Introduction

Microsoft Planner is one of the productivity apps available in Microsoft 365 suite. You can create a plan and assign tasks to each team member in a visually appealing way and collaborate effectively. In this blog, we will share four important tips to get most out of Planner app and empower everyone in the team.

Tip 1: Link Planner with MS Teams 

If you use Microsoft Teams, you can add Planner tabs to a team channel. This will make it easy for you to work on your plan from within MS Teams without switching back and forth between platforms. You can easily attach MS Teams files to Planner tasks which makes it less likely to miss anything critical. Linking Planner with Microsoft Teams increases transparency as it helps team members to view which tasks are assigned to whom.

Tip 2: Create reporting on plans using Power BI

Using Power BI, you can initiate powerful reporting capabilities in Microsoft Planner. You can have full visibility on Planner data and derive real-time project reports in a dashboard. Power BI provides powerful analytics for Microsoft Planner projects and teams which makes it easy to track progress and manage people and resources across projects and plans. Furthermore, reports and insights can be shared on desktop and mobile devices across your organization.

Tip 3: Add plan to calendar

You can publish your Planner tasks on Outlook calendar using iCalendar feed. This feature can be used to import Planner tasks into Outlook to help users in time management and tracking of ongoing and upcoming tasks. Furthermore, you can add start and due date while creating a plan which shows up in your Outlook feed.

Tip 4: Get deeper insights with group and filter feature

Group and filter option in MS Planner is particularly helpful when users have a critical project deadline to meet. You can filter tasks based on due dates and get alerts or emails about upcoming deadlines. Also, users can define priorities for important tasks, create labels or buckets for a task, check the tasks unassigned, easily find tasks using keyword or date filters, and more. Good thing about this feature is that you can combine multiple criteria to narrow down the results. For example, you can filter ‘Urgent’ tasks for ‘Today’ or that are ‘Late’.

Conclusion

Planner is an excellent tool to reduce the chaos out of remote teams while creating, assigning, and managing plans. Using Planner, teams can work together closely and effortlessly. Additionally, automating MS Planner can take user experience to next level by streamlining tasks and empowering users.

If you want to know more about MS Planner or how to automate MS Planner to achieve greater business goals, please contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com