Microsoft Planner cheat sheet: How to get started

Remember when “planning” at work meant sticky notes plastered across your monitor and endless email threads about who’s doing what? As it is wont to do, Microsoft has “reimagined” the sea of Post-it notes as a fairly sophisticated set of software planning tools, and the result is something that might actually make you less resistant to the idea of organizing your work life.

Microsoft has smooshed together three of its most popular productivity tools — the personal task manager To Do, the team-focused Planner, and the robust Project for the web — into a single, intelligent workspace now known simply as Microsoft Planner. Those tools still exist separately, but you can think of Planner as an overlay of them all, a unified view that can handle everything from your personal grocery list to managing a company-wide marketing reboot.

(And put on your “shocked” face, because you must, must be surprised to learn that Microsoft has integrated its Copilot generative AI assistant into Planner as well.)

In this guide, I’ll take you through everything you need to know about the new Microsoft Planner, from creating your first task to managing complex project portfolios.

In this article:

Getting started with Microsoft Planner

Core task management features

Shared plans

What Planner is not — and other complications to know about

The last word

Getting started with Microsoft Planner

The first thing you need to know about the new Microsoft Planner is that it’s available in two main places: in Microsoft Teams and via the web interface at planner.cloud.microsoft. While both options give you access to the same data, many users find themselves starting with the Teams version, as it’s deeply integrated with their daily workflow. There’s also a mobile app (for Android or iOS).

If you’re accessing Planner through the web interface, you’ll notice the experience is nearly identical to the Teams version, but it loads a bit faster and can be kept open in a separate browser tab. This can be particularly useful when you’re doing focused planning work or need to reference your tasks while working in other applications.

Planner is included with all Microsoft 365/Office 365 enterprise subscriptions but is not available to customers with M365 small business or consumer plans. Some advanced Planner features and templates require an add-on subscription.

Planner on the web

When you first open Planner, you’ll be greeted by a two-pane interface. The left navigation panel is where you’ll find four key areas: My Day, My Tasks, My Plans, and Pinned. Think of My Day as a one-stop shop for what you need to do today across all of your lists, My Tasks as your personal task list, and My Plans as your team collaboration space where others and you can share tasks and status.

Use Planner’s main navigation panel to view today’s tasks, all tasks assigned to you, or the group projects you’re part of.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Let’s take a moment to understand each of these areas.

My Day is exactly what it sounds like – a focused view of what you need to accomplish today. It shows you tasks you’ve previously pulled out from your larger task list, along with any tasks with a due date of today. You can add tasks to My Day from any of your lists, making it perfect for folks who like to take a few minutes with a coffee to identify their “must-dos” that day — good productivity advice for us all, in fact.

My Tasks shows you everything assigned to you across all plans and projects. The default grid view gives you a spreadsheet-like interface where you can sort, filter, and group tasks. If you want to focus on a task or two today specifically, you can right-click on them and select Add to My Day, and that’ll transfer them over to the My Day view described above.

My Plans is a list of projects or initiatives that you’re working on with others.

A quick note about navigation: the top bar of your screen is contextual, meaning it changes based on what you’re viewing. When you’re in a plan, you’ll see options for different views (Grid, Board, Timeline, etc.) and plan settings. In My Tasks or My Day, you’ll see options for filtering and organizing your personal tasks.

When you’re viewing a plan, the top navigation shows different plan views and options.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Planner in Teams

Planner seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Teams, providing easy access through the Teams sidebar. To install it, click Apps in Teams’ left navigation strip and search for planner. Find the Planner app in the results and click Add to install it.  

To access Planner in Teams, look for the Planner icon in the left navigation. If you don’t see it, click the three-dot icon (View more apps) and select it in the pop-up pane. Consider pinning Planner to your sidebar for quick access: right-click the app icon and select Pin.

This integration brings your Planner tasks directly into your Teams workspace, allowing you to manage team assignments alongside your communications, documents, and meeting schedule. The Planner interface within Teams mirrors the web version.

You can access Planner tasks and plans through Microsoft Teams.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Remember, whether you’re in Teams or on the web, Planner automatically syncs your data across all devices and interfaces. So you can start planning your day in the web app over morning coffee, check tasks in Teams during the workday, and review tomorrow’s priorities on your phone during the evening commute.

Core task management features

Let’s dive into the bread and butter of Planner: managing tasks.

One of the handiest features in Planner’s My Tasks area is the ability to slice and dice and group your tasks. If you want to see only the tasks that are assigned to you as part of a shared plan (including those that someone else assigned to you), click the Assigned to me button in the top bar; other buttons limit this view to your own personal tasks or emails you flagged in Outlook.

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Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Creating a new task in Planner is simple. In either My Tasks or My Day, click the Add new task button at the bottom of the task list.

The Add new task button is below the task list in My Tasks or My Day.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Type in a name for the task and fill out additional details such as due date, priority, progress status, and the plan you want to assign it to in the columns to the right.

Note that if you create a new task from the “Assigned to me” view in My Tasks, you must select an existing plan to add it to. (We’ll cover creating plans in a moment.) A task you create from the “Private tasks” view is automatically designated as a Private Task and is not assigned to a plan. From the “All” view in My Tasks or from My Day, new tasks default to Private Task but can be assigned to a plan instead.

Another useful way to organize your My Tasks list is by clicking the individual columns in your list, which instantly sorts them by due date, priority, progress, or the plan to which they belong. For instance, grouping by due date can quickly show you if you’ve got too much on your plate for this week.

You can also use the Filters dropdown at the upper right to filter the tasks by specific due dates, specific progress milestones, and/or specific priorities, in case you need to know everything that was due yesterday, is behind, and is a high priority. (I can’t imagine why.)

Anything you have flagged in Outlook as a to-do or entered separately into Microsoft To Do will show up in this list thanks to the magic of the Microsoft 365 graph that integrates all of your data everywhere. And when you mark things completed or otherwise change their status in Planner, that information will make it over to the other services as well, so you should always have access to the most up-to-date information.

And in Teams, there’s another way to create tasks: directly from Teams conversations. When action items emerge during chats, group discussions, or meetings, you can quickly convert them into tasks by clicking the three-dot icon for the message, selecting Create Planner task, and filling out details such as the assignee and the plan it should be added to. These tasks automatically populate your chosen Planner board, integrating smoothly with your existing project workflow.

Shared plans

In Planner, collaboration revolves around shared plans. Creating a new plan is as simple as clicking the New plan button at the bottom of the left panel and giving it a name.

But here’s where it gets interesting: you can choose from various templates depending on your needs, from simple task tracking to full-blown agile project management.

When you create a new plan, you can choose from a variety of templates.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Once you’ve chosen a template, type in a name for the new plan. You can optionally add it to your pinned plans and/or add the plan to a Microsoft 365 group in your organization. In some cases, you’ll want to create the plan privately, build it out, and then invite others to it.

The juice of Microsoft Planner is in the My Plans area. Here’s what you see by default when you click on My Plans in the left bar of your view:

You can see all of your plans in one place, and click on the one you would like to drill into for more details.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Click any plan in your plans list to open it. When viewing a plan in Planner’s default Board layout, tasks appear as individual cards arranged in vertical columns. Clicking any card reveals an expanded view with comprehensive task details.

Board view for a plan shows tasks as a series of cards arranged in columns.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Adding task details

Planner offers several powerful features that activate based on the information you include in your tasks. Here’s what one card reveals in terms of detailed information about the task:

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Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Planner tasks are highly customizable, requiring only a task name at minimum. While you could use Planner as a basic task list with names alone, incorporating additional details unlocks its full potential.

Here are the key optional fields that enhance task management:

The due date field does more than just track deadlines — it enables filtering capabilities, powers the Charts view, and triggers notifications. This makes it perhaps the most valuable optional detail you can add to a task.

Progress tracking offers three status options: Not started, In progress, and Completed. This typically involves two updates during a task’s lifecycle: marking it as In progress when work begins, and as Completed when finished.

The Priority field includes four levels: Low, Medium, Important, and Urgent. Unlike due dates and progress states, priority can be dynamic, shifting up or down as project needs evolve.

Labels provide another powerful organizational tool. With 25 color-coded options available, labels help categorize tasks based on plan-specific criteria. Teams might use them to indicate review status, budget constraints, quarterly targets, or departmental ownership. They effectively group related tasks, helping you quickly identify relevant work.

Don’t forget to assign the task to the appropriate person — a colleague, your boss (if you have that sort of relationship!), or others on the team — so that the task shows up properly in their Planner instance. This will also help you easily see if one person has a relatively full plate, which could become a bottleneck, and whether you need to reevaluate your priorities or reassign other tasks.

These five fields — due date, progress, priority, labels, and assignment — integrate with various Planner features and appear visually on task cards in the Board view. These visual indicators enable quick status assessment when scanning the plan, allowing team members to instantly grasp task details without opening individual cards.

Buckets in Board view

As noted previously, tasks on the board are grouped into columns, which Planner calls “buckets.” This is Microsoft’s implementation of a Kanban board. What’s that, you ask? A Kanban board is a visual project management tool that helps teams organize and track work through different stages of completion.

Originally developed by Toyota for manufacturing processes, it consists of columns representing workflow stages (such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done”) with tasks displayed as cards that move from left to right as they progress. This visual approach makes it easy for teams to identify bottlenecks, manage workload, and maintain a steady flow of work. Kanban boards are particularly effective for teams practicing agile methodologies, as they promote transparency, limit work-in-progress to prevent overload, and facilitate continuous improvement through clear visualization of workflow patterns.

So Planner is your team’s Kanban board, and each bucket serves as a high-level category for grouping related tasks — whether by workflow stage, client, department, or any other logical organization scheme. To customize the buckets, click the three-dot icon next to any bucket header to see options for renaming, moving, or deleting it. To the far right is an empty column where you can create a new bucket; there is no limit to how many buckets you can create on a board.

To move a task from one bucket to another, open the task and select a new bucket from the Bucket drop-down. You can also drag and drop tasks between buckets.

While buckets provide one way to organize tasks, Planner offers additional sorting options: you can alternatively arrange tasks by their due dates, progress status, priority level, assigned labels, or team member assignments. Click the Group by Bucket drop-down at the upper-right to see these options.

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Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Collaborating on a plan

If you haven’t already shared your plan with a Microsoft 365 group in your organization, you can invite co-workers to it by clicking the Share button at upper right. On the screen that appears, you can either select an existing group in your organization to invite to the plan or create a new group by inviting individual people from your corporate address book. Anyone you’ve invited will receive a notification email.

Once you’ve added others to your plan, they’ll be able to edit it — adding and updating tasks, customizing buckets, and so on. You can also assign tasks to each other: On any task in Board view, click the icon of a person with a plus sign and type/select the name of a plan member. If you want to reassign a task to someone else, click the icon of the person it’s assigned to and type/select a new name. You can also open the task’s details pane and add or change the assignment there.

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Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Schedule view

The schedule view shows tasks on their due dates in a convenient, familiar calendar view by month or week. You can choose to hide or show recurring tasks out into the future if their current iteration hasn’t been completed.

Schedule view for a plan gives you a quick overview of what’s due when.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Charting

Within a plan, you can click the Charts tab at the top to access charts that can help you assess whether your overall plan is on track or not. There aren’t many of them, but the limited selection that is there can be useful for quick updates or rudimentary status reporting.

Charts view shows visual summaries of a plan, such as how many tasks are in each bucket.
Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

The results that are displayed in these charts rely on users updating the status of individual tasks within the cards. There are no advanced project management concepts of effort, hours required, automatic tracking of items being checked in, or anything else — just users going into task cards and marking “in progress” or “complete.” Still, with a bit of diligence, these charts can be useful.

Using the Filters drop-down, you can toggle on and off tasks that meet certain criteria, which can be useful if, say, you are interested in only tasks that are late, or seeing who on your team has the most tasks, or if there are urgent or important tasks that remain incomplete.

That is, however, the extent of the reporting in Planner. While it’s better than nothing and can save you some time, it is no match for resource planning or project management software.

What Planner is not — and other complications to know about

Planner is not a replacement for Microsoft Project. It will not really forecast the completion date of a multistep effort with lots of dependencies. It is not suitable for enterprise resource planning, tracking a complex manufacturing process, developing schedules for raw material production, or anything like what you would consider appropriate for use with Project.

Rather, it is a casual tool designed mostly to help organize workgroup projects — although Microsoft says it integrates with Viva, its corporate management system, where it could pull down goals and operational key results (OKRs) into a planner view.

There are no inherent time limits or scope limits for these projects, but the rule of thumb is the simpler, the better: I can’t really see using Planner as a comprehensive planning resource with more than about a dozen people, max. Otherwise it is too rudimentary a model. (For more details about the differences between Project and Planner, see Matt Wade’s helpful post “Which Tool When: Microsoft Project or Microsoft Planner?”)

In a previous version of this article, I lamented that Planner cannot do Gantt charts. This is still basically true, although in Microsoft’s inimitable way, there is confusion surrounding this. I mentioned at the top of the article that some features require add-on subscriptions, and this is one of them. To create a Gantt chart, you’ll need a Planner Plan 1 license (formerly known as Premium) or higher, which provides access to both Planner and Microsoft Project for the web. And you’ll need a Planner and Project Plan 3 subscription or higher to get the advanced project management features found in the Project Online desktop client service — and to use Microsoft Copilot in Planner.

It gets more confusing. Although Microsoft has changed the names of its Planner paid subscriptions, it still uses the old Basic and Premium nomenclature when you set up a new project in Planner. Basic corresponds to “included with Microsoft 365” and Premium means “requires an add-on subscription.”

Each time you click the New plan button, you’ll have the option to create either a Basic or Premium plan — be sure to choose Premium if you need Gantt chart functionality. (If you choose Premium and your company doesn’t already have a Planner add-on subscription, you’ll be offered a 30-day trial.) While both plan types offer distinct features, some capabilities are exclusive to each version, so it’s worth reviewing the current feature comparison chart online before you decide which type of plan to create.

Got that?

Planner is also not a replacement for SharePoint. Think of Planner as an overlay that ties together SharePoint, Outlook, and a few other Microsoft 365/Office 365 resources and brings these objects together in a different view. The resources themselves still live in individual services like SharePoint and Exchange Online, but Planner gives you a logical view of those resources in conjunction with team planning.

It is also not for use with any teams that include folks without access to Microsoft 365/Office 365. There is essentially no functionality for users outside your Office 365 tenant. If your project relies on external contractors and vendors, either someone inside your organization with access to your 365 tenant will need to be the “point person” for those actions, or you will need to find a different planning system.

The last word

For Microsoft 365 enterprise customers, the new Microsoft Planner is a genuinely useful tool that brings together personal task management, team collaboration, and (light) project planning in a single, cohesive platform. Whether you’re managing your daily to-do list or coordinating team projects, Planner’s scalable features make it possible to work efficiently and effectively. The integration with Microsoft 365, particularly Teams, ensures that Planner fits seamlessly into your existing workflows while providing the structure needed for successful project execution.

This article was originally published in October 2020 and most recently updated in October 2025.

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