By my own admission I am NOT a Microsoft Excel expert.  I know enough about the application to make me dangerous. 

I use Excel pretty extensively in my day to day work activities, and in my continuing effort to streamline my day I decided that I needed to add some functionality to my project management spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet has really become my single point of information for all of the projects that I work on and I wanted to enhance it even further by integrating it with Outlook.

The integration that I had in mind was to read through the TASKs that I have detailed in my Excel worksheet and IF there was a due date to create a task for me in Outlook using this date as the due date and various other information from the spreadsheet as my subject.   I certainly didn’t have the expertise needed to complete this task on my own so I headed out on the Internet to find a solution.

Google is a great thing! Within a matter of minutes I had any number of resources available to me from my search terms about Creating Outlook Tasks from Excel.   Many of them included quoted scripts that gave me a head-start on what I wanted to do but ultimately none of them quite met my specific criteria.  I decided what I should probably do is simply pose the question to the experts in some of the forums that Google was pointing me to.

Now keep in mind that your mileage may vary at these sites.  I’m simply telling you of my experience.  I’m sure with the thousands and thousands of posts that each of these sites have that either would be a good place to get solutions.

I went to http://www.excelforum.com/to start with.    This particular site had helped me a number of months prior with a question I had about populating a cell with a date when I clicked on a check-box.  Within a matter of hours I was up and running with the script that I needed to perform this task.  My Outlook task on the other hand did not get the same type of response.   I was provided with virtually the same code that I had found doing Google searches and when it came to customizing that code my post sat unanswered.

A few weeks later I decided that I would try to reinvigorate the project and again get on my trek to higher productivity.  I Googled again and this time I found a post at http://www.ozgrid.com/forums-  It actually had a few Google hits that led me to believe there were people there that knew exactly what I was wanting to do.  I can tell you that on this site you need to heed the warnings of reading the RULES. And that the rules are Strictly enforced.  You have plenty of opportunity because they are part of the main page, you hear about it in the registration, and even when you are ready to post.

I joined the ozgrid site which is like most vBulletinsites.  You enter your login information, they send you an email, you confirm it and you are able to then login.  Easy enough – again with much encouraging about reading the rules which are strictly enforced.   I composed that first post… describing what I wanted to do, choosing my keywords specifically to meet the rules, including a screenshot of an example spreadsheet, clicked the review button was warned again about the rules, everything looked great so I decided to POST.   Through the magic of the Internet my help request was there for thousands to see and I hoped that soon someone here would be able to provide me with the magic script that would do what I needed or at least help me figure out what it was that I needed to do.  I’d already struck out on the Excelforum so I was hoping for something positive.

I went back to ozgrid.com the next day, logged in and was met with a message that I was banned because I had posted my request in the wrong forum and that my ban would be in effect until the 14th of December.  I thought there must be a mistake… I checked the forums that were available and the only thing I could think of is that instead of the Generic Excel folder I should have posted my Outlook Task questions in the Excel Email folder… which I had considered but didn’t because technically it was not an Email question.  Long story short… my assumption was the case, and when I made inquiry about it using the site’s Contact form let’s just say I now have a lifetime ban because I had a differing opinion than the forum owner on what was email particularly since he mentioned all of the other Microsoft Office applications by name except Outlook.  

Interesting thing about the Internet… It isn’t a democracy.  Site owners can run their sites however they want to run them.

So it was back to the Excelforum for me.  Perhaps after this many weeks someone might be able to help.   I’d pieced together some snippets of what I wanted to do and sure enough after a few email exchanges, and some additional Googling, I now have a complete resolution to my problem.  I can click a button in my Excel worksheet, it checks to see if the tasks had already been added to Outlook and if not determines the column the button is in and begins processing the due dates in that column creating Outlook tasks for each one of them.  (I am going to share a few of these Excel scripts in future postings for those that might be interested.)

I guess the moral of the story here is to not give up.  I knew there must be a way to do what I wanted and even though it was painful, frustrating and not the most user friendly at times, there are a ton of Internet resources that are willing to help, you just have to find the ones that will work best for you.  I learned so much in working through the creation of this script and a big thanks should go out to all of those on the Excelforum that offered that help and assistance.

As I stated above, you may have entirely different experiences at the sites that I mention.