Viewing Google tasks in a browser

Google Tasks allows you to keep track of what you need to do. It’s a fairly basic task manager but because it is fully integrated into Gmail and your Google calendar can be a very useful application to use.

However, the problem can be finding it!

• Option 1 – In gmail, click on the downward arrow next to the ‘Mail’ link in the top left of your screen. In the dropdown menu you will have 3 options, Mail, Contacts and Tasks. Clicking on ‘Tasks’ will popup a small window in the bottom right of your browser. You can pop it out of Gmail by clicking the arrow in the top-right corner of the Tasks box. This will create a separate window for Tasks, functioning more like a freestanding app than a module in your mail tab.
• Option 2 – In your google calander, under ‘My Calendars’, click on ‘Tasks’ and your task list will popup in the right hand column.
• Option 3 – Now none of the options above produce a very ‘pretty’ task list. But Google has hidden away a number of options mainly dedicated to the mobile public, but which we can access through a standard desktop browser:
  • Point your browser to the iPhone/Android version – go to mail.google.com/tasks/iphone or mail.google.com/tasks/android and you will get a basic but nice looking tasks list as shown below:
  • My personal favourite is the canvas view. It shows you all your task lists in the left hand pane as well as having buttons which allows you to create sub-tasks and the like. Point your browser to mail.google.com/tasks/canvas.
  • Some of the other options include:
    • mail.google.com/tasks/m – a very basic text version of tasks.
    • mail.google.com/tasks/ig – iGoogle gadget version of tasks.

Notes

• Remember in all modern desktop web browsers you can drag out one of the tabs so that you can then have your Google tasks displayed on a separate part of the screen.