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Pulling Tasks Together: To Do, Inbox, Planner, and Teams

This article applies to: Microsoft Teams

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Microsoft To Do, Planner, and Teams, available through Cornell's Office 365, can help you collect personal tasks, tasks in your email inbox, and group tasks.

Your Individual Tasks: Microsoft To Do

Microsoft To Do provides personal task management features like:

  • A daily planner
  • Collecting tasks into a list
  • Creating groups to hold collections of lists
  • Adding due dates, reminders, repeating, notes, and attachments to tasks

When you flag an email in Outlook, a task will appear in Flagged email in To Do. From there, you can drag it to Tasks and it will be handled like any other task. Checking it off in To Do removes its flag in Outlook, and checking off the flag in Outlook completes the associated To Do task. 

The To Do task based on the flagged email displays the word Message and an email icon. You can add details, due dates, steps, and attachments to it, just like any other task.

If you use Outlook on the Web, you can also right-click on an email in your message list, hover over Advanced Actions, then click Create Task to add it to To Do.

You can add any message in Teams to your list in To Do. Hover over the message until the emoji mini-menu appears, click ... (More options), hover over More actions, then select Create task

Learn more about Microsoft To Do.

Group Tasks: Microsoft Planner

Example of a Planner plan inside Microsoft Teams

Planner is a card-based team task management app. Efforts are organized into Buckets, and individual tasks are kept in a bucket. 

Buckets can have any theme or designation you want, ranging from status-based, such as New, In Process, and Done, to thematic for different areas your group concentrates on, or any type of classification that best supports your group's work.

A plan can be created or added as a tab in any standard channel in Teams. (Microsoft is working on adding the ability to create a plan in a private channel.)

Tasks are created inside Buckets, and just like tasks in To Do, can contain a lot of additional information like who it's assigned to, notes, checklists, attachments, and more. 

Learn more about Microsoft Planner

Viewing It All in Teams

Example of how the Tasks app looks in Microsoft Teams

When the Tasks/Planner app is installed in Teams, you can have all your tasks in one place. A few things to note:

  • Tasks (either in your To Do or assigned to you in a plan) and overall plans are organized separately.
  • You'll find tasks under the My Tasks heading, and Important, Planned (has a due date), and Assigned to Me contain both To Do and Planner tasks you're assigned that meet these characteristics. Each task shows where it's from under Source
  • Planner can be accessed on its own through tasks.office.com
  • Teams, To Do, and Planner all have mobile apps available through your device's app store. 

Use the Tasks apps in Microsoft Teams.

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