Unveiling the Fate of Outlook Tasks: Legacy vs. New Outlook Features Explained

Key takeaways :

• Legacy Outlook for Windows offers a different Task feature compared to the New Outlook, requiring users to switch back to Legacy Outlook to meet specific needs.
• Outlook Tasks provide detailed organization features such as folders with sub-folders, automated sorting systems, Rules for email and calendar event sorting, priority levels, color-coding, and categories.
• To Do integration in Outlook is helpful for users already using the To Do app across devices, but it does not replace Outlook Tasks as it lacks support for start and end dates, task status, task completion percentage, multiple priority levels, task work hours, task colors, and categories available in Outlook Tasks.
• Older Outlook tasks will coexist alongside the To Do page for the time being, as the Tasks module in Outlook is considered superior to the To Do solution by users due to its custom views, start date field, user-defined fields, conditional formatting, and integration with VBA.
• The To Do app in Outlook for Windows is available to Microsoft 365 subscribers running specific builds, providing availability for users with compatible subscriptions.

Are Outlook Tasks Going Away?

Hi @Ina B, welcome to our forum! Unfortunately, the Task feature in New Outlook for Windows is very different from the Legacy Outlook. I’m afraid you need to turn off the New Outlook button to switch back to Legacy Outlook to meet your current needs.

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The Best Organization

Microsoft Outlook’s Tasks feature gets really specific with its organization. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how you work. Outlook Tasks support folders with sub-folders and automated sorting systems. To Do takes a simpler approach. In Outlook, you can use Rules to send certain emails or calendar events to a specific Tasks folder. It also lets you set specific levels of priority. You can also color-code tasks with Categories.

Even though To Do integration is helpful, especially for anyone already using the To Do app across their devices, it’s not a replacement for Outlook Tasks. Microsoft says in a support document, To Do doesn’t currently support the start and end dates, task status, task completion percentage, multiple priority levels, task work hours, task colors, or categories that are available in Outlook Tasks. At least for the moment, older Outlook tasks will live alongside the To Do page.

I completely agree with @SIU-Ithaca and @kimberlykimberly. The Tasks module in Outlook is far superior to the ToDo solution. The Custom views, start date field (critical to actually manage tasks), user-defined fields, conditional formatting, Integration with VBA, I could go on-and-on. As one example, I created a user-defined Deadline date field so I could use the Start Date to manage when I would start the work and not have the Deadline changed (changing the Start Date also changes the Due Date in Tasks and this customization is critical to manage deadlines). No way to do this in ToDo.

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Availability

The To Do app in Outlook for Windows is available to Microsoft 365 subscribers running the following builds. Microsoft 365 subscribers running the following builds can specify the Microsoft To Do app as their preferred task management experience in Outlook.

To open the To Do app:

You now have the option to specify your preferred experience for managing tasks in Outlook for Windows. There are a few different ways to configure this option.

And so far, that seems to be the case—the Tasks module continues to be supported. If you go to the module launcher in the web version of Outlook, for example, you will see that Both modules are available there. And Outlook desktop has no link at all to To-Do. So far so good. If You Try Out To-Do, many of you, after reading this article, are going to try out To-Do, which makes sense. But a few warnings before you blindly do that.

View your flagged emails from Outlook in To Do. With this integration, you can also view all your emails flagged in Outlook in the Flagged email list of the To Do app. In the task details, you can view a snippet of the email or directly open the email in Outlook to get the complete context.

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