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Microsoft To-Do is an intelligent task management app that makes it easy to plan and manage your day. We'd love for you to come on this journey with us as we—with your help—continue to evolve and improve how you plan and manage your day. Last week Microsoft announced To-Do a new task management app that aims at helping you plan your day. Microsoft seems to have put the Wunderlist acquisition to good use and the To-Do is designed.
Operating system | Android iOS Windows 10 Web browser MacOS |
---|---|
Type | Productivity Task management |
License | Freeware |
Website | to-do.office.com |
Microsoft To-Do is a cloud-based task management application. It allows users to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet and computer. The technology is produced by the team behind Wunderlist, which was acquired by Microsoft, and the stand-alone apps feed into the existing Tasks feature of the Outlook product range.
History[edit]
Microsoft To-Do was first launched as a preview with basic features in April 2017.[1] Later more features were added including Task list sharing in June 2018.[2]
In September 2019, a major update to the app was unveiled, slightly rebranding it as To Do (without a hyphen), and adopting a new user interface with a closer resemblance to Wunderlist.[3]
References[edit]
- ^'Your Preview of Microsoft To-Do'. www.wunderlist.com. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
- ^'New in Microsoft To-Do: List Sharing and Steps'. www.wunderlist.com. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
- ^Foley, Mary Jo. 'Microsoft redesigns To Do to make it look more like its Wunderlist predecessor'. ZDNet. Retrieved 2019-09-09.
External links[edit]
- Microsoft To Do on Twitter
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_To_Do&oldid=915441264'
Productivity
Microsoft's added more features to To-Do, but the productivity tool still lags behind the competition. The app has potential, but there are many better alternatives among to-do list applications.
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Pros
Syncs with Outlook Tasks. Includes intelligent rescheduling suggestions.Cons
No recurring tasks, collaboration, type-ahead suggestions, tags. Poor selection of themes. Confusing to know whether you can get it.Bottom Line
Microsoft To-Do, the company's homegrown replacement for Wunderlist, pales in comparison. There are better alternatives.
With its task-management app To-Do, Microsoft has backed itself into a corner. Here's what happened. The company acquired an excellent and much loved to-do app called Wunderlist back in 2015. Microsoft announced it would discontinue Wunderlist permanently, but not before rebuilding all the best features of Wunderlist in a new app that would replace it. That app is Microsoft To-Do. From the time the company acquired Wunderlist to the time it released To-Do, roughly two years had passed, yet, To-Do wasn't even close to being finished. Two more years later, and To-Do is still out of step with the best to-do list apps. To-Do is decent enough for basic productivity needs, but it's just not as feature rich as Wunderlist (which Microsoft updates for security reasons) and many other competing apps.
So, Microsoft has cut the legs off an app that everyone loved and created a half-baked alternative. Could To-Do be a great app? It certainly has potential. What people are waiting for is a full and tight integration with other Microsoft Office apps. At the rate it's going, however, it'll take several more years to get To-Do where Wunderlist was in 2015, and in the meantime, other to-do list apps are getting better and better. It doesn't make for a compelling case.
SEE ALSO: The Best Online Collaboration Software for 2019
Now that you've heard a bit of history about To-Do, let's take a more detailed look at where it stands in terms of features, usability, and how it measures up to the very best to-do apps on the market, Todoist and Asana.
How to Get Microsoft To-Do
Microsoft To-Do is free, and to get the app you need a Microsoft account of some kind, such as a business or school email run by Microsoft or Skype credentials. The app is available for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows 10, and the web. I've tried all the apps, some with more success than others.
Once you sign into your account and choose to set up Microsoft To-Do, you'll be able to create different lists to organize your tasks.
What's Inside Microsoft To-Do?
To-Do's interface looks similar to many other task management apps, with a navigation bar on the left showing different options you have for viewing your tasks, the tasks themselves in the middle, and additional information on the right when available.
In that left rail, you have lists of tasks that you create in addition to filters. You might create lists called Personal, Work, or Shopping List. Above your lists you have a few views that act like filters. You cannot create or customize views; they come pre-loaded.
The first view is My Day, which shows all tasks due today. The next view, Important, shows all tasks to which you've added a star. Planned shows a running tab of tasks with upcoming due dates. Finally, there's Tasks, which should probably be called Inbox or something else because it's totally confusing as is. It's meant to be the default location where you jot down and store tasks until you have time to sort them into an appropriate list.
As with any halfway decent task-management app, you can add detail to your tasks, such as a due date, reminder, attachments (limited to 25MB per task), comments, and subtasks (called 'steps'). When you choose a due date, you cannot add a time, though you can add a time to a reminder. You can create recurring tasks by setting them up from a menu, but you can't type them in using natural language ('today,' 'every other Friday'), the way you can in Todoist. You can add a star to a task to mark it as important, but there are no gradations of importance or priority, such as low, medium, high, as you find in many other apps.
To-Do offers tags using the same method as Wunderlist, which is hardly sophisticated. To add a tag, you type a # symbol before whatever word you want in the task name field. You can click a tag or search for it in the search bar and pull up a list of all tasks that use it. What you don't get is a full list of tags you've created—I think it should appear in the left rail. Nor can you use tags for advanced searches, a missed opportunity, for sure. In Todoist, you can make advanced search queries, such as 'show all tasks tagged Phone-Calls and with high priority rating' and then save the query as a filter so you can pull up the results any time.
As mentioned, you can add subtasks to a task, which To-Do calls steps. Steps are nothing more than a lightweight checklist. You can't add any detail to a step whatsoever. They can't have a due date or assignee or attachment. If subtasks are important to you, it's good to know that Todoist and Asana not only include them but give them the same weight as any other task you've created.
As it stands, To-Do supports collaboration to some degree. You can invite people to join any list with an invitation email or just giving them a link to the list, but they must have or create a To-Do account to even see it. To-Do doesn't currently have any options for sharing a task list in view-only mode or exporting a list of tasks for others to see.
What Makes To-Do Different?
What makes To-Do different than other to-do apps is it's owned by Microsoft. The long-term promise is that To-Do will one day be tightly knit with other Microsoft apps. It's not there yet, and rather than tell you how I think that will work out, I'll let people make up their own minds about what kind of expectations they should have based on Microsoft's history of integrating apps.
One of the newest features for To-Do is an integration between it and Outlook that lets you flag an email in Outlook and have it show up in To-Do as a task. It only works if you meet a ton of criteria, though. You have to have a Microsoft work or school account, and you must be using To-Do via the web or Windows app only. Additionally, only the latest ten flagged emails from the previous two weeks show up, so you have to limit how much you use this feature in order for it to work. It hardly sounds enticing.
![What What](/uploads/1/2/5/2/125285295/537193443.png)
For a while, To-Do has integrated with Outlook Tasks. You can sync Outlook Tasks to Microsoft To-Do, and you can manage them from any app version of To-Do. I guess it's beneficial if Outlook Tasks is already an essential app and you want to access your info on a mobile device, although I feel bad for you if you've lived this long without having your task list on your phone.
One feature billed as unique but that really isn't is Suggestions. It's only available in some versions of the app. For example, it's in the iOS app but not macOS. In any event, you click a lightbulb icon and Microsoft To-Do suggests tasks to either add to your day or reschedule for later, based on your history of completing tasks on time. It didn't impress me when I tried it, although it's supposed to improve the more you use the app. My Suggestions, for example, were to do more tasks today even though I already had quite a few on my plate. Todoist has a similar feature that seems more useful. It suggests how to reschedule task when you've missed their deadlines, based on your history of task completion and what's on your plate for today.
Wait and See
Given there are so many other great task management apps on the market, I'm hard pressed to come up with a reason anyone should adopt Microsoft To-Do now and wait for it to improve. It's not bad; it's just...fine. To-Do feels half-baked, and I don't think Microsoft is hiding that fact one bit. The company has been transparent to say it's trying to make To-Do as good as Wunderlist, with all the same features and then some, plus tight integration with other Microsoft apps. That's a tall order. If you were an early adopter of To-Do, I can imagine how frustrating it is to still be waiting for basic features, such as folders for organizing lists and details on subtasks.
If you need a great to-do app, I highly recommend Todoist Premium and Asana. I like Todoist a little more for personal task-management and prefer Asana for more complex group projects. Both are highly capable and won't leave you waiting for years for key features.
Microsoft To-Do
Bottom Line: Microsoft's added more features to To-Do, but the productivity tool still lags behind the competition. The app has potential, but there are many better alternatives among to-do list applications.