Today, I want to show you about Microsoft tasks in teams. You might be thinking, doesn’t Microsoft already have a whole bunch of task tracking apps? Yes, there’s Microsoft to do to track your individual tasks and Microsoft Planner, which you could use to track team or group tasks in Microsoft Teams. They are now coming together. You can both see your individual tasks and all of your group tasks in one place.
In the past, when you used group tasks, you might have had a task assigned to you that you couldn’t see on your own individual task list. By bringing the two together, you can now see everything that you’re responsible for all in one place. I’m going to show you step-by-step how you can take advantage of it.
How do I access Microsoft Tasks in Teams?
- Let’s go over to the left hand side and click on the ellipses. This opens up all of the different apps in Microsoft Teams. To launch the tasks experience, we need to type in tasks.
- If this is something that you think you might use frequently, you could pin the app to your left hand side. In fact, you could do this for any of the icons on the left hand side, simply right click on the icon and then select Pin and this will stay up within the left side.
- In the tasks app, one of the features is called my tasks and everything that shows up within this category is for me to do. These are my own individual tasks.
- On the right hand side, I have what looks like a fairly typical task list. Let’s go and type our very first task.
- My first task is to tweak the cookie recipe. I can set a priority for this task. It can be either important or medium. This seems like a pretty important task so I’m going to select it. I can also set the due date to get this done.
- I have finished entering my task and this is now added to my task list.
- I have added the task to my list. I can double click on the task and enter in some additional details. Again, I could set the title of the task, priority, due date and type in some notes.
- I will add a note to this task. I have a hunch that adding more sugar to cookies will get people to purchase them more frequently but as any good business owner, I need to experiment down below.
- I have the option to add a checklist. The way to think of it is like adding subtasks.
- As you can see, I added two additional items. I’m going to test an extra half cup of sugar and I’m also going to test an extra cup of sugar. Once I’m satisfied with my task, I can click close.
- I have my very first task on my task list. I have added all of the details to this item on my task list.
- I want to show you one more way. You could very quickly update some of the details. When you have selected a task, you will see tabs appear across the top. I can click on it and update the progress. I can update the progress, priority and due date.
- There are different places where I could update those values. I’m going to have many different tasks, not just one so I’m going to add a few more tasks. I have now added a few more tasks to my task list.
How do I view Microsoft Tasks in Teams?
- Next, I want to show you some different ways that you can view your task list.
- By default, the tasks view shows you all of the tasks that you’ve added. When I click on Important on the left hand side, it filters my list down to the task that I added and gave high importance to.
- Similarly, on the left hand side, if I click on planned, it will show me all the different tasks that I have on my task list and a due date associated with them.
- These are two quick ways to narrow down your task list.
- There’s another view called assigned to me. When I click up on my tasks, a list of all of my individual tasks that have been assigned to me across all of my different group or team plans appears.
- I see that I have one task assigned to me now. This is a nice way to stay on top of any tasks that might arise from teamwork or group work that you’re doing.
How do I complete Microsoft Tasks in Teams?
- Back on my main task list. Once I complete one of my tasks, it’s very easy to cross it off my list. All I need to do is click on the box and the task disappears.
- Let’s say, I want to view all of the tasks that I finished. I could simply go to the top right hand corner and by default, it would show me all of my active tasks. If I click on this, I can also toggle to view all of my completed tasks.
- I see that the launch of the business website is done.
- I could also click on the box again and that will bring it back to my active list.
- I can also filter my list. For instance, I could filter tasks that are due this week and also look at tasks that have high priority.
Microsoft to do vs tasks
- If you’ve ever used Microsoft to do before, you might be wondering what the differences? Well, they’re pretty similar, all the same tasks that I have entered in tasks in Microsoft Teams also show up in Microsoft to do. It’s the same service that powers this.
- You do have a few key gaps, though. If we look over on the left hand side within Microsoft to do, I have my day view that shows me all of the tasks that I want to complete today, they don’t show up within tasks and Microsoft teams.
- Similarly, there’s another view for flagged emails. They don’t yet show up in Microsoft Teams with tasks.
- It’s the typical product development model where you get out the base functionality first and then continue improving the product.
- I would bet that my day view and flagged emails will show up in tasks and teams, but it’s going to take a little bit of time before they show up there.
- Along with those, there are a few other gaps. I’m not limited to these predefined categories.
Create a new list or plan
- I can also add my own personal lists. To do that, let’s go to the bottom left hand corner and click on New List or Plan.
- A list is an individual list that I use to track my own tasks and a shared plan is used to track a team or group set of tasks.
- I want to add my own personal list. I’m going to call this personal.
- Then I can select where to create this. If I want this to be an individual list, put this in my tasks and then click on create.
- You now see that over on the left hand side, I have an additional personal or individual task list on the side.
- Now that we’ve taken a look at what we can do with personal task lists. Next, I want to show you how we could create a plan or a group set of tasks.
- Once again, let’s go to the bottom left hand corner and click on New List or Plan. This time, instead of creating a list, we are going to create our own plan. I’m going to create a plan for the Techieberry Blog. We’d like to assign some tasks to my team members.
- I have added a new plan, anyone who’s a member of the team and the channel can now access this plan.
- As an example, click on the left hand side of Teams and select Techieberry Blog. A new tab across the top called Blog Plan. When I click on this, it brings me back into the plan.
- This makes it very easy for any of my team members to get back to our plan.
- I’m now back in my open blog plan and need to start pulling some tasks together so I can make my team productive. I can assign it to someone else using the Assigned to icon and this will allow me to choose a name.
- I could set it as a pretty important task and set a due date. I’m going to give myself a little bit of time to work through the details. I could set up a bucket for this task. The best way to think of a bucket is as a category.
- If we want to edit some of the details of the task, we can simply double click on it which opens up all of the task details. We can change who’s working, priority, due date and add notes. Just like I could before.
- Now, I don’t want to be too much of a micromanager, but I’m going to add a few items to the checklist just to get the creative juices flowing. This looks like a good list to start and for now, click on the check box that says show on card.
- Next, add some attachments and type comments.
- Before I close this out, I want to show a few extra things that you could do. If we click on the ellipses on the top, we can copy the link to the task so maybe I want to email or message someone and include a link to the task.
- I have added all the details for this task. When the task is selected, some quick actions across the tabs on top are visible.
- I’m going to add a few more tasks to the list and distribute them to my team. I couldn’t just give them all to my team and felt like I needed to take on at least one task so I assigned one to myself.
- We also have access to some different ways of viewing our tasks. For instance, click on active and filter between active tasks and tasks that our team has completed.
- I could click on the filter and have a few more filters than before. Just like before, the filter works based on the date and priority. We also have buckets and filters by individuals. For instance, I want to see everything a specific employee is working on.
- One of the great things about Microsoft tasks in teams is that they are not just limited to seeing tasks on a list of people; they can also be visualized in different ways.
- Right up above, by default, we’re in the list view but we can also click into the board view. I see a board with cards representing all of the different tasks I mentioned.
How do I create buckets?
- On the top, select board and click Add new bucket.
- The first bucket is for store opening and add another bucket for staffing.
- The board view quickly pull cards into these different buckets. For instance, a card that says hire service staff is a staffing related work item so I’m going to drag it over into staffing.
Charts
- We have looked at the board view. Let’s click into charts to see what we could do.
- I see a whole bunch of analytics related to my team. I can see that our team or group has 3 tasks remaining and what bucket they sit in and the overall priority across all of my tasks.
- One of my favorites is that I can see how many tasks are assigned to each member now. As the owner of the business, my one takeaway is that I have a lot of staff members who don’t currently have work and should probably go back and add some more tasks.
Schedule
- Last, click into the schedule view. Within the schedule view, I see a calendar view by month. When all the different tasks are due, I could also toggle between a week view or come back to the month view so this is just one more way that you can visualize all of your tasks on your team.
That was a quick look how you can start taking advantage of Microsoft tasks in teams.
For more information, visit the Microsoft website.
Now I want to turn it over to you:
Which strategy from today’s guide are you going to try first? Or maybe you have a question about something that I covered.
Either way, I’d like to hear from you. So go ahead and leave a comment below.
