Recurring Tasks in Outlook 2007

Recurring tasks can occur on a daily, twice a week, weekly, monthly, the second Monday of the month, yearly, and four times a year (Olympics and presidential elections) basis.

To make a task recur, do the following steps from the open Task window:

1. Click "Recurrence."

2. Select the frequency of the recurrence pattern (Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly).

3. Complete the "Recurrence pattern" based on the task recurrence preferences.

4. Select "Regenerate new task," if you want a new task to appear as soon as you mark the task complete.

5. Click "OK" to close the Task Recurrence window.

"Regenerate new task" means the next task won't appear until you've marked the previous as complete. For example, you create a new task to remind you to send a status report to the boss every Friday. If you complete the task Thursday and mark it as complete, the next one appears even though you finished the report one day early.

On the other hand, if you want to create a task to remind you to exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you want a reminder on Wednesday even though you didn't exercise on Monday, do not select "Regenerate new task."

Occasionally, you can skip an occurrence of a recurring task. For a recurring task for completing a report occurs once a week, for example. You might need to cancel an occurrence because of a holiday. In this case, you don't want to delete all of the occurrences, just one. To delete a recurring task occurrence, take the following steps:

1. Open the recurrence you want to skip.

2. Click "Skip Recurrence" from the "Task" tab in the "Options" group.

3. "Click "Remove Recurrence."

Some tasks don't last forever, so delete them and keep your task list free of clutter. Here are the steps to end a recurring task:

1. Open the recurring task.

2. Click "Recurrence" from the "Task" tab in the "Options" group.

3. "Click "Remove Recurrence."

That task is now one less thing to worry about.