Microsoft Planner - a short intro

When you run or are a part of a medium/large project. Then you use tools like Jira, Azure DevOps to organize a team work, tasks, deadlines, etc. They are great, versatile applications with a lot of functionalities. But what if you are a part of a smaller project, you don’t need to use more advanced functionalities — like repositories, tests, CI/CD integration. Or you don’t want to work with a next complicated application. The first idea is to use Microsoft Excel or a smaller external application. And indeed it is. A lot of Product Owners and Project Managers successfully run and manage projects using only Excel. Anyone whose project was conducted this way has been dealing with some drawbacks like necessity of writing functions, creating layout, struggle with errors.

In this place you can use Microsoft Planner. Which is a part of Microsoft 365.

Here is a main view. Where you can manage your tasks.

In a task details view. We have standard options like manage statuses, dates, priorities, checklists, assigning members, labels, checklists.

Here we can manage members on a project level.

There is a possibility to filter tasks by a rich set of predefined filters.

Or you can group task by another group type.

Planner has an additional simple statistics page.

…and a scheduling page.

At the end, if you really need to use Excel in terms of planning or reporting. You can do it in a simple way. By exporting project’s data into an Excel worksheet.