How to create Task from a message in Teams (Out of the Box version)

I can see Create Task has appeared in Teams Public Preview! This new feature makes it really easy to turn conversation into tasks in your personal To Do or to Team Planner. This saves the trouble of having to activate it yourself and especially the need to do copy-paste to get message contents to Tasks. Let’s take a look how it works!

You start by choosing the … menu for a channel or chat message and in More Actions you can see Create task. I noticed that the first time I clicked on Create task it took a while (less than a minute but more than 10 seconds) before the actual task dialogue was ready. On following uses it was quick. This has most likely to do with looking though all planners the user has access to

When you have clicked on Create task you get a dialogue where

• you can see message subject in Task title
• message contents in Notes along with date & user info
• You can choose where you create the task (To Do or Planner)
• Priority (default: medium)
• Due date for the task (default: empty)

When you click the arrow next to Create in Tasks you get a dropdown

From there you can see all your To Do lists and all teams with Planners. When you move cursor on top of the team name you get to see the little arrow (too little to my UX taste) where you can expand the team to show planners.

In the list we can see every possible Planner in the team along with the channel information. Just like in Tasks by Planner and To Do application.

Looking a another team in example for more clear view:

Choosing Platform Company / HR / Training requests I get to set more options

In this phase this is just like adding a task to planner. With the small highlight: Post a reply about this task that tells people you have added this to Planner.

The reply shows under the original message where you clicked … menu.

View details takes me to Tasks application and opens the task on default.

If I had been adding that to my personal Tasks (To Do) instead it would be really easy: just hit Add Task and it goes to your default To Do list.

Even if you change the list (testing in this case) the dialogue remains simple and quick.

When adding a task to To Do the original message doesn’t get a reply – because it is a personal task.

When adding a message from a chat the link to that message is added to the task

You can also add chat messages to Planner and post a reply about that to the chat. Tasks added to Planner from private chats also contain the link to the chat message but it doesn’t mean people can join the conversation.

Adding tasks seems to be available to almost all chats: including meeting chats (works ✅) and those you have with bots. However creating a task from an bot posted message confuses the feature a bit – the result is that nothing is prefilled. This also happens with Power Virtual Agent and Flow bot messages.

Conclusion

Ability to create tasks from messages in a Out of the Box fashion is a great addition to Teams. It may not be too visible to users without training or awareness rising since it is hidden behind More Actions menu. The feature is simple and a very good way to turn conversations into tasks you and your team can take action on in a managed way. Without having to copy-paste any data. I know I will be using this one a lot.

If you have lots of Planners and teams then you will be choosing the planner from a long list. If you have just a board or two where you frequently add those tasks then you might want to create your own custom action that adds the info directly to the right Planner and to the right bucket.

You can read more about that Create new action from my earlier blog post!