Today, I'm going to
show you how you can use Microsoft Planner to track the tasks and projects of your team. This way you all know
who's responsible for what. If you want to keep track of your own personal tasks and projects you can also create
your own personal plan. If you have no idea what Planner is here's a quick overview. Planner is a visual tool. It's customizable and super easy to use. It's very similar to Trello or monday.com in case you're familiar with them. You can assign tasks in
what looks like cards. Inside these mini cards you can include lots of
information and history about this task. You can move these cards
around to different buckets, track progress, deadlines, filter data, and best of all, it's fully integrated with other Microsoft apps like Teams. I'll show you how you can
do the team integration with Planner towards the end of the video. Don't miss that if you're using Teams. It's going to give you
a productivity boost. Now for our team projects,
we used to use Trello. We switched to Planner sometime ago because we're using all
the other Microsoft apps and we're really happy with it because everything is so well integrated. Let me show you now how Planner works and how you can integrate it. (upbeat music) You can access Planner from Office.com or directly from your
Microsoft Teams desktop. Now I'll go to Office.com first and later show you the view from Teams and how you can integrate it there. So just go to Office.com and login with your 365 account. Once you've logged in,
click on the app launcher in the top left corner. If you don't find it under apps, just click on all apps here and scroll down till you see it. This is going to take
you to the Planner hub which shows you to plans
you've created yourself or the plans you've been
added to by other people. If it's the first time
you're using this hub it's going to be empty. So let's create a new plan. Now, what is the plan? We'll think of a plan as a project or something you need to do that involves multiple smaller tasks. So here you can give your plan a name. Let's say you're responsible
for a new project which is about making improvements to your current finance system. Let's call it Finance System Update. Now here's something important. If you want to share your
plan with an existing group or a team in Microsoft Teams
that you're a member of, then select Add to existing 365 group. This is good practice because then everyone in
the team in that group has access to this project. You can then search for
your group or select it. Now you're only going to see
the ones that you remember of. Now, let me just go back to
show you the other options. Instead of adding an existing 365 group you can create a public plan. This means everyone in
the organization can join and make changes to the plan once you share the link them. After you shared the link they can see the plan
in their recent plans. Your other option is to
create a private plan. Now, this is good if
you're creating a plan for yourself or for specific people and there is no 365 group
or teams available for it. In our example, though, I'm going to go to this 365 group and select the finance
group for this project. This way, everyone in the finance team is going to have access to it. And because it's a collaborative tool everyone can create and
update to tasks that we have in the plan. So let's create the plan. Once we get to this view inside board you have the ability to
add tasks and buckets. What are buckets? Buckets organize groups of similar tasks. The way you organize your buckets depends on you and your project. In our project here which is about making improvements
to our finance system, I can add a bucket for ideas. Now underneath this I can collect each idea
separately as a task. Let's add the buckets first
and then move to tasks. Another bucket can contain approved ideas. Let's also add a design bucket then a testing one, then implementation. It's really up to you and
the people you work with how you like to organize
your tasks and buckets. So notice in this case it's different phases
of our finance project but you can have buckets
for different departments or different chapters of a
book that you're writing. When I create a plan for my online courses I have a bucket for each section, it's fully flexible
depending on what you want. Now, here's a good time to also talk about what Microsoft Planner
isn't well suited for. It's not a tool for large
and complex projects where you need to manage
resources and capacities. And it's also not suited when
you want to organize the work into phases and have
dependencies between tasks. If that's what you need,
check out Microsoft Project. But if you're looking for a collaborative and easy to use task management software then Planner will work for you. You can also have multiple
plans for the same group because your group might be
working on different projects. Now that we set up the different buckets let's take a look at tasks. To add a new task so let's say I want to
add a new task to ideas just click on Add task. This creates a new card. Enter the task name. In this case it's the name of my idea. Let's say, one idea is to copy data from one account to another. Let's add that with the account codes. I can assign a person to this task. If you have a lot of names,
you can search for it here. So I'm currently logged
in as this user XelPlus. I'm the owner of this task. I'm going to go ahead
and select this person to be responsible for this task. You can also assign multiple people or leave this completely
empty and do it later. In this case, I'll just leave one person. You have the ability to set a due date but you can also always
update these later. So let's just go with add task now. I can see the title of my task here and I can add a lot more detail to it by clicking on this task. I can add a label, this way I can color code similar tasks. This has both visual benefits
as well as filter benefits which I'll show you in a second. So let's say for copying accounts we want to use pink, and I'll rename this to copy account. This is the current bucket
my task is sitting in, it's in the ideas bucket. Under progress you can specify whether this task is not started, in progress or completed. Let's set this to in progress. You get to assign a priority to this task, the date you need to start working on it and a due date. You can also add some notes to your task and include some links if you need to. When you go out of this view,
the links will be clickable. A really good feature down
here is the checklist. You can add multiple
items to create subtasks. So for our task here, let's
add some steps we need to do. For example, we need to
plan steps with accounting. We need to test concept on
two years of historical data. And finally, let's just press Enter to add another item. We need to present to steering committee. We can cross off tasks we've already done by placing a check mark beside it and get to see our progress here. When this box is checked, it's going to show the list of
open items on the card directly. Let me show you. Let's close this. Everything is automatically saved. Under Board view we
get this nice overview. We don't see the item
we already crossed off, only the remaining items. This shows us how many we completed. We can cross them off directly
from the Board view as well. Now you can also show other
information on the card if you want. Of course, this is going to cost
you some space on the board. So if you have a lot of cards you might not want to show anything. Another great feature is the
ability to add attachments. You can attach files
from your local computer. So anything you upload will be stored in the SharePoint library. This way it's going to
be available for everyone working on the plan. You can add links here as
well by entering a URL. And if the file is already
stored in the SharePoint library you can select it directly from here. And finally, you can also add comments. Click Send once you're
ready to post the comment. Now this is going to do two things. For one, it's going to show
a comment symbol on the card to give the team a heads up that there is something new to read. And because it's fully integrated in 365, the comment will go right to
the shared Outlook mailbox. So if you open your Outlook
and go to a group section you will see this email in
the mailbox of the group. So that's how a task is created. You can update the
information of this task whenever you need. If you want to use
shortcut keys to add a task you can use the Tab key to move to the next item or
Shift + Tab to move backwards. When you get to add task, just press Enter and type in your title. Press Enter again, to add the task. Another thing you can do if you'd like to copy the
properties for example, the checklist of an existing task is to copy a task instead of
creating one from scratch. Go to more options, select Copy task, update the name, select the plan name. In this case it's my current plan but I can also copy it
to other plans as well. Select the bucket name and the properties you'd like to copy. I'll copy dates as well. Then select Copy. This is a standalone card now. You can go in and update
any information you'd like. I'll assign a new person to this. This time let's go with XelPlus, the user I'm logged in with. By the way every time you
were assigned a new task you're going to get an email notification about this in your inbox. Oh, and let me show you one more thing. It's about attachments and
how you can collaborate on these directly on SharePoint. Let's change the name of the first bucket to project info. Here I'd like to add the
project design document. I'll add a task, go in the card and add an attachments. This document is already on SharePoint. So all I have to do is just select it. I'll show it on the card. Now, check this out. When I click on it it opens up the document
on SharePoint directly. Any changes I make will be
reflected in SharePoint. Let's close this tab and go back. Now I also want to add an Excel file which has the project timeline. This one is on my desktop so let's browse for it and add it in. So the moment I add it here this file is loaded to SharePoint and any changes we make to this file is going to be reflected
in the SharePoint version. Let me show it to you by
going back to attachments from any card and you can see
the file in SharePoint now. Okay, that's how tasks
and attachments work. But how do you make use of these buckets? Let's say for this task
that was assigned to Chris he's completed everything from his side. Let's just go in from his account and add a comment that
he signed off on this. Not either him or any of us in the team can move the card to the next bucket. So remember, in this
case our buckets reflect phases of the project. All we have to do is drag the card over into the approval bucket. This way the team knows the
current status of this task. Now the card can be
updated here to reflect any new needs we might have
to get the approval done. So let's say the XelPlus
user who created everything is the project manager. I'm going to go back
to the XelPlus account. Go to the card and assign another team member called Admin that needs to work on this. This way they will get a
notification in Outlook. Now, when Admin goes in they can see the checklist was completed. They can add their own
checks if they need to and also view the history of comments or any attachments that
concerns this task. Once they're done from their side, they can drag this or any of us on the team can
drag this to the next phase. Then the next one, and
finally to implementation. Once the task is done, you
can mark it as completed. And once you close the card you'll see it archived under completed. You can bring it back if you need to by setting it back to in progress. Now let's check out the
different views you have. This is the standard Board view and I have Group by Bucket. You can change the
grouping with this dropdown and select another view. For example, show tasks
by person or by progress. You can also organize by due
date, priority or by labels. With the filter dropdown,
you can restrict a view and only show tasks that are due within a certain timeframe,
with a certain priority. Progress. You can restrict it to a specific person or show unassigned tasks. If you click it again,
you remove the filter. Let's go to label and
filter for copy account. And my results will be
filtered to this label only. Click it again to remove
the filter or select Clear to remove all filters. If you want a more visual
display of your plan you can select the charts view. Here you quickly see how many tasks are running late in the status chart, or in the bucket chart
you'll get an overview of the tasks by bucket. And with the priority chart you can see how many tasks
you have in each priority. Down here, you get an overview by member to see if the workload is balanced. When you select Schedule up here you get a calendar type
of view for your tasks. From this view, you can adjust
tasks by clicking on them. You get back to task view. If you update the duration of a task it's going to automatically
update on the calendar. You can also create new
tasks from this view by clicking on the plus here, type in the name select a bucket and adjust
ideas if you need to. On this side you get to see
the list of unscheduled tasks or tasks that are not
showing up on the calendar. So let's go back to Board view, in case you ever need to delete a task you can go to more
options and select Delete. Another great feature is the ability to export
this plan to Excel. Click on more options,
export plan to Excel. Let's open it. We get the task information including our checklist
information all in Excel. Remember, you can also
be part of many plans. How do you keep track of all the tasks that are assigned to you? There is an option for that. To see all tasks assigned to
you, go to this icon here. You get to view all your
tasks, regardless of plan. You can see the plan name on the card. Now I kept the best for last. If you use Microsoft Teams you can easily add
Planner to your team view. Just log into Teams, go to the channel where you
want to add this plan to. Select the plus, look for Planner. It's called Tasks by Planner and To Do. We have the option to create a new plan or use an existing plan. In this case, we already have our plan. Let's select it from the dropdown. click on Save and the plan is added to our channel tab in Teams. You can of course rename this if you want, just right mouse click rename,
and adjust as you need. The great thing about this is that from Teams you can access Planner and all the files inside Planner. You don't have to go from
the browser to office.com. You have everything in one place. So that's the essentials
for Microsoft Planner. As you can see, it's pretty
easy to manage the team work or just your own work. The card-based interface
is great for organizing and scheduling activities and keeping everyone informed
about the status of a task. And you can also use the
Planner app for iOS and Android So you can keep up with
your plans on the go. That's all for today. Don't forget to subscribe
and hit that bell so you can find these types of tutorials directly in your subscription feed. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. (upbeat music)
