Hello, it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time I'm going to share a quick tip with you
that you can use to create tasks from posts in Teams.
This feature means that everything posted in a private chat or a channel post
can be turned into a task
and that task then gets added to Tasks in Teams and the Planner app.
This is a real time saver because it means you can capture tasks quickly based on a conversation,
and everyone in the team can see the new task.
So in this video i'm going to show you how to create the task,
how to assign it to someone in your team, and then how to edit it afterwards
all from inside the Teams app.
For this demo I'm using the Teams desktop app on Windows
but this will work just the same on Mac and in the browser.
In this scenario, we're in the marketing team
and we're working on making a video together
and Sarah says she thinks we should create a storyboard for the video
and that she'll take care of it.
She's @mentioned me which is why my name appears in red
and I reply and say that's a really good idea.
Now I can create a task based on that post...
...by going to the original post and choosing the ellipsis,
then "more actions" and then "create task".
A task window appears and it uses the text from Sarah's post as the title.
I'm just going to change that to "create storyboards".
The next thing I want to do is choose where to create that task
and I can do that from this "create in" list here.
I can create a task in my own task list
or a plan that's already been added to one of my teams.
If I go to "create in", I can see it's already set to "tasks".
That's my own personal task list.
And I want to assign this task to Sarah,
so I drop the "create in" list down and now I can see "marketing", which is my team
and then I can expand that
and it shows me all the plans attached to that team.
And here I have "school launch" and "video campaign".
If you don't see your team plans listed here and you just see tasks...
...then you need to add the plans to a Teams channel first
and I'll show you how to do that at the end of this video.
I want to add this new task to the "video campaign" plan
so I just choose that from the list
and once I've chosen the plan, the task window changes.
It adds drop downs for progress and also buckets which it pulls from Planner.
So I'm going to leave progress as it is because there's been no progress
but I am going to choose from the list of existing buckets.
I've got three here: "pre-production", "production" and "post-production".
And I'm going to drop this new task into "pre-production".
I can also add a priority and I'm going to change this to "important",
then I'm going to set a due date with the picker here
and i'll choose Thursday the 22nd.
To assign the task to Sarah I go to the "assign" drop down and start typing Sarah's name
and it will make suggestions based on what I type
and I could choose more than one person here if I needed to.
This checkbox here is to post a reply to the original post
so I'll leave that checked and show you what that looks like in a minute
and why it's useful.
Once I'm happy that the task is ready I just choose "add task"
and the task gets added to the plan.
Sarah will receive a Teams notification letting her know that I assigned her a task
and it will take me back to the post
and I can see the reply there,
and this is good because it means Sarah and the rest of the team...
...will also see that a task has been created.
Now anyone in the team can go in and see the details of the task
by choosing "view details".
And this is why replying to the original post is a good idea.
If you choose this it will open up the Tasks by Planner and To Do app if you have it installed already.
If you don't it will just prompt you to install it - and it's one click to get it done.
So now I'm looking at the task in the Tasks app in Teams
and from the tasks window I can change any of the details I already set,
like buckets, priority and due date,
but now I can also add a checklist.
Checklists are a way of dividing up the task into steps.
I'm going to add three steps to this checklist.
I'm going to keep "show on card" checked
because that will show me this checklist on the board view,
a useful cue to quickly see how much work is left to be done.
And if I want to close the task I just hit x and it takes me back to the tasks app.
Notice that all this time I haven't left Teams at all.
I'm doing everything from inside of the Teams app.
Now I'm seeing all the "video campaign" tasks in a list view.
I can switch to Board view and see all the tasks as cards.
Now you can see that checklist of my "create storyboard" tasks.
I can see the task on a calendar in "schedule" view,
and my storyboard task had a due date of Thursday the 22nd
so if I switch to Week view and move forward a week, there's my storyboard task.
And if I wanted to change the due date
I can just drag and drop it onto a new date
and so I'm going to give Sarah an extra day here and move her task to the 23rd.
And finally, to assign tasks to people in your Planner plans in the way I've just shown you,
you need to add them to Teams first.
So now let me show you how to do that.
Just go to the channel that you want to see the plan in.
In this case I'm in the Campaign channel.
Then hit the plus button over here
then find the tasks app
- it's usually in the top left hand corner
but if you can't see it, just type "tasks" in the search bar.
When you add the tasks app you can create a new plan
or you can use an existing one
and in this case I'm going to use an existing one from the marketing team
called "video campaign".
I drop down this list and I choose "video campaign"
and now that will be added as a tab.
Now when I assign tasks, I'll always see that "video campaign" plan as an option.
Okay so that's your lot for this time.
Thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time.
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