Learn to Organise Personal and Team Projects in Microsoft Planner

1. Welcome: Hey guys, I'm Anthony and Educator, Course Leader, Speaker and YouTuber. I've worked in large and small organizations and over the years had more than a passing obsession with productivity, learning, habit formation, and task management. This course is all about how Microsoft plan that can help you to get organized in all areas of your personal and professional life, your family, and your business. We'll be looking at how this task management tool can help you get better organized both as an individual and set systems and routines that will help in your organization as well. Microsoft Planner sits between Microsoft To Do and Microsoft Projects. It's not a free tool. You'll need to have a subscription to a paid Microsoft account, which we'll discuss along the way, I'm going to be showing you the various versions for web and mobile apps, which can work together to ensure you're never without a way to organize your own and your team's tasks and projects and create a shared understanding of how to organize them as all my courses. Rather than going to the menu by menu, we'll explore planner in the context of practical examples and scenarios that give you a sense of the different ways it can be used and how it can scale to small teams and larger organizations will be learning about how to make use of the various layouts of planner and how to make new plans and control their settings, Sharing and permissions. We'll learn how to organize tasks into buckets or categories, and how to create lists of tax in different ways, and how to assign tasks to others and view yours and other tasks independent of the team tasks. We will learn how to use the various properties of the task cards to make sub-tasks, set due dates, and make notes and comments for your team or yourself will also learn to use labels and as an alternative to buckets. And how to filter and search using all of these criteria to make truly customized systems to suit yourself or your team. The progress view for gathering data and schedule view to see a calendar of task deadlines will also be explored as we're exporting tasks and lists and connecting to other for Microsoft tools. This is very much the course I wish I'd been able to take when I started trying to manage personal and team tasks in any purposeful way. I hope you'll join it and enjoy the process. 2. Getting Planner: Let's first look at how we get Planner. Planner is part of a Microsoft 365 account, sometimes called M365, or it might also be called Office 365. Now, you can have a free Office account or a free Microsoft account, in other words, but you need a paid subscription accounts to have Planner as part of that subscription. And that can be a business and enterprise or an education subscription. You can find out about those for your region by clicking we get off this button here at office.com, which is where we've initially gone. And that will give you the details for the various subscriptions. You might also have it as part of your work or organization. Today we're going to have a look at lots of contexts to use it in both those situations. What we want to do now having that account is to click on Sign-in. At which point using your organization's email address and password will take you through to this page. This is the office.com homepage. We're still at www.office.com. And here you can see it's taken me through to show me my most recent files as the part of the landing page. With all of these areas. I can filter it by searching here or upload something new if I want to install Office to my device, and I have that as part of my license. I can click the Install Office button here, the dropdown to allow me to select just certain apps from within the Office offering. Now we're interested today in going and seeing planner. When I look down the shortcut links down this left-hand edge here, I can actually see the planner icon here. It's this one that looks like a green triangle, if you like, sort of pixelated green triangle. However, if it's not in that list, then I want to go to the waffle, which is this icon in the top left corner, and click on that, which is called the App Launcher. Otherwise, when I click on it, it will bring up, as well as recent documents below some of the apps that I use most. Again, if I don't see it in that list, then I can click on this all apps link here and open the alphabetical list, at which point now I definitely know when I scroll down and reach the p section, planner will be there. Wherever you find it. Let's click on that Planner link, at which point it will take me through to the planet app itself in the browser. Here you can see now I'm at tasks.office.com. You can go straight to that address and login there, and it will have the same effect. Let's have a look at how we get to Planner on a mobile device. On iOS. If I go to the App Store on my phone and then search for Planner, there are a number of apps available with that title. So the one that we're wanting is this one here called Microsoft Planner. Then I will hit the download link on the right by the title. Then open the app. At which point I need to use the email address and password to match my account. Once logged in, I will then be able to access all of the various planner boards available through the account. 3. Layout in Planner: Now, what is Planner? Planner is a tool for managing personal projects and tasks and shared projects and tasks. It sits between several other Microsoft tools. Planner uses this Kanban style layout we can see here with cards on boards. And as part of the productivity suite that would also include free offerings such as Microsoft ToDo app, which you can see here is about making to-do lists. Now I have an entire course on to-do that. You can also access from my profile. And that would be on one side and on the other side of the offer would be Microsoft Project, which is a further subscription-based tool that you can see offers much more comprehensive project based task management options like this. As we get to know, planner will realize that it uses a cards or Kanbans style layout that is very reminiscent of post-it notes. And in this way is very much like third-party offerings such as Trello. However, this one is built into your office subscription. Now there's several ways to start a new plan. When we have none, we have this button in the middle creates a plan that will disappear when we have some plans available. We also in the top-left corner have this new plan option here. All of our existing plans will be available from this link, the Planner hub. And we'll see that as soon as we create one. And all of our tasks amalgamated from any plans that were part of will be available from here under my tasks. There's also a favorite section which we'll come back to once we have some favorite plans. And then under more we'll see the plans that are not selected as favorites as well. Down here we see the get's planner app link, which will allow us to download it for our phones or mobile devices. Additionally, like all Office apps, in the top-right corner, there's a **** that opens up settings and other preferences that we're looking at later Help section that allows us to search for our own support. Then clicking on your own initials will open up links. Then clicking, then clicking on your own initials will open up the options to sign out of the account or to access further account information. Whatever part of the plan or app we're viewing, we can see that this small area down the left-hand side, about a sixth of the screen is going to be how we navigate between different areas of planner and different plans themselves. And then this other large area, the five-sixths of the screen over here, he's going to be the working area where we will view different plans and different tasks within plants. From this small icon here that looks a little bit like a burger and is often called the burger menu. You can see that it's called the left navigation pane. By clicking it, we can contract that menu area down to Icon only. And if we click it again, we can expand it back out again as well. 4. Making a New Planner Board: Let's make our first plan. Now there are two ways to do this. We're going to start off using the new plan link within the planner app at tasks.office.com. This would be the main way that people working for themselves or in very small organizations may well-managed planner. The alternative to this is to use Microsoft Teams. Now remember, Microsoft Teams is part of our app list here It's within our M365 subscription, very likely. And through this, we can set up teams of groups of people that work together, collaborate on documents and communicate regularly. We can set up planner boards through Microsoft Teams as well. We'll come back to that later because there's lots of good reasons why there might be times that you want to do that. Let's close that for now and just concentrate on working within the planner app. I'm going to click on new plan and give it a title. Public means anyone in my organization, as it says, there can see the plan contents. Private means only members I add, concede applying contents. Now for most situations, private is the more appropriate option, but you can choose to make it a plan that everybody can see. If I click on the further Options drop-down link, then you can see currently the only option that's available at this time is to give a description to this group plan. I'm going to click on Create plan. As you can see here, it takes me straight to my new board. Unless I said before, if you're familiar with something like Trello that is post-it note style based or Kanban, it's often called that you can see the layout looks fairly similar. We've got what are called buckets along the top here. I'm within it. We're going to make lists of tasks that we can move around afterwards. Plan can be for a single project or it could hold a number of projects within it. We can repeat this and have as many plans listed down the side available as we choose. If I click on the favorite star here, then you can see this list of personal tasks move straight to this area. If I uncheck it, it becomes available in my recent list here. Now that we have a plan available, Let's click on Planner hub again. And we can see this time as well as a reminder to get the mobile app which I will just remove. It now offers us this personal tasks plan available within our recent list of plans. Clicking on that will take me straight back to this view. Once inside this view, I can use that burger menu in the top left corner to once again minimize or maximize that side menu just as I could from the other screens. Each plan board we create will have some similar features across the top here, we'll have some links to navigate the different views of the board. An ellipsis or three dots there, which will give us more options for ways to manage this plan. In the top-right corner. Ways to view the membership. Remember at the moment it's just shared to ourselves and ways to filter or group the contents. And it's these powerful ways to navigate and view the planner boards that make them incredibly versatile. So we're going to explore lots of different ways that we can use this tool, not just as an individual, but then shared to others and as part of groups and organizations as well. 5. Using Buckets: Let's look at our first plan, personal tasks, and start to get organized. Now, first of all, if you're not happy with the title you've given it, you can go to that ellipsis or three dots menu and go straight down to plans settings. And from here, you're going to be able to change the plan name straightaway. You can do some other things in here, such as change the color of backgrounds and make things more interesting. For now, I'll leave it playing just while we get our head around things. Then additionally, can change the settings for this plan, including that public private option, and give a description. And also then control notifications. So let's also control notifications. This menu will come back to a little bit later. Okay, so let's look at the way the plan is organized, which is in buckets here the default immediately is to do. And if I click on that link, you can see it opens a text box that lets me change that title. Well, I'm gonna change this to some of the other things I might want. I'm just going to type personal. And you can see just by hitting Enter at the end, it's not changed the title of this bucket by bucket. I mean, this area here underneath this title that is going to become the location where tasks in this bucket are kept. Next to it, I have the add new bucket link. Let me click on that and it's going to let me add new titles. So I'm gonna type finance and hit Enter. You can see it's made a completely new bucket with a similar task link to the first bucket. And move that out, new bucket link up. Let's add a couple more. Hopefully straightaway, you can see that it's possible to add an increasing number of buckets. In this way, I can move back and forth between them using the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. On a touch device, I'd be able to touch the screen and drag left and right. And I can also use the arrow keys on my keyboard as I am here, you can see which is why I get out slightly jumpy effect. So straightaway, one of your best practice decisions for yourself is going to be, do you have very few buckets within a plan so that you can see all of the buckets. This is about average on a wide screen monitor to be able to see four to five buckets at once? Or do you want to have more? In which case you're going to have to do some scrolling left and right to make sure you don't miss out on things. But that will mean you probably have less different plans overall. It's a question to think about. Let's just look in more detail a bucket, as well as being able to click and rename the bucket. I can also, when I hover over it, access these three dots menu to the right of its title. If I click on that for more options, I have that Rename option there as well, but I can also delete the bucket and move it to the left or right if I choose to, let's just move it to the right. You can see it swapped with finance equally. I can grab it and pick it up. And you can see whilst I'm holding it, the location I might take it too, is being grayed out to show me that that's the location it's going to drop into. Let me now let go. And you can see it drops into its new location. So there's lots of flexibility to create bucket size. You need them to delete them when they're not needed, but also to move them around and find the most satisfying order for you. Here on the iOS or mobile version of the app. If I click on the same plan, personal tasks, it then takes me through to the mobile view of that plan. You can see I've brought up the first bucket here, and by scrolling left and right, I can then access the other buckets within the plan. 6. Creating Tasks: We've made it, let's actually add some tasks. So we have our buckets that we set up in the previous lesson. I'm going to click on one. I'm going to click on finance on this Add Task button here. Let's click on it and you can see immediately that opens a text area to type the text of the task itself. And it also straight out, goose me some quick links to things that are most often needed in planner. The first one such due date, which I can then click on and choose the date from this drop-down here if I wish to. Secondly, assign, which will allow me to assign this task strike to somebody else. Now, at the moment, I don't particularly want either of those things. Remember, this is my personal tasks board, so I don't really need to assign it to me because they're all mine. The first thing I'm gonna do is type the name of a task. Now that I've done that, I'm going to hit Enter. And it adds the task below here. Now that I've done that, you can see it adds that task as a small card in this finance bucket and gives me back the empty Add Task Link. Let's add another. This time, rather than just hitting Enter, I'm going to click on the Add Task button below. You can see it has the same effect. I have now both tasks in that bucket below the empty Add Task area. Let's add a few more tasks in these buckets just to get the idea. Right, we've got a few more tasks to work with now, but let's have a little look at what we can do just at this level. Well, this one here, fire last month's receipt, probably if I'm want a super organized myself, really this should be in the finance list. So I've got a couple of ways I can move this. One way is to click here and I could go to move task. That would allow me to take it to a new bucket within this plan. If I had other plans, it would also let me click here and choose other plans, so that's worth remembering for later. However, the easiest way is probably just to grab it once I'm hovering over it. And you can see just like before when I was moving buckets between different orders, now I have a gray area to suggest where the new task is going to move. Let me bring it across to this finance area. And you can see in this bucket now I can move not just the bucket the task is saying, but the order within the bucket that the tasks will appear. Let's put it down there. You can see it's now moved from personal to that finance bucket. Well, let's look what happens when we complete a task. The easiest way to show I've completed a task is to hover over the circle marked area where it's now shows Mark task is complete with the text. I'm going to click in there. You can see it's ticketed off and straightaway disappeared. So how do I get back to that task if I wanted to look at it later? Well now I've got this show completed. Drop-down area appeared with a number of things that have been completed. Numbers one, let me click on that dropdown. And now you can see that it's showing me the card for that task that I've completed is in this hidden completed area. So let's do that again so that we can see it. Now if I want to bring it back, if I didn't really complete it, I can go back to its tick box and untick it. There. You can see it's moved back to the active tasks list within the finance bucket. And that completed task list as disappeared again completely because there are no completed tasks at this time. Here on the mobile version, you can also see in any bucket I have the ADA Task option and clicking in that space allows me to add a task. In the same way, I have the Add button in green, but I also have options to add a due date directly that way, or assign the task to somebody. 7. Organising Tasks: I'm going to click on new plan. This time. Make some shopping lists. Again, it's a private plan. I don't want anyone else within my organization to see it. This time I'm gonna go back to the buckets, but change these to be more reflective of certain shops that I use. There we go. I've added some buckets now that are the names of places that I shop regularly. And while we're at it, we can just see that in this side list of recents, we now have two completely different plans available. We can still jump between the two of them. Remember? And if I go to plan a hub, I now see both of these listed. We can see that the initials of the name of the plan appear on the colored icon as well, just to help us differentiate them, Let's get back to shopping lists. And now I'm going to quickly add a few things. Right there we go. I've added some tasks into each of these, which are actually my shopping lists for each location. Now thinking about it actually, I'd rather get my tomatoes from Sainsbury's, so I'll move that across. And I'd rather get my potatoes from M&S. But I really like a certain sparkling water that comes from Tesco. You can see I can move items around in the same way. I've noticed here, burger roles is spelled wrong. How can I correct that? Well, I'm going to click on this card and you can see it opens a much larger, more detailed version of the card for that task. If I click in that side leg area, actually, there we go. I can just add to it and change it. Now from there I could just click away and it goes back to that view but with the correct spelling. Well, let's get back onto that expanded card by clicking on it again, I look at a bit more detail about this here. So it tells me when it was last changed by who? Remember at the moment I'm not sharing my boards to anyone. I'm just using them myself. I've got that assigned to somebody link where I can click to assign to other people. Labels which we'll look at in more detail later. Some information about where it's contained the bucket within the current plan. I can change that from here. It's progress status, priority. So there's lots of flexibility here. There isn't really appropriate to a food shopping list, but would be appropriate in other situations, start and end dates. But what I want to is this notes area here so that I can add more detail. You might have noticed when I typed in the box that this link here appeared saying show on card with a checkbox. If I tick that box, then when I move away from the card, you can see the text I've added appears on the card as well. Let's just check what undoing that does. Remove the show on card tick box. Here it goes back to not showing that detail, but you can see that having this option to turn on or off where the note appears, just like some of these other features is a really useful way to be able to add detail to each of my items on my shopping list or task list. Let's go into the shopping lists plan on the mobile device. And here you can see all of the same items of food are available. What I want to do now is drag and drop in the same way. So let me hold down sparkling water. Now you can see I can pick it up and move it between lists in the same way, icon on the desktop. If I click on that item, it then brings up a more detailed card view, exactly the same way that I have on the desktop where I can go in and edit various qualities on properties of that task. 8. Task Checklists: We've looked at a couple of ways that buckets can be used for different subjects. Let's look at one more. This time. Let's think about what the bucket titles could be to do with making content. Here's some bucket titles that are more appropriate for a content ideas plan. Let's just scroll along. Here you can see where there are more, it's harder to keep track of. So some people prefer to have less buckets in a plan, but have more plans overall. But you can do this as well. Let's quickly add a few ideas. Here we go, a few tasks that would be appropriate for this particular plan. So if my job was to create content for a one main project, then having a plan called content ideas with tasks like this within it seems really useful. But something we want to do is get a bit more in depth with each of the cards. I'm going to go into this idea here, head shots for the whole team. So I need to get photographs taken for everybody in the team. And maybe there's five or six people. But to do this, I don't want to make a separate task for everybody. I'm going to go down to this checklist tool here. And in here, start to type the names of the people. Let me hit Enter. And when I do it gives me the option to add another name. Here we go. You can see now that I've added all of those names and it's now given me just like before when I clicked on notes and I had an option above it to our show on card. Now that I've added to this checklist, I also have an option here to show this on the card. So let me click away from it. And you can see now headshots for the whole team shows the subtasks that are contained within it, the checklist. And I can tick off any of these from that list as they happen. And you can see the tally at the bottom has changed to show that one of seven has been done. Let me click on the task card to expand it again. And you can see now as well as having cross through and ticked off that item. It also shows me a progress bar with an appropriate amount of the borrower already colored in what I had before. Let's just untick show on card just to prove that those disappear. So the names disappear of the checklist items, but the progress is still visible. Let's click on it again. Actually in this case, it's really nice to have it on the card, but I'm going to uncheck that one and it will reappear out unchanged. And none of seven to show me that though, all those are still needing to be done. Let's add another checklist item here on update this year service page with the new agreed options. I'm going to click there. Go to the checklist on here. I don't know what the services would be for this option, but let's add some n. Again, I'm going to leave it as Show on card. So that then when I click away, you can see the options to make sure I've ticked those are visible as well as the amount that's already done. How else could we use this tool? Well, let's go back to personal tasks. And here on the right-hand side I had a shopping list. Well, I'm going to click on shopping until the task. This time I'm going to go into that task and used the checklist this way. There we go, and I can see all of the things that I need to get and it's available as part of this layout and how my personal tasks with a shopping bucket, rather than having to have an entire shopping lists plan of its own. So there's some flexibility there as well. 9. Assigning Tasks: Okay, let's take a look at assigning tasks. Now. So far, remember these three plans we've made are all personal. So we haven't really assigned tasks to anybody including ourselves because they're all hours. When I click on any particular task in the assign field, it doesn't show anybody's name. And they were all like that. So if I go to my tasks remembering this area at the side, we have new plan Planner hub and my tasks. If I go to my tasks, I don't actually see any tasks in this view because nothing has been specifically assigned to me. Let's go back to that content library area. And this time we'll go into this task landing page header one. I'm going to click on Assign. And from the list of people that are available that this plan is shared too because it's just AS then this is the account that the plan is made in. So I'm going to click on that name. Now. There we go. We've assigned it to Kate leaves. And now you can see here in the assigned to field, it shows Kate lease. And also down here it shows that name against the most recent action here, Let's click away. Now we have the name associated with this task as well. And look, we also have an assigned to box that we can click on that will allow us to add further names here. We now have one task assigned. Now when we clicked on Add task, remember here, we also get an assign box there. So I can click on Assign and add the assigned person to the task are, so I make it. There we go. Now as I've made the task, I'm gonna hit Enter. And as the task is made, it's assigned to a person as well. Let's get back over to my tasks. And we can see now that both of these tasks, I'll now listed as being part of my tasks. Even though we know in reality, we have lots of tasks from these three boards that we've set up. The only ones that are actually assigned and therefore appear in my tasks are these. So depending on how you want to use planner will depend on whether the My Tasks facility is useful to you. In which case, you need to actually assign tasks to yourself. Or whether you don't need it because you're going to be using planner always with just yourself. Now, I would suggest that one of the core strengths of planner is the fact that you can make different plans. And some of them are shared just with yourself. They're personal, and some of them would be shared with your team. And therefore assigning yourself the ones that are definitely yours is probably a really good way forward. Well, which ones wouldn't you do this with? I would suggest perhaps my shopping list items. The minute I start assigning things like burgers to myself, Let's do that here. Means that when I go back to my tasks, I see just a shopping list item like burgers on that list, which isn't particularly helpful as a way to do it. That's something just to be mindful of. Let me click on that name. That means that here it shows it's already assigned and then I can click on the X and remove that name as well. So now it's disappeared from the my tasks list because when I go back to shopping list, burgers no longer has anybody assigned to that specific task. You can do any mix of those two things in the way that you organize, assigning or not assigning tasks as items to a particular individual. You may have noticed then that when I went to my tasks, the burger task appeared here as well, even though that's from my shopping list. And these other tasks listed here are from my content ideas board. Let's go into personal tasks. And I'm now going to assign some of these to myself. We'll see now that in my tasks, all of these appear and that's the strength of the My Tasks facility. It collates all of the different tasks that are assigned to you across all of your different plans. Now here we're seeing it as this not started in progress and completed view. As we said before, both Planner hub and my tasks on each of the different plans have view options. At the moment, up by group, it says By progress, if I click on that and change it to buy plan. We can now see these tasks are from our content ideas plan. These tasks are from our personal tasks plan. We could also organize by due date. And at the moment we haven't used date, so they will appear with no date. And we could also organize by priority, but again, we haven't set a priority for any of these. So at the moment they all show with medium priority. In that way, you can customize the view of my tasks as a way to collate all of the tasks that have been assigned to you from each of your different boards. Now again, this is really helpful because it's another way to identify key tasks at that time. Although I have lots of items on my personal tasks board, and also lots of items on my content ideas board. I've only assigned myself the ones that I want to deal with at the moment. It may be that more of these are actually mine, but I don't want to see them all in the My Tasks area yet. I only want to see the ones that I'm currently working with. So again, that's a flexibility in the way that you can use assigning tasks to yourself. In a little while, we're going to look at assigning tasks to others. Let's come out of shopping list. And when we look at the bottom area of the screen, you can see just like on the desktop or browser version, I have settings Planner hub in the center, which is the view I'm seeing now. And if I click to the left on my tasks, it then takes me to the same view of my tasks that I see when I look at my tasks in the browser. Here by because of the way we're filtering it, I can see not started. And if I scroll to the right, I see in progress tasks and completed tasks there as well. Just like in the desktop browser version, I can click on the Filter icon in the top-right corner. I'm changed the way I see it. So now let's change to plan view. Straightaway. It's showing me the content ideas plan. I can scroll through and see some other plans that I have setup as well in the browser version here on my phone. 10. The Task Card: Let's take a proper look at what the task card can do. I'm back here in my personal tasks board. I'm going to click on book next month's MOT service for my car in the car bucket in here you can see I've assigned it to myself so that it appears in the My Tasks area. I'm happy with the title. I don't need to change it. Let's take a proper look at some of the settings in here. Now the first one is labeled. Now if I click on that labeled area, it's going to give me a drop-down choice of existing labels, which you can see a color coded named at the moment, let's just choose one, pink. Now you can see it adds that label to this board. Let me click away from it. And you can see now on this card it has that label as part of it as well. You can rename these really easily. So for example, I've named this one phone call. And I've done that by going across to the pencil next to it. And once you click on it, you can see it lets you, It's that area. So now that I've done that, let me click on it. And you can see it sounded both. If I click away, we can see now that it has both labels currently, let's go back into that. We should look at labels properly in an upcoming session because it's a very powerful and very useful feature in lots of contexts. I'm happy that it's in the car bucket. I'm just going to mark this in progress. And the reason for that is because when I go down to my checklist of tasks that needed to happen, this task is more like a mini-project, isn't it? Like lots of things. It has several steps to be achieved. Well, I've already researched garages and found my old paperwork. I can mark that completes already. And because of that, it is definitely in progress. Notes creeping closer. So I'm gonna mark it as important up here rather than medium, so that it gets prioritized about other things in a minute. There is a due date. So let me click on that and set myself the due date that's coming up There we go. Now, down here, I have this attachments at all. And if I click on that button, I get a choice of needing to attach from computer, from a team file if I'm using Teams or a link to a URL, and that's a way that I can use any other storage capacity if it's Cloud-based as well. So let me click on from computer. Then I'm going to click on Service report document, which has now been uploaded and added to this task. You can see I've got the option to show it on the card. Now I tick that you can see appearing into that space above there as well. And actually let's show my subtasks to that's a useful thing to help me as well. If I hover over that file, clicking on it is going to open it so I can view it from here. But I also have an ellipsis or three dots on that file. So if I click on the dots, it then gives me the choice to either edit the document or remove it completely from the attachments area. I've got another art attachment button so I can keep going and add other things if I want to. This is a really useful way to manage documents to do with projects and tasks, to have it part of the actual card itself. And this is great when I'm using it on my own. But if I'm using it as part of a team and using a shed planner, then that's even more useful. Below that is a comments area which I can click in and send a comment straight to this card. Now that's really helpful in lots of situations. You can see here, although this plan that is only shared to myself, I'm actually using it to keep comments of what I've done so far for me because it means that their date and time stamped already as I type them. And that's really helpful, especially when you're on the phone or something like that. If I'm sharing a board with others. And we all need to stay in the loop about what's going on to do with a project or task, then this is even more valuable because it means that everyone can see the comments that everyone else has added. More on that in a little while. Here, Let's add another attachment and adult URL just to see what that's like. When I click on that box, I now get like any URL tool, the address that I'm going to put in, and then the text to display. So I'll put in something nice and safe. Bbc website. It's not very appropriate to the task, but at least it shows how this will work. And then once I've done that, I'm going to click on Add. And now it's added that website as a secondary attachment. Again, I can embed any of these in the card when it's shown if I want to, as we mentioned before, if I click on a task card on the mobile version, then it opens an expanded card in the same way as the desktop, where I now have options to change. The bucket that it's assigned to. The task is assigned to its progress status, its level of importance. To tick off or untick any of the checklist sub-items to access and change any of the attachments to adjust the due date or start date, to add or remove or create different labels. Then to view the history of the task at the bottom, including adding a comment, should I feel I need to. In that way, it's a fully featured experience comparable to using the browser version. 11. Filtering and Grouping: I mentioned earlier that one of the most powerful features of planner was the ability to filter the view and changed the way that items are grouped on any plan. We started to look at that a little bit earlier when we looked at my tasks. And remember, we saw that the initial view was to do with progress, so it was not started in progress or completed. And then we realized that we could go up to group and we could change that to plan, to see items reorganized by the plan they were Fromm and also to do with due date such as this. All to do with priority such as this. Well, let's go into a plan and have a look. So I'm gonna go back to personal tasks now. Here I've been through and added a few due dates and priorities and things like that just so that we can see how this palms out. So now that we're in a plan, remember any plan will behave this way as well. Let's go up to groupby again. Here we're grouping by bucket. But if I click on this, we get a similar tool that we found in the My Tasks area. I can reorganize by who it's assigned to. Which remember, is going to be my account or nobody at the moment, because this is a personal plan to progress, which again shows us that not started in progress and completed view. Then due date, which gives me today future or no date and it would give me past as well. If there was anything over two. Then labels which we haven't used particularly yet. But let's just look at that. You can see that all of the different color labels can be used as of you. Then finally, priority. That's a real powerful, There's a real versatility to the white planner can display any of your tasks. Um, I would say just using the groupby option gives you lots of different ways to see what's going on. Now secondary to that, if I just take this back to bucket so we're familiar for you. We can now go to Filter. Next group BY is the filter option. You can see it's got a 0 to show that no filters are in place at the moment. If I click on that drop-down, you can see I have a lot of options here. The first thing I can do is filter by key word. So let's, for example, choose a word that I know is in here. Let's go for email. And if I hit Enter, then immediately you can see it's filtered out. Anything that doesn't contain the word email to only show me those tasks. Let's clear that. But I also have all these predefined ones to do with date. So let's put look at next week. Let's look at this week instead, or as well as, let's look at the future. There we go. And it's putting us things that are in the future. If I want to look at things that are overdue, I could click on late. There are none currently thankfully, as well as do I also have other things such as priority? So having set some priorities, I can then see what's important. And you can see it pulls up the dry cleaning and the book in booking a car service that we know we are set as being important. We also have progress. So let's see those things that are in progress currently. There we go. There's two that I've marked in progress. Let's go down to label. Well at the moment, we haven't set many labels, but let's just go and choose phone because we know there's one of those. There we go and it filters out everything except those. If we add additional labels, remember it will, it will filter by more than one criteria. And actually I could be choosing criteria from all of these could if I wanted to find everything that was labeled phone call that was overdue, but in progress, it would be very easy to set those filters, wouldn't it? Let's remove those now, hold that up. Then assignment is to do with who it's assigned to. So at the moment I can click on assigned and it'll give me everything that's assigned to the accounts I'm using equally. I could click on unassigned and it would show me everything that's not assigned to anybody. If there were other people that things were assigned to, they would also appear in this list. Now that's very similar to the next option on that is members up here. If I click on members, it's going to show me anybody that this board, so sin2. So at the moment this board is remember only assigned to the account I'm using, Kate leaves, so I don't see anybody else. But if I did in the same way that I use to filter, to choose people or unassigned down here, I can do the same thing very quickly from haha. Also here on the mobile version in the top right corner where the menu link case, I then have the option of the Boltzmann to change groupby again. From there, remember I can change to show other things such as organized by the level of progress or any of the other group BY tools that we could use on the desktop as well, such as labels. 12. Buckets as a Runway: So far we've looked at buckets, two main categories. We've looked at several different contexts across three different boards where this works really well, but it is possible to use them in a very different way. I'm going to click on new plan again. This time creates another new plan. Here we go, and I'll keep it to myself again. This time I'm going to use the categories quite differently. Now let's look at the way I've created these buckets, rather than being different categories that are task would fit into one off. This is more like a runway or a ladder going left through to right. In this context, it would be content to be published, maybe to a website or a magazine or brochure or something like that. So let's put it in something and see how it might work. Quickly added in several tasks so that we can see how this might work. So let's look at this July issue summer suits for every occasion. So if I click on that task, then we can use every facility within the card. I've added the document here. That would be perhaps the text that could be used to remember now it lives with the plan. So anyone that can access this plan or open it can use it. And once we've had the idea and we're ready to where it's fully formulated and ready to draft. I'm going to grab that task and move it across into the drafts column. So now we're going to draft out the text. Once that's completed, I can grab that task and drag it into the writing column to be fully returned. Once it's been completely written and it's ready to be checked, I can drag it across into the proof column. Once it's been proof read by somebody, I can drag it over here, ready to publish. And then finally, once it's ready to hit print, I can take it and put it in the published column where everything that's published can live and we could even at that point ticket as being completed. That then in this column, we only see things that have been completed and all the way through to the published row. In that way, we're using the idea of buckets in a completely new way. We're not using them to separate things into categories. We're using them as steps on a ladder or a runway if you like, that, we can gradually move content through. That's one way to organize content over time. In the next lesson, we're going to look at a slightly different way of managing timescales. Remember on the mobile app, a similar drag-and-drop experience, his possible. So as I want to move an item from an idea into draft or from draft into writing. I can do so by pressing my finger on it and dragging it from left to right across the screen in the same way I would in the browser. 13. Managing Members and Using Teams: Let's take a look at adding members to a plan. Here I am in a slightly different plan this time, the account that uncertainty is called Anthony leaves. And if I click on members this time, then you can see that's the only accounting it currently. However, if I click on this box that says Enter name to add a member, here I'm going to type a name. You can see it brings up a couple of options at which point I can choose the one that I want. And now that account is also argued as a person that can access this planner. Now at the top, I see both icons rather than just one in the filter options. I now also see that other account that I can filter the results by. It's no problem to manage and add and remove members from a planner board that you've already created. However, there is another way to manage the membership of a plan that is probably more useful for lots of people now, rather than doing it through the new plan link inside planner, I'm going to go up to the waffle and choose Teams. This will now open Teams. And if you're not familiar with Microsoft 365, then Teams comes bundled with all business, enterprise and education accounts. It means that you can use the Teams app. It's another app within the office we environment. And it gives you lots of facilities that are not really found in any of the other apps. So here we have a team that already exists. What we're going to do is we're going to create a team. Then we're going to use that team to be the location for a new planet board. And it means that we can manage who is allowed to access that board through the team. So let's do that now. I'm going to click down here on Join or create a team. From that, I get a choice to either join a team that already exists with a code or the option that I really want, which is to create a team. Let's click on Create team. And we have some choices here, either from scratch, from a group or team that already exists, or using some different templates for it to be part of a project, to manage an event, to onboard new employees, to adopt Office 365. And you can see there's a whole range of different templates here. Today. We're going to choose from scratch. We're going to make it a private team. We're going to choose support desk. And I'll explain to you in a little while how we're going to use this. Let's click on Create. This point the team is created. And it will let us and allow some people. I can choose any one that already exists. Here we go, I'm going to add that account because that already exists in our office directory. And as well as being people that already exist inside your directory, you can add guests as well. You can see it can't find that e-mail address. So it's offering to add it as a guest and I'm going to click Yes. What I'm gonna do just before it does it, I'm going to click on little pencil mark there. And I'm going to change that to be the actual name because it could show the email address, but showing the actual name is two more tidy, isn't it? Let's click on the tick. There we go. I'm going to add those two accounts as well and click Add. Then I'm gonna click on Close. And it means now that in this team called support desk, there is already, you can see a post-its channel here where I can click on new conversation and type a message. I can click across on files and access the Microsoft OneDrive that is part of this team. There's a wiki which will have, have no pages currently, but you can see that I can access. And by managing the membership of this team, all of the members of the team can access any of these resources. So let's just go to the ellipsis here next to the team. I'm going to choose manage teams so that we can see who's in it. Here, inside members. You can see there's owners. Okay, please. Because that's the account we're using right now to make all of this. And if I expand the members and guests, then I can see this gas dive at it is shown here with this account. And that means that they can basically experience the team and participate, but they can't control the team in the same way that an owner can. I can remove this person with by clicking on the X over there. I can change when there's a drop-down arrow, the status of any owner or member using that drop-down there as well. So that's how I control the membership. Now we're not gonna go too far down the teams rabbit hole because that's for another course. But what I want to do is use this team to control their membership. Of a planner board. And that's one of the things that Teams is great for. You have one location here called Manage Team, and then any of the resources and facilities and tools that you link to that team can all have their permissions controlled in that way. So it's a really easy way and very transparent and open as a way for an organization to see what's going on and who can access what. I'm going to click on plus here to add a tab. We've got these three already, but I want a new one, so I'm going to click add a tab. From here. There's a wider range of things that I can add to this team. We're going to want to add a planner board. Let's find planner. Here it is, tasks by planner. And we're going to call IT help desk. There we go. So we're creating a new one. We don't want to use an existing one. We can see there aren't any currently, so we definitely want to use a new one. Now if I leave it ticked post to the channel about this tab, then the minute I hit Save, it will put a message in that posts string, which is the ongoing conversation of this team to show that this has been created. So let's just do that. I'm going to hit Save. Now we can see that we've created a planner board called Help Desk up here, and it's inside that support desk team in this general channel. Let's go back to the posts tab. There we go. And it's told us that a new channel, a new link has been added at the top of the channel called helpdesk. When I go through, I can click on that again. There we go. It takes me back to that board. If I click on the drop-down there, then I've got some things that I can do, like rename this title controller settings. Let's click on that now just to see what it is. And again, it's going to let me chose to rename it or change it to be a different plan. But I don't want to do any of those things because I'm very happy that I've got this. Now that that's in place. We have this Help Desk planet board setup that is controlled by the team. So when I go into Manage Team, I can add and remove members of the team and it will control it in this board. Now when I come out of Teams and go back to the planner app itself, we can see here now, I have helpdesk already within my recent boards as well, so I can still use it and work it from the app if I wish to. Or I can go to the team and manage it there and use it there. However, the management will be controlled through this link here. Let's just check from this team. We can see up here, both of the people that we know are members of this help desk planner are already added there. I see them there. I see them in this list, and I see them in the filter options there as well. So hopefully we're really clear now that we can make a new plan and control who can contribute to that plan, either through the new plan link here, and then via members here. Or alternatively, we can go to Teams. We can create a team and then we can add a tab and choose that option tasks by planner that lets us make a planner that is then controlled as part of that team. So two different ways to achieve the same thing, depending on probably who you want to be part of that planner. 14. Buckets vs Labels: Let's see what we can learn about organizing buckets and labels using the help desk idea. I've made here three copies of my help desk plan, and let's see how we can organize them in different ways. So here I've got in the first version a tasks in the to assign bucket ready to hand out. And then my other buckets are using the names of the different technicians available. So I could say, this task needs to go to this person, this task to this person, this task to this person, this task to that person there. And then by moving the tasks around, it's very easy to assign tasks to people. Now in that situation, you can see I've made labels as well. So if I click on one here, then you can see my labels that I have available are to do with location. The site maybe all across different aspects and different campuses perhaps. But if I come out of this, you can see then that names are the way the buckets have been chosen. Now, this isn't a particularly great way to organize it when we consider that each person, Anthony, Steven, and Jody, will want to use the My Tasks facility or to filter. Now they can filter by the bucket, but it makes much more sense for them to filter by them their own names. So this arrangement doesn't really allow that to happen. Let's look at helpdesk be. In this situation, we've got the same tasks needed. But here we've made the buckets, the location. So campus one, campus to campus three. Now in that way, Let's assign these as well. So room five is on campus one, so we'll put it there. This printer stand is on-campus three rooms seven is on campus to conference room two is on campus one, and max is laptop maximum lives on campus three. So we'll put that across that. Now we've assigned the tasks again, and we've done it based on the location that each task needs to be performed, assuming perhaps that somebody works on each site. That means now that when I go into this task, I then need to assign this task to the person that's going to do it. And I can use the assigned tool. In that way. It means that when this person, so Caitlin, goes and looks at my tasks, they will see the tasks assigned to them from high up. In this way, I've used labels in a different way. So I've used labels more like the way we were using categories at the very beginning of this course. If I open this task maintenance issue, we can see that the labels available here are more situation dependent. Software issue, a V issue. Now for myself, if I want to be able to check how many of each issue there are currently and what's open. I can then go to group by. And instead of grouping it by bucket or any of these other situations that we've used before, I'm going to click on Labels. Now when I grouped by label, you can see that I see all of the software issues together. It still shows me the bucket there from the campus. But the AV issues are separate, maintenance issues are separate. Again, it's another way to be able to resort, regroup, and visualize the tasks to be done in a different way. Let's now go to Help Desk see and look at a third option. Here. If I go to the to assign tasks bucket, I can see that I have other buckets. It's to do with software setup, audio visual issue, maintenance, and site. And these are the names that we were using for the labels in help desk bay that are actually now our buckets. Let's see, print a stand. Well, that's an AV issue. Toner cartridge. That's a maintenance issue. Re-install Windows, that's a software issue. Add the display driver, that's a software issue. Now that I'm going into these, I can now see the different types of issue. Again, if I open one, I can assign these different tasks to the different people that they need to be assigned to. But let's now go and look at label. And here I would need to use labels in a different way. Again, I could change this label to be building a. Let's change this one to be doing Bay. This one to be able to say. And then I'll account allocate this one to the building. It's actually from this is in building Bay. Now it has that label as well. Which again means, although in this way I've still assigned things to people, my bucket's up by the type of task or category if you like. But now I can again go to group and choose labels and see the location of each of these projects as well. Which is again, another way that it's a really versatile solution depending on how you best wants a group your tasks. In that way, a combination of buckets and labels provide a really versatile cross-referencing system. The difference between the two, of course, being that a task can be moved very easily between buckets by dragging and dropping as a practical thing. But you can have more than one label. A task could have multiple labels and be searched or filter to all of them. 15. The Charts View: Planner has some really useful visual aids built-in. Here I am on helpdesk see, and you can see I've added a few more tasks and finished a few just to help us with what we're going to look at next. Up at the top, we've been focused entirely on the board view. We haven't looked at charts or schedule yet, but let's do that now. I'm going to click on Charts. And that's going to change the way that I see my task information completely. Now, I see first of all, a status area that tells me there are four tasks left outstanding according to the key to have been completed for are yet to be started. Then I can see my buckets view here, and it shows me how many tasks there are in each bucket currently. So we see that the gray means not started. And if I come over to here, we also have some green here, which means these are completed. So that's a helpful way to view that. And then again, I can see my tasks according to priority. Everything at the moment is medium priority because I haven't changed it. So you can see there are four here, two of which have been completed. Now underneath that view, when I scroll down, I see members. Remember at the moment this helpdesk board, I didn't add anybody to, so it only shows the owner, which is the cake leaves account. Here. It shows that there are two tasks not started on this green side to complete it versus the number assigned here, of which there are two which have not been started. If there were many people in this team, it would show me all of their graphs here to help me assess how well those people are managing their tasks. Down the right-hand side of the charts view, I see the tasks that are irrelevant. So all of the tasks that are being shown in any of these grasps, these are the tasks here. Just like in any other view, if I click on the card, I can open and therefore edit and work on the expanded card for that task. Charts is a really great way to get a really clear picture about what's going on. This is something that lots of people would screenshot and use as evidence may be as part of the presentation. So you could screenshot this into something like PowerPoint or Google Slides or Keynote. So this chart's view forms the basis, not only for a way to be able to report back and show what progress has been made across different tasks and different buckets. But also to be able to support people that you live in, manage in seeing not just how successful they're being at completing their tasks, but also helping manage the workload and ensuring they don't have a disproportionate number of tasks versus the other people in the team. Take this slightly further. So at the moment, remember we're looking at the charts view for this planner. Let me go to my tasks and here I also have the three options, board charts and schedule. Let's click on Charts here. And now I can see my own progress and outstanding tasks across my different plans as well. If I go to plan a hub, initially, I just see the cards that leads me to each plan, but should I favorite some of these? Let's do that now. Let me favorite helpdesk see. Then you can see I then get a slightly expanded card that shows me the progress I've made on that project. Let's go to published tasks and also then to personal tasks and favorite those. And you can see I can favorite a number of projects which then appear in this favorite list here. But also that I see this expanded more detailed card for the Planner hub itself on the mobile app. Some of this functionality is also available. So let's go into personal tasks. From the tasks view here I'm going to click on the top-left corner where you see the bar graph underneath the clock there. When I click on that, it opens up the charts view for me where I can access the same charts that are available through the browser, albeit in a vertical scrolling format instead. 16. The Schedule View: And finally in views, Let's move on from board I'm charts and look up the schedule for you. This now gives us a calendar view of our plan. Here you can see the tasks that already have due dates. I can move them around by dragging them, just like anything else. I can click on the Task and see it's expanded card as well if I wish to any task that does not have a scheduled date yet, I can grab on odd in this wife, this is the way that I think most people find the easiest to manage dates and timelines within planner is to grab the task and drop it on the date it's due. And if you then need to change it, you can just pick it up and move it around really easily. So really it's a combination of using the board view and the schedule view that makes managing tasks in a plan most successful. If you have a great deal of tasks to manage in a period of time, you can change from month view here and click on week instead. Then move between weeks and months using the view here or the arrows here to move forwards and backwards. 17. Copying Tasks: Let's look at copying tasks. Now. I'm back in my publishing tasks board. I'm going to click on July issue here and open the expanded card for you. And up in the top corner I have this ellipsis, which is going to give me certain options working backwards, I can delete the task. I can copy a link to the task, which when I click on that, you can see it brings up a URL and puts it on the clipboard that I can paste into other locations. I can move the task between different plans and buckets. But now we're interested in copy task. Copy task. If when I click on that, he's going to bring up a smaller card here that lets me decide what the copy is going to contain. It can be an exact copy and I can leave the title of the task and the planet bucket the same, or I could change it. Let's just put a two on the end to see the difference. And then down here, you can see I can choose what to include. It says some task information cannot be shared across plans or groups, and I can click to find out more. But otherwise at the moment it's saying that the description of the task, the checklist, it contains, the attachments and the labels will be parts of the copy, and that's by default. I could also click on date, progress, and who it's assigned to. So let's do that and I'm going to click, it's going to put it in publishing tasks. So let's just change ideas and put it into draft just so that we can see it appear. Here we go, Let's click on Copy. Now that I've done that, we should see a copy of this task, but with a two on the end. There we go, has appeared in the draft bucket. And in that way, we can make copies of tasks really easily. So I'm going to go now to my personal tasks board. Over here. We had a weekly task which was pickup groceries on way home, and I had some things in there that I'd created a list of already. Let's just take that as if I've completed it. So I've completed that shopping list. Now this may be something where I pick up the same things each week. So let me go to complete it, expand that. And here I can do the same thing, but we can do this in one of two ways. I can either click on the board and then use the ellipsis in the top corner where I have coping task. But what I might also want to do is just to go to the ellipses for more options on the small version of the task card. Let's do that. Down here you can see I've got some familiar options, including copy task, which brings me back to exactly the same way of doing things. So let's do pick up groceries on way home. We'll put this in shopping. Again. Copy. There we are. Now as well as the completed shopping list that's hidden out of the way. I now have next week's grocery shopping list ready in the active tasks here. 18. Collaboration Tips: So up until now, we've covered all of the features built into planner. The next set of lessons are going to be to help you get the best out of it and work most effectively and most efficiently. Next, we're going to look at collaboration tips in planner to help you get the best from it. So planner is a great way to save on having as many meetings to keep in touch with your team more closely, to help you support those you lying manage, and to give you a powerful tool for feeding back to others the progress of projects and tasks. But there are some ways that you can do this most effectively. The first one would be to comment on tasks. So let's go into content ideas. Let me open up a task. And down here we remember we have this comment facility. Making a comment when you progress. Task in some way is a really good way to leave notes for your future self. But also so that the other people that the project is shared to see what steps you have taken and the history of that task. Number two would be to use the conversation tool. When I go up to the ellipsis here, remember this is the menu that controls all of the settings of the plan. I'm going to go now to conversation, which has brought me into Outlook and open the conversation in Outlook for this group. Now I can click on Send, Email and draft a message that will go to everybody that the planet board is shared to. The third way to collaborate most effectively would be to use attachments. So by adding links and documents to the expanded card for any task is a great way to keep track of that document. Avoid having multiple copies and make sure that everybody associated with the project can access the documents needed. Number four would be using links to tasks, where a task needs to be discussed, going to the ellipsis and choosing Copy link to task. Remember, generates a URL on the clipboard that you can then paste into a Teams message or an email, or however you correspond with your teammates, which means that they can click it and it will bring them directly back to this task in planner. Number five would be to use those charts to ensure you have a really clear picture of everybody's workload, how much support they might need, how they're progressing with their own tasks within the project. And be able to keep that bird's-eye view on everything. Number six would be to control notifications. I'm going to go to the plan menu and go down to plans settings. And at this point, go into, first of all, group to check my privacy permissions and then to Notifications. Here in notifications, I have some options. So let's have a look. Email is always sent to the group when a comment is made on a task. And I have a tick box for send e-mail to the group when a task is assigned or completed, which it tells me that group owners only can change so I can check or uncheck that setting. Then for myself It says half planner, send me notifications when someone assigns a task to me, it will send me an e-mail and push notifications through the app. And then also a task assigned to me is light due today or do in the next definite seven days, which which will then email me about. I can toggle on or off ether and both of these things for myself and this one for everybody within the group because I'm an owner. Finally, number seven would be to train your team to update and use the tools as well as you do. So that when you are all within a board and you set up a task, everybody knows how to update the progress and ensures that it nothing gets out of date and doesn't reflect the true state of any project. It's time well-spent. 19. Settings and Notifications: So now we want to spend a couple of minutes checking in on some of the settings we haven't yet looked at. There's two levels of settings. One is for all of planner, and the other is for an individual plan board to access the global settings for Planner, let's go to the cog in the top right corner and click there. And here we have, when we look in the themes area that are the most eye-catching, the most popular themes. And if I click on view all you can see it expands this out. Now this isn't all the backgrounds, this is the headings. When I click on these, you can see the title row where it says planner at the very top of the screen, changing each time. Let's take it back to the tasteful blue I started with. And that's the most useful thing to be able to do in here. Probably. Additionally to that though, I may wish to change my notifications for all off planet. Let me click on Notifications now, hand near the top. Here you can see I can set globally what I want my preference to be. Have some planner, send me notifications when someone assigns a task to me, a task assigned to me, it's late due today or do you in the next seven days? So these settings we access through planner earlier for a particular plan, but here we can access them for every plan. Let's just counsel that not to change it. That's our global settings for the planner app completely or close that, remember that's from the caulking the corner. But for each plan, we can go to the plan menu and down to plan settings. This is where we have setting specific to the plan. The most fun part that we haven't even touched at all really is looking at some of the backgrounds available. Some of them are very tasteful. Some of them are a little bit more busy and I think a bit hard to see through what you're doing, but you can see for yourself what's available. And the content of this changes depending on the title of the plan itself. So you'll find different backgrounds are available depending on what title you've given the plan. If I go into group, then we recognize that public versus private setting and the group description that we accessed earlier and into notifications. Remember, we have the same options that we access to minutes ago from the COG. But unlike the COG, these take effect specifically for this plan. 20. Exporting to Excel: The next few sessions are based on ways to integrate or use planner with other apps and programs. We're going to start by looking at exporting content from planner. I'm going to go up to the menu for this plan and then go down to export plan to Excel. If I click on that, you can see it's downloaded an Excel file that if I now click on open that file here is that open Excel file. And you can see now I have first of all, the plan name, the plan ID that identifies that plan to office, and the date of the export. Let's just look at that plan ID for a moment. And the way to identify the plan ID should you ever needed, is that it's part of the URL or the address of the original plan. So let me bring that down slightly so that we can see the browser behind. Here. We can see at the end of the URL after these equal signs, that part of the address there matches to this part here, that is the plan ID. Now the exported Excel document contains everything that was found within the plan itself for each task. So here we have a task ID that does the same thing. It identifies two planet which task we're discussing the task name. Let's just expand that so that we can see all of the texts. The bucket it was contained in, its progress status and priority status, who it was assigned to, as well as who created it, the creation date, start date, due date, whether it's late or not. And then let's let's bring the rest across here. Then the completed date and completed by and description. As well as that, Let's expand here so that we can see completed checklist items if there were any, and eat their status and what the items were. You can see it here, separated by semi-colons and any labels that were assigned to the task. In that way, you can get all of the information for each task in the plan out of planner into an Excel spreadsheet where you then might want to use it for other purposes. 21. Planner and Teams: In Microsoft Teams. So rather than using the new plan link here to make plans, alternatively, going into Teams and making a team with the creative team link down there means that you can integrate plans into 18. Remember this Support Desk team we made earlier, you manage through the Manage Team link there, which then allows you to see who are the owners and members, including potentially guests of that team from there, by clicking on the channel, remember we had that help desk tab that had the plan belonging to the general channel of this team here. And we created it by going to the Edit tab button. And then in this recent section, tasks is the one we've used most recently. Tasks by planner is what it's currently called. And you may find over time that name changes. It may just become tasks or just become planner. And when I click on that, it then let me either create a new plan or use an existing plan that already exists to add there. So let's just cancel that because we want to come out of it. But remember, we can manage and use Planner through Teams. The bonus of viewing it through Teams means not just you get this Kanban board view, the charts view, the schedule view, but you also get a list view that is more like the to-do app approach, where you can see things as a horizontal list. When you click on a task, you get the same expanded card view that you're used to. But it gives you this fourth way of viewing tasks that again is slightly different. And for some people they might prefer, the horizontal lists facility may be the main reason why using Teams is a good way to manage your planner. Additionally to that, remember, you can access posts to start conversations, nested conversation, as well as having a file store associated with the team as well. And the other things that you can add such as wikis. When I go back to Help Desk, then gives me access to what I think is the third reason that might be really useful to use Teams. And that is that it's very easy to start a meeting or organize a meeting with the people in the planet. So up in this corner I can click on meat and it will start a meeting now. Or I can click the dropdown and choose schedule a meeting. From there, it takes me through to the Teams meeting scheduler where I can give a title to my meeting. Adding the people that need to be shared to, it's going to go straight into the support desk. General channels will be posted. And then I can add any additional examples. So let me just type it in, so I'm meeting the title so that we can save this. Let us do that and click Send. I know now that when I go back to the general channel, two posts here it is, the account that I'm using Kate lease has posted right now, scheduled a meeting. And if I click on that meeting, it will give me details of that meeting, which I can then choose to join from the link up here as well. 22. Planner and To Do: The next integration we're going to consider is another Office app to do. This could be completely life-changing to the way that you use Planner. If I go to the waffle, remember, I will have to do available in that list. And if it's not obviously in that shortlist that I can click on All apps and go through the alphabetical list until I find to do there. Let us go into todo. Here I am in the browser version of to do. There's also a desktop and mobile app as well. I'm to do is Microsoft's Task Manager app for making lists of tasks. Here tasks is the default list. I can click and start a task. There we go. And like anything else, I can tick that task off, like a pleasing sound into do when I've completed it. I can follow that list up out of the way if I don't want it. And I can also uncheck that to add it back to the list. The way that to-do works is that I have a tasks Lester is the default list that I can also make other lists using the new list. And what it wants me to do then is to use the My Day tool to prioritize things that are important to me. So let's just right-click on buying milk and choose Add to My Day. And we can now see up in my day, there's now one thing in my day to do. Well, that's all well and good. But how does this link to Planner? Well, here I have this assigned to you option as part of the available lists. When I click on Assign to you, it then shows me all of the tasks in planner from all of my different plans that are assigned to me, exactly the same ones if we go back that we found when we went to my tasks. So all of these tasks here from my tasks, because they're assigned to me. When I go into to-do and click on assigned to you, they appear here as well. It's a very, very tight integration. Now that means that I can then, let's choose one. Right-click and add that to my day. Let's right-click on orders, paint for spare room, add to my day. Let's do the same for gas spell out to my day. You can see now it says up my day as well there. Now if I go to my day, it has four items and if I click on that list, my day remember, is my working list. It's the one that I will attend to each day as the things that I've highlighted in some programs. It would be things that maybe you'd favorited or start or highlighted as being significant at that time. And you can see here, there's a color-coding in effect to show me things that have come from lists within to do, and things that have come from lists within planner as well. I can see the different color there. I can tick them off here, mark them as complete, and it will mark them as complete in planner as well. So you can manage everything to do with your planner tasks through planner, through the My Tasks links. Or you can use Planner to organize your tasks and collate all of them into the My Tasks area by having them assigned to you. And remember, this is true not just for your personal plans, but also all of the ones that you're part of with other people that you're collaborating on. And then for your day-to-day knowing what job you actually want to do, you can use the to-do app and click on Assign to you and choose which of these tasks you actually want to add to your day. And see as the working list that you're using to do is an enormous facility. It's a huge tool, very easy to use, very intuitive, but has a lot of tight integration with the rest of Office. I have a whole course completely separate, totally dedicated to do. If you're interested in that and knowing how to use to-do and get the most out of it. Then go back to my profile page and find that course that 23. Planner and Outlook: Next, let's look at integrating with Outlook from the plan menu for any plan, remember, we can choose conversation that will immediately launched the conversation tool in Outlook for that particular plant, I hear half send email which remember, will allow me to write a message to everyone in the plan. I can go back through previous messages as if I'm checking email exactly the sign. So that's the first integration. The second is to consider how I might be able to get the plan schedule into my calendar. I'm going to go to the menu again, and this time go to the bottom option, Add plan to Outlook calendar. Here I have they don't publish, keep private or publish share with anyone. So I'm going to choose the second option that allows me to publish it. At this point, I know I have an icon, a link that I can copy down here, paste into other calendar programs. But if I want to use Outlook, I can click on Add to Outlook. When I click on that ad to Outlook box, it's going to then open this within the web version of Outlook. Here we have Planner published tasks as well as thoughts address. Let's give it a color and it's going to add it within my range of calendars. So down the side you can see I have my calendars or other calendars. Let's just feel those here. My calendars are the ones that I see in this group, and then other calendars will appear below. So let's choose other calendars. Let's give it an icon. Then let's hit Import. Which point you can now see the planner publishing is now available down the side as one of my calendars that I can view. And here's that example calendar event that we added previously inside Teams. 24. Planner and OneNote: Next, let's look at using planner with Microsoft OneNote. Onenote is Microsoft's note-taking and Notebook App. I'm actually each plan includes a Notebook associated with it. So let's go back to the menu again. And then here as well as files and sites, you can see I haven't notebook. When I click on notebook, it's not going to open this notebook separately. The browser version of OneNote. Now the notebook is completely empty to start with. So as it says, I'm going to hit Enter to create a new section. Then at least we can see how it's going to be organized. Onenote is split into sections or section groups and pages. Here is this section I've named contents which is like a section in a ring binder or a filing cabinet. And then this untitled page at the moment. So I might call it intro page just to give it a title. And we can see then that in the side menu it's title has changed to intro page. Down the bottom, I have options to add a section, which we'd let me add a new section below contents. And also add page which adds another page underneath. Like all browser versions of The Office programs, I can still right-click and access the quick tools menu here as well. Let me click Delete Page and that one disappears. In this way, it's possible to build up a reference book, built off sections, section groups, and pages, just like any other ring binder that contains all of the content associated with the project that the planner is part of. You can right-click and choose Copy link to this page, and copy the link to that page to paste into a task just the same way as you would paste a link to a task itself, as well as having the browser version, like other Office apps, you can click in open in desktop app and add this notebook to your desktop or mobile version of the opposite. Well, I have again, another course completely dedicated to organizing absolutely everything both personal and business projects through Microsoft OneNote. So if you go to my profile page, you'll be able to find the link to that course as well. 25. Planner and SharePoint: The last integration we're going to look at as part of the main course itself is with SharePoint and SharePoint sites. I'm going to go back to the menu here. This time, I'm going to go down to sites. When I click on sites, it's going to open the SharePoint site associated with this planner project. And once insights, you can see what a fully formed experience there says. If you are wondering why this might be useful, this is a great way to be able to have a central focus for a project that is already created out of the box. But you can use with everyone that's working on that project, but also other people that may want to be able to keep taps on the project and see it progress. So all we did for publishing tasks, remember as a planner was create this planner. But having done that, it now exists fully in this form in the browser. If I go to the side menu, we can see this homepage area has collated news on the latest activity below that. It has a document store, which we can access here that remember, these documents are the ones that we added to those planner tasks. It's the same document and we can get at them in the folder here. That's the same as going to this document link at the side here. If I want to add to this news area to make a blog, I can click on Add news here. You can see it's going to let me add text and pictures, either, giving me some tips if I've not don't know what I'm doing or if I know what I'm doing, it's going to let me just go for it. Let's close that for a moment. It's going to guide me through this which sludge approach to how to make a blog. In this section, let's choose facial, but some more interesting layout is never skillful basic texts, which gives me a slightly different layout. And if I go for blanket will just give me that style as well. I think that probably might be the one I would want most for this purpose. Once I've been in an edited the text, I can click on create post. I'm gonna Council it for now. But at least there you can see that it does give you that blogging facility that's part of this page. I can go to conversations. It's gonna take me back to Outlook. If I go into documents, is going to take me to the document library or the OneDrive belonging to this plan. Remember, here we're seeing documents that we uploaded as attachments to plan. So this is not a good way to get at them as well, because this is part of SharePoint and therefore parts of all of Office, I have useful tools up here, such as adding documents and links direct from here, uploading files and folders here, and also synchronization tool. Now if I click on sync, that's going to then in cash a copy of this folder and all the files in it to my desktop device and keep them synchronized using the OneDrive sync tool. That is an incredible facility that if it's plans you use a lot and therefore documents that you need access to a lot, then being able to synchronize them to your device, even when you're offline and keep them synchronized up to date when you are online is a really, really useful tool. You can see. It also gives me access to tools like Power Apps and Power Automate that we're going to cover in something later bonus classes. Let's go down to notebook. We can see it's taken a straight back to the same notebook we found from within the plan. That's just a flavor of some of what you can do with this SharePoint site for this planner board. And remember every planner board that you create in this way, well, have this SharePoint site available for it that you can bookmark, that you can share to others and that you can use as the central home for the project. Again, it's one of those hidden links that you may not even have noticed was there, but adds an enormous amount of functionality. I'm can completely change the dynamic of the way that you use planner as a team. 26. Summary and Course Task: Right, the class project, the class project is going to be to create a project board of your own. Now you could use a fictitious as in a made-up project to work with just to have a go. Or you could choose something real that is gonna be of actual benefit to you. You need to do it either using the new plan link in planner there, or to go through Microsoft Teams and make a team and then add a new tab with a planner and built it that way. And then to go in and you're going to need to set up the buckets that you need and then add the tasks to each bucket to assign them to who they're going to be used by. Perhaps then add some other detail, possibly using things like the labels, but adds so much versatility to it. I'm really looking forward to seeing your screenshots of how you use Planner and all the different diverse ways you use it to help manage your personal and professional work through planner to unsee that in the discussion group for the course. Good luck. Thank you very much for taking my course. I hope you found it productive and useful. I look forward to seeing your comments in the class discussion and seeing what you've made of the class project. Thanks very much and see you again.