Create and filter tasks

- Outlook comes with a built-in mechanism for handling all of your to dos, and it's called Tasks. To access your tasks, on the bottom of the screen, click the clipboard icon and you'll be brought into the task screen. You may notice, right away, that you already have some tasks in there. All of these are followups that you may have designated in Mail and Contacts. In fact, you can tell by the icon which is which. Let's create a new task, and we do that by clicking new task, in the top left-hand side of the screen.

Now, we can create the body of the task. You can specify a priority on the right-hand side, high or low. You can set a due date for your task, and also a date that you need to start your task. Finally, you can put a reminder on it. A reminder for your task will show up on your calendar. You can also include some notes about your task. You can make the task recurring by clicking the recurrence button, then deciding how often you want the task to recur.

You can also categorize it. When you're done, click the save and close button. Your task will appear, and you can tell it's a task that was created in the task area because of the check mark icon. To view the details of the task, you can click on it and it's going to show up in the preview pane. To mark incomplete, you can place a check box next to it. From this home ribbon toolbar, you can filter the task by clicking filter. You can only see high priority tasks, tasks that are overdue, and sort them out by their due date.

The great thing about tasks is that many of them, including email items, can be handled directly from Tasks. For example, here's an email. I can click reply, right in Tasks itself, and answer this. Now that I've followed up on that email, I can place a check box next to it, and it's marked as complete and removed from this list. You can also use smart folders on the left-hand side.

For example, you could see any task that's due today, high priority tasks, overdue, or tasks that are recently completed.