5 Ways to View and Organize Tasks in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams can be more than a place for meetings, messages, and file sharing. When you’re managing tasks in Teams, changing how those tasks are displayed can make it much easier to understand workload, priorities, progress, and upcoming deadlines.
Instead of scrolling through the same task board every time, you can organize your work based on what you actually need to know. You might want to see who has the most work assigned, which tasks are urgent, what still hasn’t been started, or what’s coming up on the calendar.
Here are five useful ways to view and organize tasks in Microsoft Teams.
1. Group Tasks by Assignee
When you need to understand who is responsible for what, group your tasks by Assigned to.
This reorganizes the board into columns for each person with assigned tasks, along with a separate area for tasks that have not yet been assigned.
It’s especially helpful when you’re managing a team project and want to quickly identify unassigned work or get a clearer picture of how tasks are distributed.
Keep in mind that a task assigned to multiple people can appear under each assignee.
2. Group Tasks by Progress
Another useful option is grouping tasks according to their current progress.
This separates tasks based on whether they:
- Have not started
- Are in progress
- Are completed
The progress view is particularly useful when you need a quick answer to a simple question: Where does the project stand right now?
Instead of opening individual tasks, you can quickly identify finished work and see what remains outstanding.
3. Group Tasks by Priority
Not every task deserves the same level of attention.
Tasks can be assigned a priority such as Low, Medium, Important, or Urgent. Organizing your board by priority makes it easier to identify which work needs attention first.
For a busy team with dozens of open tasks, this can provide a much clearer starting point than working through tasks simply because they happen to appear first on the board.
Priority is optional, but using it consistently can make the task board considerably more useful.
4. Use Charts for a Project-Level View
Sometimes you don’t need to see every task individually. You need the bigger picture.
The Charts view provides a visual overview of what’s happening across the project. It can help you see task status, how work is organized across buckets, priorities, and how tasks are distributed among members of the team.
This makes Charts especially useful when checking the overall health of a project rather than managing a single task.
You can still access individual task cards from this view, although they have less screen space than they do on the standard board.
5. Use Schedule View to See Tasks on a Calendar
The Schedule view takes a different approach by displaying tasks according to their dates.
A task with only a due date appears on that date. If you’ve also added a start date, the task can span the appropriate period on the calendar.
That makes Schedule view particularly helpful when timing matters. Instead of looking at a list of assignments, you can see how work fits together chronologically and better understand upcoming deadlines.
Which Microsoft Teams Task View Should You Use?
There isn’t one view that’s best for every situation.
Use Assigned to when responsibility matters. Use Progress when you’re checking project status. Use Priority when deciding what should be addressed first. Use Charts for a higher-level project overview, and use Schedule when you need to see how tasks relate to dates and deadlines.
The real advantage is being able to look at the same work from multiple perspectives without rebuilding your task list.
Watch the video above for a quick walkthrough of each option and see how changing your task view can make managing projects in Microsoft Teams easier.
Video Transcript: 5 Different Ways to View Tasks in Teams
Hello, it’s Cecilia from Virtuas. Today, we’re going to look at the different ways you can view your tasks in Microsoft Teams.
We have a birthday planning project with several tasks and tags. Everything is organized into buckets, and we’ve added assignments, due dates, and other task information.
The standard board is great when you’re working at the individual task level, but what if you want a better look at what’s happening across the entire project?
Group Tasks by Assignee
By default, the tasks are grouped into buckets. If you want to see who has the most work, or identify tasks that haven’t been assigned yet, you can change the grouping to Assigned to.
Any unassigned tasks are placed together in one column, while each person has a column containing their assigned tasks.
Some tasks may appear more than once if they’re assigned to multiple people. For example, if a task is assigned to Alex, Christine, and Deborah, it will appear in all three of their columns.
Group Tasks by Progress
You can also group tasks by Progress.
This lets you quickly see which tasks haven’t started, which tasks are currently in progress, and which tasks have been completed.
Group Tasks by Priority
Another option is grouping tasks by Priority.
Priority is optional, and the available levels are Low, Medium, Important, and Urgent.
This can help you decide where to focus first. You might start with urgent tasks, move on to important tasks, and then work through medium- and low-priority items.
Charts View
The Board isn’t the only way to view your project. You can also switch to Charts.
Charts provide a dashboard-style overview of what’s happening throughout the project. You can see task status, buckets, priorities, and the progress of work assigned to different members of the team.
Your individual task cards are still available, but they appear in a smaller area on the right side of the screen.
Schedule View
The final option is Schedule, which gives you a calendar view of your tasks.
If a task only has a due date, it appears on that particular day. If you’ve given the task both a start date and an end date, it stretches across those dates on the calendar.
A start date isn’t required, but adding one can give you a better visual representation of how long a task is expected to span.
That’s all for this video and this series. Hopefully, you’ve picked up some useful tips for digitally managing your tasks.
Thanks for watching!
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