Challenges to Import Outlook Tasks to Google

In my article, “Goodbye Exchange, Outlook & Blackberry — Welcome Google & Android”, I discuss the overall switch.  In this article, I discuss one area that doesn’t transition so smoothly: Tasks.

I have been using Outlook Tasks with Categories for about a decade.   My basic practice is to capture the task, priority, category(s), and detail notes, if any.  Once I finish a task, I mark it completed and hide it from view.  Most of the time, I would print these out and use it as a “scratch pad” for all the little jotted notes of things that need to get done.  I would also work the list as appropriate.

Google Tasks Relative Weaknesses to Outlook Tasks

Here are the list of features that I consider relatively weak to Outlook:

• No priority sorting
• No ability to have a task in multiple lists (I am using google list to be my analog to an outlook category).
• Limited control on reporting overall on tasks.

Importing Outlook Tasks

There does not appear to be any built-in tools to import tasks.  So here is what I did:

1. Sorted my Outlook Tasks by Category.
2. For each Outlook Category, I created a Google Task List.
3. Select all the subjects (task name) in Outlook for a single category and pasted it into Google Tasks.  It will intelligently crate a new tasks for every line item.
4. For each Outlook tasks that I had notes, I had to one-by-one cut-and-paste the notes into Google tasks notes.

This really wasn’t too bad.  Fortunately, I was not using any of the date tracking mechanisms as that would have been another field that I would have had to manually copy over.

Getting to your Google Tasks on Android

I am still evaluating two tools to create and manage tasks on my Nexus One Android 2.2 device:

1. GTasks
2. Google Tasks

Each look like they will work and I am satisfied that their synchronization mechanisms get the job done.  I’ll write more after some more use.

I must though mention that I really like the 3Banana Notes from https://catch.com.  The tagging mechanism is similar to Twitter.  Just add # to any string and you have tagged the note.  The mechanism is fast and makes it possible for a note or task to be tagged to multiple categories.  Also, the Android Widget is fast to add a new note/task.  But I elected to not go with it because I want to stay close to the Google interface and use the built-in task manager.