the functionality that works with the SharePoint tasks list (Not Planner). The To Do app is also missing "Start Date" as a view option. I have been training teams for a long time that Start Dates can be as important as Due Dates.
I work with multiple companies and have emails at each company. Each company has SharePoint and uses multiple task lists. Tasks with the To Do view is far superior than the To Do app.- I completely agree SIU-Ithaca and kimberlykimberly. The Tasks module in Outlook is far superior to the ToDo solution.
The Custom views, start date field (critical to actually manage tasks), user-defined fields, conditional formatting, Integration with VBA, I could go on-and-on.
As one example, I created a user-defined Deadline date field so I could use the Start Date to manage when I would start the work and not have the Deadline changed (changing the Start Date also changes the Due Date in Tasks and this customization is critical to manage deadlines). No way to do this in ToDo.
Replacing Tasks with ToDo would be a terrible idea for anything other than a grocery list.
