Forum Discussion
How can I see tasks filtered by category?
Great news that categories in Outlook are now mirrored in To Do (at least in the browser version for now https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=63231).
Now: is there a way I can see my tasks filtered by category in To Do?
rainmountain Excellent question! I do not think there is a way to do this. And this makes the categories pretty useless at this point.
I agree uozdemir . The search bar seems to only search the name of the task or hashtags. Seems like a big miss if you are going to add the functionality to categorize tasks but then can't search or filter by task.
I appreciate this is a few months old but I had the same question. The closest I have got to this is to do the following:
- Go the Outlook Desktop App
- Go the My Tasks tab
- Select To Do List
- Change the settings to group by category
(Home Ribbon --> Current View-->Simple List --> Right Click --> View Settings --> Group By --> Categories)
It's a work around - a bit clunky as I can't find this on the browser version of Outlook or To Do
Thank you NadiyaK. That's a good workaround to see the tasks sorted by category in Outlook. As To Do is my Task-Manager Application across platforms I would still like to see this within To Do.
Just found this: some information on how to add categories in To Do (and on how this will affect Tasks created from flagged Emails): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-steps-importance-notes-tags-and-categories-to-your-tasks-bf9fdff6-f85f-4e03-9534-c587eb32515c#ID0EFBBAAA=Web
rainmountain agreed - and I rely heavily on categories. If MS does not address this, I will unfortunately, and inconveniently, need to move away from using outlook for tasks.
- Any further update on this yet? Thanks.
rainmountain - Another possible work-around is to use Shared Lists instead of categories to contain all the tasks that are related. For example, I have a personal email and a work email. I also have separate computers for work and personal but want to be able to add or view the work tasks and the personal tasks from either computer. I do this by creating a shared list for work tasks and another for personal tasks. The Shared Lists are shared between my work Userid and my personal Userid. This allows all my work and personal tasks to be visible across all my devices, including mobile. If you have a manageable number of categories, you could create a Shared List for each category. The shared list would only hold the tasks for that category. So, for example, if you wanted a category for Project X tasks, create a Shared List called Project X Tasks and use it for all the tasks for Project X. Do the same for Project Y, Project Z, etc. There's a bit of setup time to create the Shared List, but otherwise it seems to work.
- I just tested it by creating a task with only the word 'Test' in it and assigned it a category which was called 'Hardware'.
Then I searched for Hardware in the global search bar - the 'Test' task was not found...
