While working with any project, we need to manage the tasks for an individual developer. Whenever we talk about some tasks, there should be some predefined things to be managed like creating a task, assigning a task to a person, tracking completeness of the tasks, tracking the progress of the tasks and many more such things. This can be maintained manually by using an Excel sheet or some sort of text file. But if we are using SharePoint, then we have a special list template which helps individuals to maintain the tasks. Let’s see how a task list can be helpful in maintaining the tasks for any individual.
SharePoint provides a list template called Tasks List, using which an individual can manage their own or team members' tasks together. Using this tasks list template, the user can track the task status and completeness of the tasks. It has some nice functionality, like you can track what are the upcoming task and what are the pending task what other completed task and how much percentage of the task is completed we can create several views based on the status of the task based on the assigning of the task and many more facilities.
Step 1
Open the SharePoint site where you want to create the tasks lists. Click on the setting icon available on the top right of the page. Then, click on Site Content link as shown in the below figure.
Step 2
This will open up a Site Content Page. Here, you have to click on the "Add an App" link.
Step 3
Once you click on “add an app” link, it will open “add an app” new page. Here, search for the Tasks list template or you will have this template available on the page itself. Click on the Tasks list template icon.
Step 4
This will open up a new dialog box where you have to enter the name for your tasks list. Just enter the name and hit the Create button.
Step 5
And your task list with the given name will be now created and available on the Site Content Page.
Adding a new task in Tasks List
In order to add a new task in the tasks list, open the task list and click on “new task” link or else you can simply click on the “Tasks” tab from the ribbon and hit the “New Item” link as shown in the figure.
When you click on any of the links, it will open a new task form.
Let’s understand the meaning of each field available here.
- Task Name: This will be the name for your tasks such as “Create a Login Page”.
- Start Date: This will indicate your tasks start date. It will accept a valid date value only.
- Due Date: this will indicate your due date for the task. This will also accept a valid date value only.
- Assigned To: this is a people picker field, here you have to select the user to which you want to assign these tasks.
- % completed: this is a numeric field that accepts the number of the percentage for the task complete.
- Description: This will be a multiline text box which will contain your description of the given tasks.
- Predecessors: This will be the tasks which should be completed before you complete this task. I will be writing much in detail on this in the next article.
- Priority: this will be the priority for the task. You can choose any one among High, Normal and Low.
- Tasks Status: This will be a tasks current status. You can choose any one among Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Deferred, Waiting on someone else.
When we create a SharePoint tasks lists, it comes with some default views. If you want to learn more about the SharePoint views, you can refer to
Views in SharePoint article. In order to see the SharePoint list view, you can open the lists from SharePoint Site Content page.
Let’s open the tasks list that was created in previous steps.
Once the tasks list is opened, it will look like following,
Here following are default view created when we create the tasks list.
- All Tasks: This will be the default list view. This will display all the tasks without any filter.
- Calendar: This will also display all the tasks but in calendar format. If you want to learn more about calendar view, then you can refer to Calendar View in SharePoint.
- Completed: This view will list all the tasks which are completed. If the % Completed is 100 then it will consider as completed tasks and that will be displayed into this view.
- Gantt Chart: This view will list all the tasks in the Gantt chart format. You can read more about this view at Gantt View in SharePoint.
- Late Tasks: This view will list all the tasks for which the date value of the Due Date column is already passed. For example, if today is 4th April 2019, then it will list all the tasks which have Due Date less then 4th April 2019.
- My Tasks: This view will list all the task which is assigned to currently logged in user.
- Upcoming: This is opposite to the Late Tasks view; it will display all the upcoming tasks for which the Due Date column value is greater than today’s date.
These were default views available in SharePoint tasks list, but you can create any new view or update existing views as per requirement.
There are several benefits of using Tasks list in SharePoint. Few of them are listed below
- It helps an individual to track the tasks which are upcoming, or which are late.
- It has a calendar view and Gantt view which provide a graphical interface to give more information on the tasks.
- A project manager can track the tasks assigned to his team and track the status on it.
- We can create tasks and subtasks under any tasks (Subtasks will be covered in the next article)
- It has a timeline bar which gives more information on current tasks for the current month
- SharePoint Tasks can be integrated with Outlook and Project. See below snapshot for more details.
There are many more benefits which will be covered in the next article when we will see Tasks and Subtasks relationship.
Summary
In this article, we have explored most of the things related to SharePoint tasks list template. We have seen what tasks list is, how we can create it, what are the default fields available in it, what are the default views available in the SharePoint Tasks lists, and also how Tasks list can help an individual or project manager in managing the tasks. In the next article, we will see what subtasks in tasks list are and how we can manage it, along with that we will also go in detail on timeline graph available in Tasks list view page.
As usual, any questions, feedback, suggestions are most welcome. Do comment if you have any questions.