Task List Guru

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 18, 2011

Dextronet's Task List Guru is a free tool for creating and managing personal task lists. It can also manage small projects, but it's not a project management tool designed to keep teams in touch; it's a personal organizer designed to keep your life on track by helping you organize and prioritize lists of tasks and keep track of notes and other reminders. Its approach is both familiar and unique, thanks to an Explorer-like tree view and handy icons for quick visual identification.

Task List Guru's installation wizard includes a seven-step quick-start guide that does a fine job of summarizing the program's methods and features. Task List Guru is based around the to-do list tree, a hierarchical tree view for organizing task icons. Selecting a Task on the to-do list tree opens it in the Task view in the upper half of the main window, with any associated Notes displayed in the lower half. We started with Task List Guru by creating, naming, and saving a new database for our lists and notes. The next step was to add to-do lists and tasks via the program's wizards, which let us set due dates, type, priority, and status as well as add Reminders and Notes. By default, the program saves new tasks to the open to-do list, which in our case was our default list. However, you can easily create as many to-do lists as you need and add tasks and notes to them just as easily. The Add To-Do List includes a wide selection of colorful tree icons, covering everything from blogging to banking, with several size options. We could customize lists, icons, and other program features and set hot eys, change fonts and colors, and configure how the program behaves in the options. Task List Guru can also save free-standing notes called Memos.

Personal organizers come in more flavors than gourmet jellybeans, or so it seems from the many different approaches they take to organizing what you tell them to, which in the end is all they're capable of doing. A tool that's fast, easy, and even fun to use, like Task List Guru, makes personal organization less of a chore.

Publisher's Description

From Dextronet:

Task List Guru is a free task list organizer ideal for personal task management and small project management. You can organize not just tasks, but also task lists, notes and reminders. The free task manager has a hierarchical task list tree with icons that allows you to organize all your todo lists and notes in a structure with icons. You can choose from 48 different colorful icons - this makes using this organizer fun. When it comes to task management, Task List Guru allows you to specify Priority, Due Date, Type and notes for each task. One of the greatest features is the ability to drag & drop everything using mouse in order to reorder it. Easily reorder tasks and to-do lists with just one click. The program will remember your custom task order. Task List Guru is very easy to use and has clean and intuitive design.

What's new in this version: Version 3.056 includes multiple misc. fixes.