hey all welcome back to the channel in today's video we're going to be showing you how you can automate the creation of Microsoft planner tasks using Microsoft power automate and the flow to do exactly that now you're probably wondering how could that be useful in Planet and we had a question for one of our subscribers outlining a bit of a problem when we use reoccurring tasks inside a planner and we check them off it effectively brings that task back straight onto the plan if you're working on tasks that are going to be over a period of a month or a week and you clear down a task you may not want it to reappear straight away so instead you could use the process we're showing you today to recreate those tasks weekly daily or even monthly depending on your requirements so we're going to show you to go right from creating that new power automate flow all the way to Destiny in Microsoft planner if you do like this content we'd love it if you hit that like button and follow us more great content in the future and let's head into Power automate and get started so let's get started with creating a new flow to recreate tasks in a Microsoft plan every single month all we need to firstly do is go into Power automate so if you're not sure how to do that go to office.com on the left hand side click on the app launcher it's actually called The Waffle so it looks like a bit like a waffle right and you don't see Power automate go to explore all of your apps at the bottom you will find the option for power automate click into Power automate you'll land at the home page and we're going to go and also create a new flow I've also done for this actual tutorial is I've already went and created ourselves a brand new Microsoft planner there's a couple of custom buckets been scoping and financials otherwise entirely empty to allow us to test out our changes but you could also use an existing plan to also have this work for you as well so let's go back into Power automate and click on create on the left hand side to get started and as this tutorial is focused on the creation of tasks every single month we're going to select scheduled Cloud flow we're going to give it a name so here I'm going to put import for project nine and I'm going to then start this flow every single month from the first of the month at 10 am and it's going to repeat one month so repeat every one month effectively while described by power automate it's going to run every month on the first of the month so I can go ahead and click on the create button to create a reoccurrence ie schedule it's going to work every month starting on the 1st of July but if it now reoccurs it's not going to do anything at all we need to tell power automate to do something that's going to be creating a new Step searching for the word planner under connectors selecting the planner icon and we can now Define an action so our first one is going to be create a task brackets preview and that has a number of options that we can actually select from when we create our task now don't be overwhelmed by all of these fields most we will never actually use all we need to do is click in the group ID and we can select the team or group to which the plan is associated to now mine is Project nine yours might look a little different and we're going to select the plan name which is also called project 9. we're only going to give this task a title and that's going to be create a project scoping document which I'm just going to Simply copy and paste in one of our documents here and the bucket is going to appear in scoping now all importantly our task needs a due date it needs a start date as well and I can show you how to manipulate those so you don't have to pre-create them and manually adjust them every single time for example my start date could be when this task is created the start date starts then so I can actually click into that field select expression and on the right hand side I can actually type in UTC now open close brackets click on the blue button so effectively means that the start date with the same date this task is actually created on the due date however it's impossible to do this on the same day it's been created so again we're going to click on expression and use a slightly different expression and this is also included in the video description so you can copy and paste if you would like now this here is going to be add days so IE we're going to add some days UTC Now with an Open brackets to begin with open close brackets comma 15 close brackets now sounds very complex but simply saying he's had 15 days from the date that he's going to be now so in that scenario you can adjust the 15 and change it to 7 in such as this should be due in seven days once a task is being created click OK and it'll now add this expression in and pre-create our due date you can also assign user IDs by typing in email addresses and putting semicolon although they should be a member of your plan to allow that but I'm not going to do that in this scenario I'm quite happy just to assign it when that task is created but if it's yourself as an example you can put your own email address and it will effectively assign the task to yourself now a whole load of these files actually dedicated to coloring so depends if this task needs a color as its category I can mark this as a green category by dropping into the drop down selecting yes leave all the others blank and it simply means this task will have a green label category applied to it once it's being created priority is also pretty useful at the bottom hovering over it will tell you effectively what this means but in short one is versioned free is important five for medium nine for low so I'm going to mark this as urgent just to show you how that looks by putting a priority One now that's all great but you will also note that we're missing a few things we're missing a description we're missing things like checklists they don't appear on our task here so can we add those and if certainly we can go to the bottom click on new step and again search for the word Planet this time scrolled in the button and we're going to be looking for update test details click on that here and you'll now see we're prompted to input a task ID but it has no idea what the ID is because it says no items well it wouldn't know that because a task doesn't exist we are designing a task we haven't built one yet so if I click on enter custom value and on the right hand side I can select the ID of the task it now means that the task with this ID will be updated by this action I can now add a further description by adding further details again I'll copy and paste this for my document here save us some time and it'll add a further description or comment into that task for your more relevant information I could also add references to other files such as Excel or Word files but I can also add a checklist so here I'm going to add a very simple checklist our first ID always begins with one we then need to give our checklist a name so I.E this is the name of the first item in our list so it's going to be gathering project requirements and is it checked no and I'm going to add another item this time select two as the ID give it effectively a different checklist title and marketers know to be not automatically checked once it's being created now a habit of mine and for Good Housekeeping we should really rename these tasks and these actual tasks inside a power automate for example create a task preview update test details are not very good because if you want to create more tasks inside of this flow you'll have them all are the same name it's impossible to know when things go wrong we need to go and make a change to particular task this will save you a whole heap of time later so click on the free dot menu select rename and you can rename this action so this is going to be create project scoping document task the next is going to be much the same update project scope and document task so rename update project scoping document task nice and straightforward so we now have the relevant names of our tasks here in our power automate the problem is though we're going to want to know if this works now I could say we could wait until the 1st of July to make sure it works but it's not very useful so instead what we can do is click on the save button to the right hand side and then click on the test button to the right and we can now select manually and click test and power automate will run this flow regardless of the reoccurrence date and at this point you can see it's been run successfully it took one second to actually complete it and if I go into my project line planner as if by Magic there is our task with a green label create project scope and document marked as urgent we start in due dates notes and a checklist pre-created using power automate so you can of course add more tasks in power automate to create many of those and of course as we've seen now on that schedule when it runs itself on the 1st of July and every month thereafter it's going to pre-create these tasks for us in exactly the same way so how does this differ though to a reoccurring task you may add well in a reoccurring task if I was to mark this as reoccurring and I could still do that because the task is also being created it doesn't have that Association anymore I could say work on this weekly and then close it now as I close out this here it'll simply add the next one in but that can clutter up your view the power automate process we're using doesn't use reoccurring tasks effectively it means you can clean in all of your tasks you won't see them on the first of the month they'll be recreated for you as a brand new task allowing you to go in make adjustments clear off the task and knowing next month the task was regenerated for you on the given date so nice and easy to do to build your own power automate flow and to get that running for you foreign [Music]