The blog

More and more of the orga­ni­za­tions I help are tran­si­tion­ing into using Microsoft’s Office 365 Online. There are of course still many who con­tin­ue work­ing with the installed Office-pro­grams, but an increas­ing num­ber have com­plete­ly con­vert­ed to the online option, using web clients instead of being con­fined to per­son­al computers.

This tran­si­tion has its ben­e­fits, but at least one big dis­ad­van­tage: the func­tions for get­ting a com­plete overview of all the things we have to do, have not exact­ly been ter­rif­ic thus far.

• The Tasks-func­tion in the Out­look Web App is a stripped ver­sion of its excel­lent equiv­a­lent in the clas­sic Out­look-pro­gram. You can cre­ate cat­e­gories in the online-ver­sion, but you can nei­ther sort nor fil­ter by them (as the reg­u­lar pro­gram allows you to).


• Plan­ner is actu­al­ly quite a prac­ti­cal tool for col­lab­o­rat­ing on sim­pler projects, but it is dif­fi­cult to get a quick overview of all the things that need to be done today. If you pre­fer the kan­ban-for­mat (or ​”notes on a whiteboard”-format, if you will), you might appre­ci­ate the more flex­i­ble fea­tures in the pop­u­lar ser­vice Trel­lo.


• You can cre­ate a to-do-list in Share­point as well, but even if both the search- and fil­ter-options are up to stan­dard, the inter­face is not all that easy to work with, and if you ask me, it requires a bit too much click­ing for my taste. 

To be hon­est, I have been at a loss as to what to-do-list tool I should rec­om­mend to the clients who have gone down the Office 365 Online-path — until now.

A new app
About a week ago, Microsoft released their lat­est star on the ​”keep­ing track of what you have to do”-sky: the app Microsoft To-Do, which was devel­oped by the cre­ators behind the very pop­u­lar to-do-list-app Wun­derlist.

The app pro­vides the Office 365 Online-users with that which oth­er apps have failed to deliv­er — per­haps not entire­ly, but at least to a high degree.

A smooth and easy list
Microsoft To-Do may look sim­ple and uncom­pli­cat­ed … and that is exact­ly what it is. It lets you write your to-do-task quick­ly and eas­i­ly. If you want to cat­e­go­rize the tasks you sim­ply use hash­tags (#), which makes it easy to see all the tasks tagged with a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­go­ry when­ev­er you please. You can assign due dates to the tasks (if they have a set dead­line) and you have the option of adding an explana­to­ry note to tasks. If you want to group tasks accord­ing to the projects or work­ing spheres you are active in, you sim­ply cre­ate ​”lists” which you then fill with tasks, all the while main­tain­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of view­ing the entire list of tasks if you so wish — regard­less what project they are part of.

An emp­ty list every morning
One par­tic­u­lar fea­ture I have not yet seen in oth­er tools is that the view ​”My day” (mean­ing, today’s to-do-list) is blank every morn­ing, mak­ing the user cre­ate and fill today’s list with tasks on their own based on the sug­ges­tions pro­vid­ed by the app, as well as their own pri­or­i­ti­za­tion amongst all tasks in the tool.

When does email come into the picture?
At the time of writ­ing, I still have not found an easy way to cre­ate a task in To-Do from an email, which I admit is a down­side. But, it also appears as if the To-Do ver­sion just made avail­able is just the begin­ning, and that a num­ber of fea­tures will be grad­u­al­ly added to the app.

Do this
If you are using Office 365 in the ful­ly online ver­sion, and still have not found a to-do-list tool you are com­fort­able with amongst the oth­er options I just men­tioned, I sin­cere­ly rec­om­mend you have a look at To-Do. Besides, if you cur­rent­ly have tasks in the Tasks-func­tion, you will find them in To-Do as well, since the lists in the func­tions sync with one another.

Get a com­plete overview
If you make To-Do your to-do-list of choice as an Office 365 Online-user, it will become eas­i­er to get that great com­pre­hen­sive overview of all the things you have to do. Today’s list is easy to cre­ate, and it becomes eas­i­er to focus on the tasks with the high­est priority.

Have you tried it already?
Per­haps you have already had a look at To-Do and start­ed using it? If so, feel free to share your eval­u­a­tion of the tool in a comment.