Task List Export – Access, Project and Visio

It always amazes me how many little tid bits are hiding inside of SharePoint 2010 and this is another that I found when working with a task list.

If you have a task list you now have the option to export the list to the following formats: Access, Visio and Microsoft Project.

To do this simply go to the task list that you are interested in, click on list and then from the ‘Connect and Export’ group choose on one of the following options:

Create Visio Diagram

This will create for you a really cool data driven PivotDiagram consisting of three sheets: Task Status, Workload Distribution and Incomplete Tasks by Assigned.
You can then mess around with this but remember that Visio will not push your changes back to SharePoint. It does however allow you to see your tasks in a unique way

Open with Access

First of all you will get this prompt below which will ask you if you want to link the data or not, so you can have a two way sync between Access and SharePoint.

From here you can now play around with the list using Access 2010 and all the goodies that it offers like below:

Open Schedule

In this option you can open up the task list in Microsoft Project and play around with it in there which actually contains a few options that are quite useful, for starters you can now change tasks within Project 2010 and then have them updated in SharePoint 2010.

So here we have 3 little options that we can leverage out of the box in SharePoint 2010, who knows what else we will find

Tags: project, visio, word

Category: General