Forum Discussion
Microsoft To Do vs Outlook Tasks
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
- 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.
kimberlykimberly and the worst thing is, they are ending outlook tasks. I tested out the new Outlook for windows client and there is no longer tasks, only to do. And when you click on the to do icon, it opens To do on the browser. They are oversimplifying the apps for the novice user, but completly screwing over the advanced user.
rfmrqs I noticed that too and it's painful (and how they've changed the OneNote integration) - even though it's in the 'My Day' tab, you can't see the descriptions there. Hopefully this is still just a preview and it gets remedied before the full release.
kimberlykimberly Hey, you're raising some interesting points here - I'd be keen to learn more because I need to have these conversations with others. How are you accessing Microsoft To Do (e.g. web/desktop app/Outlook/Teams)?
Looks like Outlook now has To Do included alongside tasks. It has all the features of the web and opens email tasks in the desktop app.
I also use the 'Planned' smart list a lot more than the My Day list. I've found it more manageable for seeing time-dependent tasks.
For your flagged emails, I still have the option in Outlook to assign custom dates. How are you seeing it?
