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A better view for To-Do list in Outlook 2010

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The default To-Do list in Outlook 2010 – the list at the right next to your mail/calendar etc. – shows all flagged messages and all uncompleted tasks.

I make extensive use of the Task feature in Outlook to set myself future reminders to do things, and I don’t need to see those task until a week before I need to do them.

I thought I was going to have to get into DASL language to get this functionality, but thankfully the filtering in Outlook 2010 is quite intelligent, and automatically uses OR when you add filters on the same field.

So to get what I want I changed the view for the To-Do list by right clicking on the column header in the To-Do list and selecting View Settings…

Then I clicked on Filter… and switched to the Advanced Tab.

The Date Completed and Flag Completed fields were already set to “does not exist” which is what I want in order to show all tasks that haven’t got any start or due date.

Now I added the following three filters:

  • Start date – in the next 7 days
  • Start date – does not exist
  • Start date – on or before – today

The filter automatically recognises that I want to display all tasks for which any of the above are true.  This is confirmed by looking in the SQL tab at the DASL query:

(
    "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/810f0040" IS NULL   
          AND 
    "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x10910040" IS NULL 
          AND 
    (
          %next7days("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81040040")%
              OR 
          "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81040040" IS NULL 
              OR 
          "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81040040" > 'Today'
    )
)

You can copy and paste the above DASL query into the SQL tab to quickly set this view, but you will lose the ability to edit the view through the Advanced tab, so if you want to make any further adjustments do your editing in the Advanced tab.

If you have any suggestions to improve this further, please add a comment below to share.

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