Please help me! Recently, at my job, we switched from using Lotus
Organizer, to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 (SP2). I really like it,
overall, but I’m having a lot of trouble with the “Tasks� portion of it.
Under the “Current View� of “Simple List,� I typed in about 30 Tasks that I
need to get done. I didn’t specify a category then, so they all went under
the category of “none.� By right clicking on the “Categories: (none) (30
items),� and selecting “Categories,� “Master Category List,� I was able to
type in the categories that I wanted to use. When I clicked “Ok,� the
categories appeared under the Available Categories heading. I checked the
boxes in front of them, and clicked “Ok,� but now ALL of the tasks appeared
in EACH of the categories! Talk about duplication of effort! Now, if I
delete a task in one of the categories, it is deleted in all of the
categories! If I try to drag a task to a different category, it is copied
there, but when I go to delete the old one, they both get deleted! What’s
up with this? It’s frustrating!

So, I added a field of “Categories,� after the Subject, so that after I type
the subject on the “Click here to add a new Task,� I tab over to the
“Categories.� There should be a drop down list of the categories that I
selected, so that I can put the new Task into one of the existing categories,
rather than my having to type it each time. If I don’t type it exactly as I
did before, it puts the new task into a “new� category, which is really just
a misspelled existing category! Again, very frustrating! If I delete a
single task under a category, the category heading vanishes! Again,
frustrating! I want the category headings to stay displayed, so that I can
drag and drop tasks into different categories.

I’d say that this part of Outlook definitely needs some work. I also
cannot drag and drop the Category headings, to rearrange the list. If I do,
the tasks in the Category being dragged, are ADDED to the other Category!
Then, if I delete either of the duplicated Tasks, they both get deleted!!!
That’s what happened to all of the 30 tasks that I initially typed in. Now
I have to retype them. Again, very, very frustrating!