Announced at Ignite 2022, the integration of Microsoft Planner with Viva Goals is now available. This capability enables you to view your teams' Planner tasks and update the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in Viva Goals that relate to your Planner work. You can automatically track your team's progress towards your high-level key results based on the completion of day-to-day tasks in Planner.

For more information about Viva Goals, check out the Make Your Goals a Reality with OKRs and New Capabilities from Microsoft Viva Goals and 4 goal-setting trends for 2023 and how Microsoft Viva Goals can help articles. 

We’re excited to share that the Recurring Tasks and Grid features have now launched in Planner!  

Recurring Tasks 

You can reduce extra work by easily setting up automatic repeating tasks for daily, weekly, or monthly recurrence – and many other interval options – with custom repeat settings. This feature was highly requested by our users, and we greatly appreciate the feedback!

Some examples where this may come in handy include: 

• Monthly report 
• Weekly progress review 
• Daily scrum meeting 
• Quarterly Planning 
• Yearly Review and Planning 

Specify task recurrence 

1. In Board view, select the task card to view its Details panel.  
2. Set task timing parameters using the Start date and Due date fields.  
3. Select the adjacent Repeat field to open the Repeat menu and choose a recurrence interval: Daily, Weekdays (M-F), Weekly, Monthly or Yearly.  
4. Optionally select Custom to open the Custom repeat pane. Explore and select from a range of options, including Day/Week/Month/Year, specific Weekdays, specific Month date, and Yearly due date, etc. 

FAQ: 

Q: I don’t see all the future occurrences of my task, is this normal? 

A: Yes! You will only have one active occurrence of a task at any point of time. The next occurrence will be created once the current one is marked as complete. If you wish to see future occurrences, you can navigate to the Schedule view to see project future tasks.  

Q: What happens if I remove the due date on a task? 

A: Your task will no longer be recurring.  

Q: What happens if I delete the active recurring task? 

A: You will be asked whether you want to delete just the active task or all future tasks in the series as well. 

Read up more on the feature here: Recurring tasks in Planner - Microsoft Support 

Grid View 

You can view your tasks in a convenient list using the new Grid view. This view enhances the way you interact with and understand the tasks that make up your plan, allowing you to easily add new tasks, make quick edits, and see more details about each item without the need to open individual task details. 

The Grid view is available within any plan as well as the Assigned to Me tab, which gives you a single place to view all tasks that are assigned to you across all of your plans. 

To get to the Grid view, simply select Grid at the top of your plan or Assigned to Me view. Here you can:

• Click on any cell to change its value 
• Select Add new task at the bottom of the grid to input information and hit Enter to create the task 

• Check the circle to the left of any task to mark it complete 
• Select Filter in the top right corner to filter by keyword, due date, priority, progress, labels, bucket, or assignment.  
• Select the Open Details button on a task’s title cell to open the task details pane and see more information about any task 
• Right-click or select the More Options button to perform other actions on a task, such as delete and copy link  

We'd love to hear your thoughts on other ways we can help you and your team organize and stay on top of work in Planner. Please feel free to post a comment below or submit any feedback directly through our feedback portal. And keep visiting our Tech Community Blog for all the latest Planner news. 

Happy Ignite! The upcoming new capabilities for Microsoft Planner focus on integration, which is key in keeping the flow of work going and helping you and your team to be more productive. We are pleased to announce the following.

Align work to key organizational priorities

The Viva Goals team announced on September 22, 2022 a new integration with both Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project. Viva Goals will help your teams align your work to your organization's strategic priorities through Objective and Key Results (OKRs) while increasing visibility across projects for stakeholders.

New application permission capabilities for the Planner APIs

Two enhancements that are designed to make it easier than ever to work on tasks in your organization will be available next month. The first, Business Scenario capabilities, allows integrations with external sources so those external inputs can be represented as tasks for the appropriate team. As an example, you might build an app to listen for warning events from machine sensors that monitor for machine failure signs and then create a task as a result. Application permissions for existing Planner API capabilities is the second enhancement. With this feature, you can compile a daily report of completed vs. not completed tasks on a specific team. Read more about these new additions to the Planner API capabilities.

Watch the Ignite 2022 on-demand session, Enhance a new way of work with Microsoft 365.

We’re back with the second post in our blog series about task management tips for beginners. Our first post takes you on a high-level tour of Microsoft Planner and tips for effectively managing your team plans. Today’s post covers all the other apps and integrations in Microsoft’s task management ecosystem, including Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Loop.

Every app in this blog is available as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription—except Project, which you’ll need to purchase separately.

To Do: tips for taking control of your individual tasks

Whereas Planner is for team tasks, To Do is your go-to Microsoft 365 app for individual work and personal tasks. But it’s much more than a simple to-do list: the app helps you prioritize what’s most important so that you’re in control of your tasks—and not the other way around.

• My Day: At its core, To Do is a set of lists, the most powerful of which is My Day. Your My Day list streamlines competing tasks so you can zero-in on what’s most important today. You can manually add tasks to My Day, import tasks from other To Do lists, or—and this is where the magic happens—select the lightbulb icon for task suggestions. Those suggestions come from other lists and are based on task due dates, helping you consolidate what’s immediately important in one list. The My Day list resets each day, so anything you don’t finish today will reappear tomorrow.
• Hashtags: Hashtags in To Do act a lot like hashtags on social media, helping you quickly find similar tasks across different lists. Consider using hashtags like #travel to plan multiple upcoming trips—one in your “Friends” list and the other in your “Family” list—or for the name of a work project that affects different departments. You can use hashtags in the task name, steps, or notes field and quickly find any instance by typing it in the Search bar.
• Assigned to you: If you and your teams use Planner, all your individually assigned tasks will also appear in the “Assigned to you” list in To Do. That list syncs to Planner and vice versa, so you can actively manage your assignments in either app.

To Do is available as a desktop app, on your favorite web browser, across all iOS and Android mobile devices, and, as you’ll read about soon, in Outlook.

Project: tips for managing projects large and small

You don’t need formal project management training to use Project. The reimagined Project for the web was built under the assumption that everyone manages projects—even if it’s not in their job description. Project is well-known for its Gantt chart and dynamic scheduling engine, but there are other tools that help beginners effectively manage projects of any size. Note, the following tips only apply to Project for the web. The UI and instructions for Project Online and the desktop client may vary. 

• Multiple views: The famous Gantt chart view in Project is now joined by two more views—Grid and Board—giving you the flexibility to work the way you want. The Grid view presents all your project tasks in a table, with the option to add whichever detail columns you’d like. If you’re a Planner user, the Board view will look very familiar, with each task presented as a card and organized into buckets. Finally, the Timeline view—that’s the Gantt chart—sets your tasks as bars on a timeline, helping you visualize task start dates, finish dates, and duration throughout the lifetime of a project. All three views are also available in Teams and sync in real-time, so you can flip between each as the project calls for different management styles.

• Subtasks: Subtasks let you break complex Project phases into a bunch of smaller, more manageable tasks. Once you’ve determined your project phases and their subtasks, add them all as tasks to Project—the subtasks should go under their associated phases—select the subtask ellipses, and choose “Make subtask.” This will indent each subtask under the phase (or parent task), giving you a visual cue in the Grid and Timeline views of the task hierarchy. (Note, you cannot add subtasks from the Board view.) Project automatically completes the parent task once all its subtasks are finished, and you can always promote subtasks to parent tasks (or create subtasks under other subtasks) as your project evolves. 
• Dependent tasks: Like subtasks, dependent tasks help ensure every step in a process gets completed. The difference is, subtasks can start at any time and, from a Project perspective, are all the same priority. Conversely, dependent tasks must start after their parent task (or predecessor) is completed, and there is a clear order of when each task must be done. When you add a dependent task—you can do this in the Grid and Timeline views by selecting the task information icon; in the Timeline view by dragging the connector between two task bars; and, in the Board view by selecting the task itself—Project automatically sets its start date for one day after its predecessor. If you need to update the start date, finish date, or duration of the predecessor, the dynamic scheduling engine automatically changes the dependent task details accordingly.

Outlook: tips for pairing your emails with To Do

To Do serves as the main tasks hub in Outlook for the web (and in preview in Outlook for Windows), helping you convert email messages into tasks and tracking those action items in a dedicated To Do pane. When coupled with Cortana, task management in Outlook for the web becomes even easier.

• Flagged email: Flagged emails have long helped Outlook users prioritize their inbox; now, those same flagged messages are also added as To Do tasks in Outlook for the web. First, navigate to “Settings” in To Do and turn on the “Flagged email” list. Then, to flag an email, select the flag icon that appears when you hover your cursor over an email in Outlook for the web. Flagged emails will now appear as tasks in To Do, where you can edit them, add them to My Day, and open the original email. You can also mark the task as important by selecting the star icon, which will add that task to your “Important” list in To Do. Just note, if you delete a flagged email, the associated task will disappear from To Do too.

• Create tasks from email content: You can also create a To Do task based on the contents of an email message. In Outlook for the web, select the text that you’d like to convert to a task and choose the resulting checkmark (the To Do icon). Your new task will automatically open in the To Do pane to the right of your email, where you can quickly edit it. Select “Manage all tasks” at the bottom for more editing options. Unlike flagged emails, tasks created based on the contents of an email message are not lost if the original email is deleted.
• Cortana: Cortana can also help you create, manage, and add reminders and tasks to your To Do lists. But first, you’ll need to add your Outlook or Microsoft 365 account as a connected service to Cortana. (Select the “Cortana” hyperlink to learn how.) Then, it’s as simple as opening Cortana and saying or typing, “Create a list.” Cortana will ask what you want to call the list and the items you want to add. When you’re finished, Cortana will automatically save your changes, which can be edited in To Do at any time on any device.

Office: tips for assigning tasks in the flow of your work in documents

Tasks happen everywhere—which is especially inconvenient if you’re in the middle of something. But if you’re working in Word or Excel for the web, you can capture those tasks in the moment using @mentions.

• @mentions: In Word or Excel for the web, you can use @mentions to assign and track tasks. To start, @mention the person (or people) in a comment who you’d like to assign the task. This will bring up the option to assign that comment as a task. Select the “Assign to” checkbox and post your comment. The assignee will receive an email notification about the task and can officially complete it by checking the “Resolve task” circle in the comment. Like regular comments, task assignments from @mentions can be reopened once resolved and deleted outright. You can also reassign the task by using an @mention in the comment response and selecting the “Reassign to” checkbox. 

Task assignments from @mentions are currently only available in Word and Excel for the web.

Teams: tips for streamlining frontline worker tasks

If you read our blog for Planner beginners, you already know about some of the task management features in Teams, like create tasks from messages. But the one we didn’t mention is task publishing. If you’re in retail, healthcare, manufacturing—any industry with a large, disperse frontline workforce—task publishing can help you streamline task management across your workforce. As a leader, you can create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to targeted frontline locations like stores, clinics, or factories. After tasks are assigned, frontline workers see a simple list of their task assignments in Teams, while corporate has full visibility into task progress across all locations. Setting up the feature takes a little time, so we suggest reading our support article for details.

Loop: tips for connecting tasks across apps

Hybrid and asynchronous ways of working mean people need a more fluid way to create and maintain context as they collaborate with their team. Loop was developed to achieve just that. The solution has three elements—Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces—and the first components for Teams chat were just released in November, including task lists. The Loop task list component appears as a table in your Teams chat, with columns for the task name, assignee, and due date. To add one, select the Loop icon at the bottom of your Teams chat, then choose “Task list.”

Anyone in the chat can edit the task list table, and task assignees receive an Outlook notification that also contains the component. Here’s the best part: no matter when or where you edit the table—today, next week, in the Teams chat, in Outlook—your changes replicate instantly across all endpoints. This means you can manage Loop tasks lists in your preferred app and know that it’s always current. Loop task lists come with Version History too, so you can easily recover older content.

Our tasks webpage has even more information about managing to-dos across Microsoft. And if you’re looking to connect with other task managers and stay current on all the latest Planner and task management news, bookmark our Planner Tech Community site.

A new year is the perfect time to try new things: new hobbies, new foods, and, if 2021 felt like a disorganized blur, a new way to manage your tasks. To kick off 2022, we’ve pulled together some helpful Microsoft Planner tips for beginners.

If you’re new to Planner, study the screenshots below for a minute. The one on the left shows a typical Planner plan in the Board view, where each task is represented as a card and organized into columns, or Buckets. Selecting a card brings up a more detailed view of that task, shown on the right. Depending on the task details you add, Planner does some really cool stuff—stuff that all Planner beginners should know about. We’ll touch on other Planner views, like Charts, in this blog too. But our main focus is working within a plan like the one below.

Tips for managing tasks

Each task in Planner is full of optional details, as you can see above. The key word there is “optional”: the only task detail you must enter is a name, which, if you did that for all your tasks, would turn Planner into a very simple task list. And if that’s all you need, great! But we’d recommend adding a few more details to really get the most out of Planner.

• Due date: Beyond the obvious reason that most tasks have a deadline, the Due date field also informs filtering options, the Charts view, and notifications—all of which we’ll discuss shortly. Of all the optional task details, the Due date is probably the most important.
• Progress: There are three options for Progress—Not started, In progress, and Completed—which means you’ll likely update it twice: once when you start a task (In progress) and again when you finish it (Completed).
• Priority: The Priority field has options for Low, Medium, Important, and Urgent. But unlike Due date and Progress, which rarely fluctuate (ideally), the Priority field can be more fluid. A task priority can go from Medium to Important and then down to Low as plan priorities shift over time.

There’s one more task field that, like the three above, feeds into other Planner functions.

• Labels: The 25 color-coded labels are a great way to organize tasks around information specific to that plan. For example, you might use labels to explain delays (e.g., “Pending review,” “Overbudget”), note the quarter that tasks are due, or define the responsible department. Think of labels as another way to group tasks by similar attributes so team members can quickly identify the to-dos most relevant to them.

All four fields inform different Planner capabilities—more on that in the next section—and, when added, are represented on each task in the Board view. Scroll back to the screenshots at the top of this blog and you’ll see the Due dates, representative icons for Progress and Priority, and labels on various tasks in the Board view. These visual cues give anyone who scans the plan a quick indication of each task’s status.

Tips for finding the right tasks

We asked you to “stay tuned” throughout the last section to see how different task fields inform other Planner functions. Here, we’ll explore the two most important.

• Filter: You can filter on any combination of six attributes in Planner, many of which you’ll recognize from the previous section: Due date, Progress, Priority, Label, Bucket, and Assignment. Since filters work on multiple attributes, you can pinpoint exactly which tasks are due this week (Due date) but at-risk (Label), or which urgent tasks (Priority) are assigned to the HR team (Assignment) but not yet started (Progress).

• Buckets: All Planner tasks are stacked within a Bucket column, and you can add as many Buckets as your plan requires. Think of each Bucket like an uber label for arranging tasks by process step, client name, department—whatever makes the most sense. But those Bucket names are just one way to sort tasks; you can also arrange them under Due date, Progress, Priority, Label, and Assigned to.

Between filters and Buckets, there’s no shortage of ways to organize a plan exactly the way you want for whatever task information you need—just don’t forget those task details! And you can do so without interfering with others: your Planner view is specific to you and does not replicate across your team members’ plans.

Tips for staying on track

Built-in notifications are one way stay on top of tasks assigned to you. But if you’re interested in your tasks and the progress of your entire plan, you’ll want to check out the Charts view.

• Charts view: Like all views in Planner, the Charts view is available at the top of a plan next to the plan’s name. It shows several highly visual yet simple charts that display the status of all the tasks in your plan based on the details mentioned earlier. You can drill into status specifics using the same filtering options as the Board view, but the difference is that the Charts view also shows how many tasks are due tomorrow, marked Urgent, or labeled “Pending review,” in addition to listing the individual tasks with those attributes in the right-hand pane. While you’ll likely spend most of your time in the Board view, the Charts view is a great resource for plan leaders to gauge progress and plan members to understand their tasks in the context of others.

Tips for Microsoft Teams users

Microsoft Teams is a productivity powerhouse with a huge range of built-in and third-party capabilities that can bring most of your work into one app—including task management.

• Tasks app in Teams: Planner integrates with Teams through the the Tasks app, which shows up in the Teams left-hand siderail. To get the app, select Store, search for “Planner,” and choose the app. We’d suggest pinning it to your siderail too (right-click the app to do that). The Tasks app brings all your Planner tasks directly into Teams, so you can manage your team to-dos alongside all your team messages, files, and meetings. The Planner experience in Teams is nearly identical to the one on the web, and any changes made in the Tasks app are replicated in Planner for the web (and vice versa).
• Create tasks from Teams messages: As ad hoc to-dos come up in one-on-one Teams chats, group messages, or meeting conversations, select the ellipses in that conversation bubble and choose “Create task.” The newly created task will automatically appear in the Planner plan you select so you can manage it in the context of your other related work.

We’re all hoping 2022 gives us a fresh start: personally and professionally, locally and globally. And we hope these tips for using Planner, especially if you’re a beginner, give you a fresh start for managing tasks. Head over to tasks.office.com when you’re ready to create your first plan. If you’d like more information about Planner, check out our support page and Tech Community Blog.

Looking for more task management tips? Check out our second blog post in this series, "Tips for task management across Microsoft."

Microsoft’s work management apps, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project, help your hybrid team coordinate and manage tasks and projects. Both share a similar look and feel by design to make it easy for you to shift as your needs evolve. Planner helps you manage and monitor team tasks in a shared plan while Project takes managing your tasks and projects to the next level with more flexibility and power. Over the next year, our plan is to simplify and bring the experiences of these two apps closer together so that moving from one to the other is effortless.

Here’s the rundown of newly released features for both apps as well as a look at what’s coming during the next few months.

New for Microsoft Planner

Planner is perfect for visually managing task-based efforts across a team. Everything your team needs to organize a marketing campaign, internal budget review, or small event is set out on a traditional Kanban board. Each task on that board contains all the necessary details—due dates, comments, attachments, color-coded labels, and more—in one place, while prebuilt charts graphically summarize the status of your entire plan. With Planner, your team has an intuitive, visual, and collaborative app for getting work done or managing workflows. If you’re a current Microsoft 365 subscriber, you can log into Planner at tasks.office.com.

During the past six months, we’ve launched a number of new Planner features to save you time, improve coordination, and, ultimately, streamline your task management. Some of these releases include:

• Create tasks from Teams messages – Ad hoc work and task requests happen in many places at work—and especially in Teams. Back in June, we launched an integrated Teams feature that makes it easy to create and track informal asks that come from Teams messages.

• Suggested attachments – Stop hunting through your folders, servers, or cloud storage to find the right file to attach to your task. Instead, scroll to the bottom of your Planner task for a list of suggested file attachments based on the title and description of your plan and task; the members assigned to the task; and files that have been shared with you.
• Recommended plans – We’ve added a “Recommended” section in Planner for the web that surfaces plans with tasks assigned to you but that you haven't opened yet.
• Move tasks between your plans – You can now move tasks to any plan you're a member of, regardless of Microsoft 365 Group, to better coordinate tasks across your teams and private groups.
• Features for GCC customers – In July, we announced extended Planner functionality for GCC customers. These added features, all of which are only available for Planner in Teams, include a new List view, a new left navigation pane, native integration with Teams notifications, and task publishing for frontline workers.

In the year ahead, we’ll continue to integrate and connect Planner with other Microsoft 365 apps and release some of the features you’ve been asking for, such as recurring tasks. While we can’t share everything we’re working on just yet, here’s a look at some of the new items on our public roadmap:

• Recurring tasks – Many of you have asked for a way to configure tasks so that they occur on a regular cadence. We’re delighted to bring this capability to you early next year.
• Rich text and images in task notes – Soon, you’ll be able to paste images and rich text (bold, underline, italics, etc.) into the Notes field of a Planner task. We’re also enabling text highlighting and text formatting with keyboard shortcuts. Images pasted into the Notes field will also appear as file attachments in the task.

New for Microsoft Project

As a powerful work and project management tool, Microsoft Project enables you and your team to take on projects big and small that require dynamic scheduling, sub-tasks, dependent tasks, and reporting. You can create and manage your plans in whatever way best fits your workstyle with Grid (list), Kanban-style Board, or Timeline (modern Gantt) views. If you’re a current Project subscriber, you can log into the app at project.microsoft.com.

With the continual roll out of features and improvements for Project this year, you can manage your work confidently and successfully. Here are some of the new capabilities we released during the past six months:

• Assign tasks outside your group – You can assign tasks to anyone, even people who are outside of your Microsoft 365 Group.
• Flexible deployment – Flexible deployment in Project for the web allows you to create different environments based on organizational, business unit, or team requirements. The choice of deployment gives you the flexibility and extensibility to stay on top of business needs while reducing complexity for your IT group. 
• Critical Path – Highlight the most important tasks that affect your project's finish date on the Timeline view in Project for the web.

• Custom Fields – Create custom fields to track additional information around your tasks. Choose from text, date, number (with rollup options), and choice types.

Successful project management requires robust collaboration, flexibility, and attention to detail. These releases hit on each of those attributes and extend our commitment to make Project a simple but powerful project management app. But we’re just getting started: in the coming months, we’re adding Project capabilities to make it even easier to manage your collaborative work. Here’s a look at some of the upcoming features on our public roadmap:

• Conversations and @mentions – Initiate conversations on specific tasks and @mention colleagues in those conversations from the Project app in Teams.

• Add checklist and labels to tasks – Add checklist items to your tasks and mark them complete as you finish your work. Add labels to tasks to highlight important task information. These additions are just two examples of how we’re making it easier to move from Planner to Project as your work needs evolve.
• Guest users in Project for the web – Add guest users and assign tasks to them. By default, guest users get the same experience as team members, which means they can view shared projects and update the status of tasks assigned to them.
• Progress updates on assigned tasks – Users with Microsoft 365 licenses can mark their Project for the web tasks complete and change the percent complete for their tasks—all without needing a Project license.
• Charts – Visually assess the progress of your work through charts. Like the upcoming task checklist and labels, these charts will add another Planner-inspired element to Project.

Exciting changes are on the horizon for Planner and Project—including a more seamless experience between the two. We’d love to know what you want to see in Planner and Project. To send us your ideas for Planner, select the “Help” icon in the lower-left corner of Teams; for Project, select the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of the app. If you’re new to the apps, you can learn more about Planner at aka.ms/planner and Project at aka.ms/microsoftproject. There are additional details about each app in above video too.

Do you ever feel like you're forgetting something important? It's Monday morning and you just organized your Microsoft Planner plans but realize a couple tasks are missing from your meeting last week. Lucky for you, we have a pair of feature enhancements that improve how you and your team surface and organize tasks in Planner.

Recommended plans

We're excited to announce a new Recommended section in the Planner web app to help you discover plans that are relevant to your work. This section will surface new plans that include tasks assigned to you but that you haven't opened yet. Recommended plans can be found in the Planner hub between Recent and All or in the left pane between Favorites and Recent. 

Please note that the Recommended section only appears if you have new plans with tasks assigned to you that are not already in either your Favorites or Recent section.

Image description: A screenshot of a Planner board with a teaching callout to highlight the Recommended for you section in the Planner web experience

Move tasks to any of your plans

Until recently, you could only move tasks between plans in the same Microsoft 365 Group. This limited the ability to coordinate tasks across teams, especially when working with a private group. With this new feature, you can move tasks to any plan you're a member of, regardless of group.

To move tasks in the Planner web app, tap the ellipses (...) that will appear in the upper right corner when hovering over your task and select Move task.

Image description: A screenshot of a Planner board that shows the ellipses (three dots) in the upper right corner of a task and a drop-down with the words Move task highlighted

Choose where you want the task to go from the drop-down list of available plans and buckets, and then select Move.

Image description: A screenshot of a Planner board with the Move task window open and a drop-down list of available plans to choose from

Image description: A screenshot of a Planner board with the Move task window open and a new plan name selected; a teaching callout highlights that you can move tasks to any plan you're a member of

You'll get a notification when the task was relocated successfully. If you click on the notification, it will take you to the task at its new location.

Image description: A screenshot of a Planner board with a notification that a task has been moved with a link to the task

Please note that certain fields may not be moved to a plan in a different group and labels do not move across plans. You can learn more about moving tasks between plans from our support article.

Availability

The recommended plans and move task features are now available to all Planner customers worldwide and can be accessed on Planner for the web. Additionally, the move task feature will soon be available in the Tasks app in Microsoft Teams.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on other ways we can help you and your team organize and stay on top of work in Planner. Please post a comment below with your ideas or feedback. You can also send us feature suggestions and report a problem directly in Teams—simply select the Help button in the lower left corner of the app and choose Suggest a feature or Report a problem. And keep visiting our Tech Community Blog for all the latest Planner news.

We’ve all had the frustrating experience of not being able to find a file that we want to attach to an email or share with a colleague. Microsoft Planner can help reduce that frustration with the introduction of suggested attachments. Now, when you want to add attachments to a task, Planner will show you a list of related files for you to select from. No more hunting through your folders, servers, or cloud storage to find the right file to attach.

Suggested attachments help keep the items your team needs to complete the task is in one place. Specifically, suggested attachments shows you a list of files that are based on the title and description of your plan and task, as well as the members assigned to the task and files that have been shared with you. We built this feature to save you time and reduce frustration.

Adding a suggested attachment to your task is easy:

• Open Planner for the web from https://tasks.office.com.
• Select the desired plan from your list of Favorites or Recent plans in the Planner hub.
• Open a task.
• Scroll down to the bottom of the task to find the Suggested attachments section.
• Select Add next to the file you'd like to attach. (Pro tip: You can also select the three dots to the right of the file name (...) that appear on hover to open the file or copy a shareable link.

Once the file is attached to the task, you can choose other actions such as edit the text to display, remove the attachment, or select Show on card to add the file as a preview to the task. If you don't see the file you want to attach in the suggested attachments list, you can still add it by clicking on Add attachment in the task.

The suggested attachments feature is currently available in Planner for the web.

As always, we welcome your suggestions for making Planner an even better experience. Feel free to leave a comment below with your feedback or ideas. And keep checking our Tech Community Blog for the latest Planner updates.

Tasks happen everywhere. They can pop up in an email thread, working file, or team chat—really, wherever you work most often. But ad hoc tasks like this are disruptive and often forgotten. We’ve all been there: you promise yourself (maybe even out loud) that you’ll definitely remember so-and-so’s request only to forget it a minute later.

That’s why one of our goals at Microsoft is to help you quickly capture those kinds of informal tasks the moment they happen. We’ve done this for emails in Outlook and comments in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs—and starting today, you can create tasks from Microsoft Teams messages on desktop and web.

This update also addresses one of the most requested asks from customers. Before, lots of people were using third-party apps or creating Power Automate flows to convert Teams asks to tasks; now, that conversion is natively built into the Teams experience.

Converting a Teams message into a task on desktop or web is super easy: hover over the message, select the ellipses (…) from the pop-out menu > More actions > Create task.

A task created this way opens a pop-out window directly in Teams for editing its details. Here, you can choose to add your task to the default Tasks list in To Do or a specific Planner plan. Added tasks will show up in both Tasks in Teams and the standalone To Do or Planner apps. The editable task details are slightly different depending on which option you select:

• If you add the task to the To Do Tasks list, you can edit the task name, priority, due date, and notes.
• If you add the task to a Planner plan, you can edit the task name, priority, due date, notes, progress, and bucket. You can also assign the task and decide whether to post a reply about it to the original Teams message thread.

Task editing options for adding your task to the To Do Tasks list (left) and a Planner plan (right)

But you’re busy, and this might seem like a lot to fill out for a simple task—especially if you don’t know all the details up front. That’s why Teams auto-populates the task name and notes fields for you, getting your task in the queue right away so it’s not forgotten while you wait on more information. The default name matches the first paragraph of the message, while the default notes field includes details from and a link to the original message.

Choosing to post a reply helps everyone on your team track the task and keeps those assigned to it accountable. This option produces a short summary graphic in the original Teams message with a button to open the task in the Tasks app, where you can manage that task in the context of your Tasks list or the underlying Planner plan.

Summary graphic from posting a reply about the created task

This new way to capture tasks is perfect for tracking requests that come out of informal Teams messages and gives your team additional control and confidence over ad hoc requests. If your team asks a question you can’t answer without more research, convert that ask into a task. If your manager pings you for updated sales numbers, assign that ask to your sales lead as a task. If a colleague needs help finishing her presentation, get your entire team involved to deliver it on time. Tasks from Teams messages automatically appear alongside your other tasks in the Tasks app and To Do or Planner, so you can nix the sticky notes and instead manage all your tasks together. Plus, creating tasks out of ad hoc requests relieves the stress of trying to remember (or find) what was asked of you—all those requests are in one place.

Bonus coverage! Creating tasks from Teams messaging isn’t the only Tasks app news this month. You can now delete and rename any task from Planner and To Do directly in Tasks. Before, you had to do this from each standalone app.    

We’d love to hear your thoughts on other ways we can help you capture tasks from wherever you’re working. Post a comment below with your ideas or feedback. You can also send us feature suggestions and report a problem directly in Teams: simply select Help in the button left corner of the app and choose the best option for your input. And keep visiting our Tech Community Blog for all the latest Tasks in Teams and Planner news.

Last year, we hosted several “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) sessions for Planner—and they were a huge hit! We heard from customers around the world who asked about our plans for future feature releases, technical difficulties, integrations with other Microsoft 365 apps, and much, much more. The conversations were engaging and enlightening: our team learned even more about your needs to make Planner the best task management app for your work. If you’re curious about the kinds of questions and answers in these sessions, check out the November AMA summary.

Coming on the heels of several app enhancements, like more labels, and the Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft digital event, we’re excited to be hosting our first AMA of the year on Wednesday, April 7 at 9 a.m. PST right here on Tech Community. Make sure to save the date!

To join, simply visit the Planner AMA space at the time of the event and select "Start a New Conversation" to post your question. This session is open to all Tech Community members. Representatives from both the product and engineering teams for Planner will be on hand to answer your questions.

Talk to you on April 7!

One question we often get in support is, “How do I find all my Planner plans?” The answer to this is not too tricky—the tricky bit is ‘all plans; rather than ‘all my plans’—as, due to security and privacy controls, you can only ever see plans that are in a group where you are a member (and being an owner does not automatically mean you are a plan member as far as Planner is concerned). But with that constraint how can I get a list of all my plans other than looking at the Planner hub? PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph API are one way.

An animation showing some plans, the PowerShell code and then the output list of groups and plans

I’ve posted previously about using the Graph with Planner, and to avoid repeating some of the basics I won’t cover the creation of App Registrations in Azure Active Directory in depth. You can find those details in this blog from Lee Ford. His blog is not about Planner specifically, but has very good steps on the App Registration using a more recent UI than I did in my earlier posts. I’ll note in the PowerShell code walkthrough below the specific permissions needed. 

I also use the latest MSAL authentication, using the MSAL.PS module to make things easier. You'll need to have the most up-to-date version of PowerShell and preferably PowerShellGet to make it easier to install modules. I usually work in the ISE, too. On to the code!

First, I have a function that helps to handle failed web calls—unless you get a “200” http response, it will be handled as an exception—so you need to use Try/Catch rather than just read the status of the response. I found this useful function on Chris Wahl’s blog.

This will be called in the catch to give the specific error (usually it will be a “403" for Groups that you read, but since you’re not a member you can’t see the groups). You could use this information to either find a member or add yourself to check for plans.

Next is the authentication using MSAL. First, you need to install the module either manually or using the Install-Module if you have PowerShellGet.

For the call, you need to have your TenantId as well as a ClientId that you have configured via Azure AD as per the reference I shared above. This assumes you are making an interactive login—so it will prompt you—but if necessary you could configure with any of the supported MSAL authentication flows. Just a reminder, Planner always requires an app + user authentication.

Once you have the token, the next section is where the work happens, as it makes a call to get all groups and then iterates over the groups to get the plans in each group—assuming you have access.  As you can potentially have a lot of groups, the response can be paged, so the “while” loop handles this seamlessly to get all groups in one PowerShell object. There are very useful Graph examples in this blog from Rezwanur Rahman. I used the “top 10” filter to give me a nextlink—even though I don’t have that many groups—and to check the “while" functionality. This also shows how the parameters are passed in, which are not really the body of the call but work as url query strings. I also use the parameter to pull just two fields.

Now that I have all my groups, I’ll next look at each for any plans.

Again, I am using parameters to get the fields I want. I also found that on some machines I didn’t need the -UseBasicParsing flag—that depends on exact versions and is now the default. The output of this script will show the group ID and display name, and then indented underneath the plan ID and title for each plan.

Part of the output showing groups and plans and a failure

I hope you find this useful.

Together with our friends from Microsoft Project and Dynamics 365 Project Operations, we invite you to join us for a free digital event to reimage your project management. No matter the shape, size, or complexity of your work, Project, Planner, and Project Operations can help you deliver quality results on time, and this event will show you how.  

The Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft virtual event is Thursday, March 18, 2021 from 8:00 AM-9:30 AM PST.

Register now for Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft to:

• Discover new features and best practices during the keynote and 6+ hours of additional on-demand demos and product walkthroughs.
• Engage with our product teams and partners by signing up for roundtables on a range of topics related to our project management solutions.
• Connect with Microsoft experts, technology partners, and peers to expand your network.

>Register now

Labels in Planner are visual cues, drawing attention to a particular set of tasks for a particular reason. For example, you might use labels to tag tasks with the same completion requirements, dependencies, or issues, and then filter your plan on those labels to zero-in on related tasks. In short, labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks.

But we’ve long heard that the current catalogue of labels (six total) isn’t enough; in fact, adding more labels to Planner is one of the very top asks on UserVoice. This update has been on our radar as long as yours, so we’re thrilled to announce that there are now 25 labels available in Tasks in Teams and Planner on all platforms and in most environments. (GCC availability is coming in March.)

Each of the 25 labels is a different color, and each can be edited with whatever text you’d like. More labels mean more options for getting a similar group of tasks done right: flagging more risks, signaling more reasons for a delay, prompting reviews from more people, and tagging more departments, to name a few.

We’re constantly chipping away at big and small asks alike from UserVoice, and invite you to submit your ideas for improving Planner and Tasks in Teams to that site. In the meantime, keep checking our Tech Community Blog to see which ask we address next.

If you’re like us, crossing a completed task off your list gives you a boost. The simple, visual act of striking that to-do is both satisfying and energizing. You did it and you can do it again.

That’s exactly why we introduced confetti animation in Planner last year: that burst of color represents pride in your completed work and offers motivation to finish the work ahead. It’s also why we’re excited to announce even more visual cues to help you do the same, all of which are now available in both the Planner web app and the Tasks app in Teams.

• A checklist progress bar
• Confetti animation for completed tasks
• Confetti animation for a completed checklist

Checklist progress bar

Checklist items are a bit like sub-tasks: they’re often added to a task as basic predecessors (to borrow a project management term). And like more formal predecessors, they should be completed before the primary task is checked off. This is easy if your checklist is just a few items. But what if it’s a few dozen—or more? Then you might need some help.

To help you keep track, we’ve added a simple progress bar to the top of the checklist element in your task cards. Like other visual cues in Planner, the new progress bar gives your team fast status on checklist items so others can jump in to help if needed. A visual bar is easier to quickly comprehend than the traditional numeric representation (e.g., 12/20)—which is still in the task card, by the way—especially if you’re skimming lots of task cards.

Confetti animation

We first announced confetti animation for the Planner web app in May (see the blog link above). You’ll now get that same burst of color when you complete a task in the Tasks app in Teams or the final item in a checklist in either experience.

2021 is shaping up to be a busy year for Planner and tasks in Microsoft 365, and this Tech Community Blog site will continue to be your source for all the latest news. If you have ideas for what else we should add to our pipeline, drop us a line on UserVoice.

If you’re in retail, healthcare, manufacturing—any industry with a large, disperse frontline workforce—you know how challenging it is to connect people from the top floor to the shop floor. That coordination is now more critical than ever, too, as leadership navigates unprecedented changes to frontline locations.

Microsoft Teams helps bridge this gap, especially with the recent release of the Tasks app in Teams and, as of today, task publishing. Task publishing is now generally available to coincide with our announcement of the release at NRF, one of the largest retail conferences in the world.

With task publishing in Teams, leadership can create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to targeted frontline locations like stores, clinics, or factories. Tasks can be assigned to all frontline teams or specific locations based on customizable characteristics like size or layout. After tasks are assigned, frontline workers see a simple list of their task assignments through Teams, while corporate has full visibility into task progress across all locations.

2020 is now behind us, but companies would be remiss to ignore its lessons in 2021 and beyond. Of everything we learned, the most important was the essential role of frontline workers. Microsoft is taking this lesson to heart, too. You can read about our frontline worker strategy and enabling features like task publishing in a pair of new blogs from Emma Williams, CVP of Microsoft Office Modern Workplace Transformations, and our friends on the Microsoft Teams Tech Community. The first blog is here and the second here. We’ve also put together a short video at the end of the blog that highlights our strategy in the context of a potential real-world scenario.

Companies around the world are already seeing the benefits of managing their frontline worker tasks in Teams. This includes Chedraui, a publicly traded, Mexico-based grocery store and department store chain. “We chose Microsoft Teams because it brought all the communication and productivity tools we needed together in a single platform, combined with robust security,” says Pilar Rojas Suárez, CEO and Director of Systems at Chedraui. “With Tasks in Teams and the mobile app, area managers have considerably reduced the time it takes to carry out, monitor, and supervise tasks.” You can read the full Chedraui case study here.

For more details on task publishing and how to get started, check out our dedicated support page—but first you’ll need to set up your team targeting hierarchy. If you need more help with this, contact your sales representative. We’ve also developed a Tasks in Teams and Task Publishing look book that goes into even more detail about the feature. 

Microsoft has several virtual sessions at NRF this week. We hope you tune in! We also hope you’ll continue visiting our Tech Community and submitting your ideas to improve Planner on UserVoice.

Planner enables us to visualize our work in a fun and flexible way. But it can be difficult to identify which plan you are in, especially when you’re a member of 50 different plans that look the same.

That’s why we’re excited to begin rolling out smart backgrounds, which lets you customize your Planner boards to make them your own and help others quickly find the right plan. We’re starting to roll out smart backgrounds in Planner for the web this week.

With smart backgrounds, you can choose from a variety of image recommendations to liven up your Planner boards. Smart backgrounds is powered by the same Designer feature that suggests creatively designed templates in PowerPoint. Designer works in the background, trying to match the title of your plan with relevant and unique high-quality background images, like a coffee scene for your Coffee Store plan, a business backdrop for your Online Marketing plan, or a city skyline for your Town Hall Meeting plan.

To access recommended background images, click on Plan settings from the dropdown menu under (…). With one click or tap, you can personalize, differentiate, and more easily identify your plans and task cards.

Smart backgrounds is currently only available in the Planner web experience.

Tell us what you think! We love hearing feedback from the Planner community, so leave a comment below or head over to Planner’s UserVoice to vote on and share new ideas. And keep checking the Tech Community Blog site for the latest Planner updates and other task management news.

When we first announced the public preview of Tasks in Teams, we also announced a three-stage naming sequence for how the app name would appear in Teams. The timing of that original sequence has since changed, which we noted in an Oct. 30 update to the general availability blog.

Today, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ve hit Stage 2 in the sequence. This changes the Tasks in Teams app name to Tasks by Planner and To Do from Planner, the original app name, for all non-government users. The app icon has changed to its final form, too. Both changes also apply to the Planner tab in Teams channels. When adding that tab, you can search “Planner,” “To Do,” or “Tasks” to find it.

The goal of this sequence is to help all customers easily find the new hero task management app in Teams. We believe Tasks by Planner and To Do better reflects the app’s functionality—it combines team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do—so that customers who don’t closely follow Microsoft news will start (or continue) using the app with confidence.

Here’s where we stand currently.

Please note, this does not affect the functionality of Tasks in Teams in any way; the name and icon changes are merely cosmetic. The name change also does not impact the Planner or To Do standalone apps.

We’ve also added a banner inside the app announcing the name change.

Although this is a big change, it’s a temporary one. Stage 3 is right around the corner, and our goal is to start rolling out the final app name, Tasks, in the coming months. We’ll make sure to communicate that rollout here and in Teams when the time comes.

If you have any questions about the current name change, leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you. And keep checking our Tech Community Blog site for the final naming sequence announcement and other product news.

We're excited to report that Tasks in Teams for the Teams mobile app is rolling out to all users in non-government clouds. The rollout starts today and will be completed in about a week. You don’t need to download anything new to use the Tasks mobile app: simply select the More (…) option in the Teams mobile app interface on your iOS or Android device and tap Tasks. The Tasks mobile app will automatically appear in that menu once it’s available to you.

Tasks in Teams, which became generally available in October, lets you manage your team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do alongside all your chats, meetings, and files in Teams. If you’ve added Tasks in Teams to your Teams desktop client, it’ll automatically appear in your Teams mobile app, too.

The Tasks mobile app comes with all of the same tools you use to manage Planner and To Do tasks on desktop, including features like attachments and labels in Planner task cards and checklist items in To Do tasks. The biggest difference is how you see your tasks: whereas the Tasks app for desktop offers four different views (Board, Charts, Schedule, and List), the Tasks mobile app surfaces your tasks in the List view only. On a mobile device, this makes it easier to quickly skim all your tasks at once and click into those assignments for more details.

Of course, you can create, edit, and complete tasks in the Tasks mobile app, and you’ll receive and prompt all the familiar notifications, too. All changes in the mobile app are reflected in both Tasks in Teams on desktop and Planner or To Do, depending on where the task lives.

Just like Tasks in Teams isn’t replacing Planner, the Tasks mobile app isn’t replacing the Planner mobile app for iOS and Android, either. Each serves its own purpose: we’d suggest using the Tasks mobile app when you need a compact overview of all your tasks, and the Planner mobile app when you want to manage your collaborative plans in the Board, Schedule, and Charts views.

Don’t see Tasks in your Teams mobile app yet? Hang tight. The app will be rolling out this week and next, so by mid-December everyone should see it.

We’re gearing up for several announcements in the coming months, so keep checking our Tech Community Blogs site for all the latest news. And if you have feedback or ideas for Tasks in Teams or Planner, leave us a note on UserVoice.

Bonus coverage! Have you noticed the darker side of Planner mobile yet? In case you missed it, dark mode for the Planner mobile app was released in October. Dark mode will turn the app’s background black and the text white, which can be easier on the eyes, especially at night.

There’s no setting in the iOS app to enable dark mode; instead, the Planner mobile app will inherit whatever display option you’ve chosen for your phone. To switch to dark mode, select Settings > Display & Brightness > Dark.

The same is true on Android, but you can also turn on dark mode in the Planner mobile app itself. To change displays for your phone; select Settings > Display > Theme > Dark. To change displays in the app, tap Settings > Theme > Dark.

We want to hear from you and answer your questions around using Microsoft Planner! We will be hosting an "Ask Microsoft Anything" (AMA) session on Tuesday, November 17th at 9 AM Pacific Time, here, on the Tech Community. Save the date!

To join, simply, visit the Planner AMA space on date and time Pacific Time and click "Start a New Conversation" to post your question. This event is open to all Tech Community members and we'll have members of the Microsoft product and engineering teams standing by to provide answers.
In the meantime, if you haven't already, be sure to join the Planner Community.

We look forward to answering your questions!