rblog

I have used Outlook tasks to run my work life for years - and am very happy wih the system that I have. However, it requires a fairly customized setting on the "Task Settings" tab for me to see what I want. Note: the view that I am using is the familiar Day/Week/Month calendar view that shows the tasks in the "Task Pad".

The tasks that I want to see are those that are due today or that I completed today (so that I can get the satisfaction of coming close to "crossing off everything on my list"). I don't want the completed ones to go away immediately, as that detracts from my sense of satisfaction. But this complicates the Filter.

Recently I changed to a new email system and had to recreate the filter - it was a bit of a pain, so I am posting it here so that I can read it in the future.

The strange query that works in Outlook 2003 (and requires direct SQL) is:
( %today("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/810f0040")% OR

("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/811c000b" = 0 AND "http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81050040" <= 'today') OR

(("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/811c000b" = 0) AND ("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/81050040" IS NULL)) )

The way it works (for my own future) is that the fields are:
DueDate = 81050040
Complete = 811c000b, No = 0
Date Completed = 810f0040

And, translating this we have:
(1) Date Completed = today
(2) Not complete and due today (or in the past)
(3) Not complete and no due date

The astute reader may notice that I used two different syntaxes for determining if a date is today. It turns out that for the DueDate, you must use " = 'today' ", but for DateCompleted, you must use %today()%. Very very odd. And yes, I know that I could make the expression a little more compact, but I am going with easier readability.

So, we have what we want...

Whew!