In today’s workplace, tasks come from everywhere. Hundreds of flagged emails in your inbox, work from dozens of projects, and let’s not forget your own to-do list. If you haven’t checked out the new Microsoft Planner, then you’re in for a treat. It combines the best of past Microsoft apps from personal to-do lists to collaborative project planning, and plus, you’ll get a taste of how Copilot makes it even better. Let’s dive in. As of today, the new Planner is only available in Microsoft Teams. When you’re in Teams, click the three dots on the left sidebar and then click on Planner to launch the new experience. Then to keep Planner in your sidebar, right click on the icon and click on Pin. Right away, you see how the old apps feed into this new experience. My day comes from the old tasks by Planner and to-do experience where you can prioritize your daily to-do list. My Tasks consolidates all tasks assigned to you regardless if they’re private tasks, flagged emails, or tasks from an existing plan in Project or Planner. Finally, my plans includes all project plans you’re a part of, shared or personal. These plans come from both Project for the Web and the old Planner. Let’s deep dive into my tasks for your work. Click on My Tasks. This is a great place to capture to-do items before organizing them later. Select All so you can see all tasks assigned to you. Notice your flagged emails all show up here as well as your private tasks. Let’s add a new task by clicking where it says Title. I’ll type Edit Planner Video. You can now choose is this part of your private task list or is this for an existing shared plan? Every team in Microsoft Teams has a default plan associated with it, so even if you haven’t created any plans yet, you’ll see those here. Let’s keep this task in our private to-do list. You can also set a due date by clicking on the calendar icon in the due date column. Let’s set the due date for tomorrow. You can also change the priority, but let’s keep it at the default medium. Finally, press the Enter key to commit the task. Now here’s a quick tip. If you right-click on the task or you click on the three dots next to the task name, you can add it to My Day. Then if you click on My Day, you’ll see that task show up in the list. Tasks with a due date of today also show up on My Day by default. And of course, you can mark a task as complete by clicking on the circle icon next to the task name. Okay, now we’re done with the private task list. Let’s jump into plans. Now there’s something you should know about plans. You see, this is a basic plan. It’s pretty similar to a private task list with maybe one or two extra fields. But now let’s look at a different type of plan. This is a premium plan. You would think that all the features of the basic plan would work in the same way on the premium plan, but that’s not quite the case here. You see, because basic plans are plans from the old Planner and premium plans are from Project for the Web. And that can lead to some weird behavior when you’re looking at tasks from both basic and premium plans at the same time. For example, this task is from a premium plan. And if we try to add it to My Day, it doesn’t show up as quickly as it would from a basic plan. It’ll actually take several minutes to show up. Let me show you one other surprising difference. Let’s say you want to copy or move a task to another plan. For a private task or a task from a basic plan, it’s as easy as clicking the three dots next to the name and clicking on copy task. Now let’s try doing that for a task from a premium plan. When you right click or click on the three dots, you can’t copy or move the task. In fact, you have to go back into the original project plan to perform these operations. So, keep an eye out for these differences. Let’s trek on and make our first basic plan. Click on new plan in the bottom left. You can either start with a blank plan or you can use one of the many templates that are provided for you. Let’s click on project management. You’ll notice the choice between basic and premium plans. Here’s a good rule of thumb to help you decide between the two. If your project is complex enough to need a Gantt chart, go with premium. Otherwise, basic will probably be good enough for you. Premium also requires a project plan three or project plan five license. Let’s stick with basic first, so click on use template. Let’s call this Q4 influencer campaign. Check the box add to my pin plans so you can see it show up on the left sidebar. This last step is important to pay attention to. You can directly add this plan to any group, which means you’re creating a plan for everyone in that group to collaborate on. Now you don’t have to choose a group now, but if you choose one, be aware that you can’t change it later. I know that I want to add this to the marketing group, so I’ll click marketing. Click create to make your plan. So, a couple things just happened. The plan was created and it’s now pinned on the left sidebar. Let’s get some more room in the main canvas by clicking on the hide sidebar icon. With your new plan, you start in board view with a preset list of tasks, which are grouped into buckets, otherwise known as categories. Now, if you don’t like these built-in bucket names, you can rename them by clicking on the three dots next to any bucket name, then clicking on rename. Let’s call this starting instead of initiating. You can also scroll all the way to the right to add a new bucket. In board view, you can change how tasks are grouped by clicking on the group by button in the top right. For example, you can view how tasks are split up by their status or their progress. And now it’s easy to update the progress of a task by clicking and dragging it between groups. Let’s understand what we can track in a task. We’ll click on this identify goals task to bring up the properties window. First, we can assign this task to someone on the team. So, let’s click on assign and then assign this to Adele. Notice you can assign a task to multiple people at the same time. You can also add labels to a task. You can’t type in new labels, but you can change the name of existing labels. There are a lot of other fields you can change too, like the bucket, the progress, the priority, the start and due dates, and how often this task repeats. Let’s set the start and due dates around now. So, we’ll start this one today and end it next Monday. You can give the task a description as well as a checklist of subtasks. And you can add files and comments. I know this is going to disappoint some of you, but you can’t @ mention others on your team in these comments, but you can in premium plans. Let’s exit this task and add a new one. Click on add task under not started. For task name, let’s type validate goals. Here you can quickly change the bucket, set a due date, and assign the task. I’ll assign it to myself and then click on add task. Finally, you can filter tasks by one of the six fields we discussed earlier by clicking on the filters button in the top right. This makes it easy to see which tasks are assigned to a certain person or perhaps which tasks are due next week. You can also search for tasks by their name by using the filter by keyword text box at the top of the screen. Now we’ve just been looking at the board view, which is useful for checking out tasks status. But if you want more of a big picture view, the grid view might be more interesting. Here you can see all your tasks in a table and make edits much more easily. You can also use the schedule view to see your tasks on a calendar. Finally, you have the charts view. Here you can look at overall project progress and each task at the same time. If you scroll down, you can see your tasks broken up by assignment. And if you click any of these bars, the rest of the graph, as well as the tasks on the right-hand side will filter just to that person. So overall, basic plans have pretty simple functionality for short term projects that don’t have a lot of complexity. Time to dive into some premium features. Click on my plans in the top left to get back to the homepage, then click on new plan in the top right. This time you’ll click project management and then premium and then use template. We’ll call this one Q4 influencer campaign two, also add it to the marketing group and then click create. This time you’re brought into the grid view experience and you can already see how much richer it is. You can have task hierarchies, you can assign durations, you can assign risk for any task. And most importantly, you can add custom columns. We’ve seen a few of these before like bucket and labels, but there are several others like dependencies, effort and percent complete that can be useful to track. Most importantly though, you can create your own fields. With custom fields, you have a few simple data types to choose from. Let’s add a yes/no column and call it QA signed off, then click create. Let’s pause for a moment. We’ve got this massive project plan of over a hundred tasks and this template might work for you, but if you’re in a specialized domain, then this might just be a lot of overhead to manage. Let’s explore how Microsoft Copilot now integrates into Planner to save you a ton of time. First, let’s get rid of all these tasks. Scroll up to the top and click on initiating, then scroll all the way down and hold the shift key and click on close contract. Then right click on the selection and click delete task, then click delete, then click on the Microsoft Copilot icon in the toolbar on the top right. Now you can use Copilot for simple tasks like creating a sub task or adding a bucket, but you can also use it for more complex tasks like building an entire project plan, so let’s try that. We want to create a plan for making an influencer led social media ad campaign. So, let’s use the following prompt. You are an expert marketer at a product led growth startup currently making under 1 million a year. You are looking to grow product usage by 10% over the next quarter by working with influencers to showcase your product. Build a plan for making these influencer campaigns successful that last no longer than three months. Then press enter and make the magic happen. Now after about 15 seconds, Copilot manages to create some different buckets of tasks. And then after a few more seconds, the plan is created. Awesome. You now have a great set of tasks to start from. Now, did you see what Copilot missed? There’s no durations on any of these tasks. So, we don’t know if this can really fit within a quarter or not. Let’s try asking Copilot to fix this up. We use the following prompt. Assuming we started next Monday, assign start and due dates for all tasks that makes this possible within one quarter. Unfortunately, Copilot fails us. So, there’s still a few things we’re going to have to do ourselves, but one thing Copilot did help us with is to generate some placeholder project goals. Let’s click on the goals tab to check this out. Let’s close Copilot to get a better view. Now goals help all project stakeholders get aligned on the most important tasks for a project. Here you see tasks are broken down by each goal. Not only do they show up here, but you can also go to the board view and then group tasks by goal instead of by bucket. You can also check out the new people view to break down task assignments by person. This view is a bit better than the people board view because you can also see incomplete and late tasks by person. For example, you can go into a task and assign it to a person. Let’s assign this one to Alex, exit the task, and you see that Alex now shows up on this view. Finally, one major advantage that premium plans have over basic plans is a task history. If you click on any task and then click on the history icon in the top right, you can see every change that has ever been made to a task and when it was made and who made it. This audit trail is critical, especially in virtual environments. Time to get into the real meat of project management. Let’s get out of this task and then open the timeline view to see all tasks displayed as a Gantt chart. Now, because Copilot couldn’t set up dates for us, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Click on the information icon under the first task. Now, the fastest way to set up dates for all the tasks is just to set the duration. I’ll fill in two days here by typing two, then the letter D, and when I press enter, you’ll see it automatically sets this to start today and end in two workdays. Let me take a few minutes to fill in durations for the rest of the tasks. This looks much better and gives us a firm footing to talk about dependency management. Move your mouse over the timeline for any task and you see a couple of changes in the UI. You can click and drag the start or end date of any task to move them and you can set up dependencies by clicking on the circles on either end of the task and then dragging your mouse to the start or end of another task. This sets up a dependency relationship between the two tasks. And if you click on the info icon of the dependent task, you can see the dependency listed in the task properties. Although not as common, you can change the dependency type to finish to finish, which means the tasks end at the same time, start to start, so they start at the same time or start to finish, which means this task can’t finish until the other one has started. You can also define lead and lag time. For example, if you need to wait a workday in between the last task finishing and this task starting, then select a lag by and then one day. Notice how this changes the start date of this task. Let me add dependencies to the rest of the tasks, so we’ve got a real project plan to look at. Now we’re looking better. When you have a lot of tasks, it can be difficult to understand which tasks are the most important to get the project done, so Planner has a critical path function to help you see that. Click on filters and then show critical path. Close the filter view, and now you can see the tasks that have the most influence on the timeline in red. Finally, let’s take a look at how Planner addresses capacity planning and making sure that no one is overloaded with work. You can see Adele has a lot of tasks assigned to her in this week of November 10th. Let’s see if she has enough time to do them all. Click on the new assignments view in the toolbar to find out. Here we see for each person and for each task, how much time is allocated. By default, Planner assumes that every task takes eight hours per day. You can change the view from daily to weekly to get a sense of everyone’s weekly workload. Now let’s move over a month to get to the week of November 10th. And you see that Adele has 104 hours of work allocated that week. So as a project manager, you can sit down with Adele and figure out how much time these tasks will actually take. Then you can make updates on this chart with the information you find out. So, if this task only takes 20 hours, you can enter that. And if this task only takes 10 hours, you can enter that. And same thing here, another 10 hours. And then you’ll get to your magic 40 hours a week. Next, here are five tricks that will save you a ton of time using Planner. Number one, if you want to copy a premium plan, go back to the grid view and then click on the dropdown arrow next to the plan name. Then click on copy plan. By default, this copies the plan into a private workspace. If you want to move this to a different group, click on the share icon in the top right toolbar, then click on Add to existing group, select your group, and then click the Add button. Just like other plans, once you assign it, you can’t reassign it. So be sure that it’s the right group. Let’s go back to the grid view. Number two, to make a lot of subtasks at once, click on the tasks that you want as the parent. Then hold Shift and click on the last task that you want to make a child of that parent. Then right click on the selection and click Make Subtask. The first task you selected will become the parent of all the rest. Number three, here’s how to export a project plan to Excel. Click on the dropdown arrow next to the project plan name and then click on Export to Excel. Now you might get multiple copies of the same document, but it’ll have just about everything you need. The first tab has every project task and just about every property you would want from each task. The second tab has your project goals. Back in Planner and on to number four. Earlier, we assigned some tasks to some individuals who don’t have project plan licenses, like Alex here. I’m actually now signed in as Alex, and you notice I just have basic access to this plan. This means I can view the plan and I can still make basic edits to most of the properties in a task. But I can’t access the timeline view, people view, goals, or assignments. If I try, I’m hit with a free trial offer. And number five, if you can’t find a feature you think should be there, double check in the web apps. For example, here is the basic project plan that we created earlier, and if you click on the three dots next to the view type, you get a ton of extra options. This includes copy plan and export plan to Excel, which you won’t see in Microsoft Teams. So, what do you think? Did what you see convince you to change your current task management approach? Leave a comment and let me know. And if you enjoyed what you saw today, leave us a like, and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. This is David signing out, and I’ll see you next time.