Hello,



could anyone please help me with a problem, I have during my daily work with Outlook 2010 task management?

I am making intensive use of the task module of Outlook in order to keep track of my daily activities at work. Here I also use the possibility of syncing my ToDos with my mobile phone.
This synchronization is done by use of the Exchange server of the company I’m working for. The smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy S4 and it uses the Nitrodesk „TouchDown“ application for managing synchronized items (ToDos, calendar, contacts, mail, notes).
Anyway, in my opinion, my question is basically about the PC-/desktop-part, so about MS Outlook 2010.

Normally, my tasks are going along with quite simple text based notes, mainly containing numbers, dates, phone numbers, text and/or bullet points.

Now, during my daily work, it often happens that complete notes of my Outlook ToDos will be unwillingly “reformatted”. The contained text will be displayed in a completely different layout, there may be sentences reformatted to headers in bold or colored style, line spacing will be changed and even mail addresses and/or phone numbers might appear reformatted to headers or even hyperlinks etc.

Here is a simple example of such unintended „reformatting“ – sorry, the text is in German language, but, anyway, you should be able to see what I mean.

Task with the original text/note


Task with „reformatted“ text/note


The only way to restore the original format of my text (well, at least almost) is to delete the "automatically" applied style sheet. But with the big number of tasks that I manage with Outlook, this is really a painful and annoying work.

And even after having deleted the unwanted style sheet, in most cases, the text will not be restored to its original format, but to a plain text without any formatting.

Deletion of the applied style sheet in order to restore the former format


In the meantime, I already tried to delete all the existing style sheets (formatting templates) in the Outlook catalog of style sheets, except the „standard“ one. But this had no positive effect.

Style sheets before deletion


Remaining style sheets after deletion


To me, it is completely uncomprehensible how Outlook comes to this „life of its own“ and how I could avoid it in future. Perhaps, it might even be related to any synchronizing activities, but, honestly, I think that this is not too likely as „TouchDown“ not even works with any style sheets and, furthermore, there are also examples for Outlook tasks that never get „reformatted“ during synchronization (I don’t know why). What is more, the unwanted reformatting mostly matches one of the formerly existing style sheets of the Outlook catalog of style sheets.

Does anyone of you have a good idea how I could avoid the above mentioned effects in order to keep my ToDo-notes in their original format?

Thanks a lot in advance for helping!

I have a very similar problem. When I edit the notes for contacts from my Samsung Galaxy S4 in the TouchDown app, it applies unwanted formatting automatically which messes up my notes.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a solution for this problem until now.
I believe that this unwanted formatting only happens, when working with tasks or notes on the Galaxy (with TouchDown) and then syncing it to the Exchange server and Outlook.
The other way round (working in Outlook and syncing to the mobile doesn't seem to mess up the tasks... but I am not 100% sure.

deb10042, you are correct. The problem only occurs when editing the notes on the Galaxy S4 and then viewing them in Outlook.

That is the problem, but I still don't have a solution since I need to be able to edit and view these from both the phone and from Outlook. (not just one way)

Yes, me too!
But I also found outthat several of my tasks don't get reformatted, no matter if they are edited and rescheduled on the PC or on the Galaxy. For the others, I always start again and again, formatting them back to their original layout.
This is a really annoying "feature", but I fear, we won't find the reason, as for a long time, nobody else answered