Dec 30, 2010<\/p>\n
If you have hundreds of tasks in your task list, and you don’t know why, here’s an explanation—and a new way to fix it.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/michaellinenberger.com\/images\/ToDoBar.jpg\" "\\"To-Do")
Adding a flag to a mail item in Outlook 2007\/10 or 2011 creates a task-like entry called a flagged-mail task in your task list. A somewhat unfortunate side effect of this is that if you have used flags on mail in the past, and then more recently decided to start using the task system, your task system will appear overloaded with these. These accumulate even if the mail is stored away in older folders, even from years ago.<\/p>\n
Clearly this is not something you want, given how old these items are, and if you have a lot of them it can make the task list almost unusable. So you will want to clean this up by clearing those flags.<\/p>\n
You can clear these one at a time just by clicking each flag. Or you can SHIFT-select a number of the messages in the task list at once, right-click the flag, and choose Clear Flag (in Windows if you select more than one, the right-click choice will be Clear Flag\/Delete Task\u2014it leads to the same outcome). This operation preserves the original mail and removes the item from the task list, so it is just what you want. If the old mail still has meaning to you, consider applying a color category to that mail as a way to mark it for later search.<\/p>\n
If you have hundreds of these scattered among hundreds of real tasks, then scrolling and selecting these can be hard to do. So better is to group all the flagged-mail tasks together and clear the flag on all of them at once, in bulk. In the 2nd. Edition of my Outlook book, I showed one way to clean those up. Here is another way that is a bit easier and more universally applicable. It also works with Outlook Mac 2011. This will appear in the book’s 3rd. edition, due out in early 2011.<\/p>\n
How to Do a Bulk Flagged-Mail Task Cleanup:<\/p>\n
Those steps will clear out your old unwanted flagged-mail tasks from you task lists, but will retain the original e-mail. It will also remove the flags from all those mail items in whatever mail folder they are stored in.<\/p>\n
Windows users who upgraded from Outlook 2003 will most-likely find that all that mail has a corresponding color category still assigned. Decide if you want to remove that as well.<\/p>\n
And speaking of categories, if you are afraid of not having your previously flagged mail marked in any way, in step 4 above while you have all that mail selected, consider assigning an Outlook category (like Red) to all that mail so you can still find it easily.<\/p>\n
Some cautions: do not simply delete these items using the DELETE key, since that will delete the corresponding e-mails. And do not select any of the true tasks during step 3, as those really will be deleted. And finally, remember, if you have been purposely creating flagged-mail tasks for a while before doing this, do not clear those out.<\/p>\n
One other tip. If you would rather not remove <\/em>all the flags, but just want to filter <\/em>them out of the To-Do Bar task list, see this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dec 30, 2010 If you have hundreds of tasks in your task list, and you don’t know why, here’s an explanation—and a new way to fix it. Adding a flag to a mail item in Outlook 2007\/10 or 2011 creates … Continue reading