How to use Planner in Microsoft Teams?

Introduction

Microsoft Planner is an application by Microsoft to help organize the tasks for project. It can be used as a separate web application from Office 365 or with integration to Microsoft Teams — a collaborative workspace application.

In today’s blog, i will show you how a Project Manager, Team Lead or a Teacher can create tasks using Planner inside Microsoft Teams.

Step-by-step guide

1. Sign-in with your account in Microsoft Teams (online or desktop both can work)

2. Select your desired team where you want to add Planner.

3. Once selected, click on the “ + “ button on the top navigation to create a tab.

4. Search for Planner application and click on it.

5. Create a new plan by writing the name of a plan of your choice OR if you have any existing plan, you can choose from 2nd option.

6. Once you hit save, it will create a tab on the same team with your plan name.

7. This is the default view of Planner app inside Teams where you can start by adding tasks in each buckets — a set of tasks. You can also rename this buckets with your own project related tasks by double-clicking the “To-Do”.

8. After naming the buckets, you can click Add Task to continue adding tasks and assign it to members of the Team (NOTE! Members must be part of the Team).

9. You can add task details like comments, notes or attachments for the assignee to understand the task better. Just click on the created task and a pop-up will appear to add details

10. To see the current status of tasks by assignee, state or date, just click on Charts section for the overview of the tasks.

End note

This is how to create and monitor the tasks using Planner application in Microsoft Teams. One thing to note here, Planner added as a Tab is to works as an application itself for “read/write” operations but if you add Planner as “Connector” by clicking on the ellipsis in left-navigation, this Planner app shall provide only overview of the tasks assigned to particular user currently signed-in.

You can see the difference of UI of both Planner application. This one works like a to-do app because Microsoft is soon going to change it with Tasks App (mentioned already on the top). So, there is no need for members to add Planner as a Tab, they can add the connector and see their tasks.

Happy Learning

Thank you