Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin. Today, I want
to show you how you can use Microsoft Planner in Microsoft Teams and also how you could use
Microsoft Planner outside of Microsoft Teams. Before we jump into this as full disclosure, I
work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. My HR department requires me to say that. So first off,
what is Microsoft Planner? Well, Microsoft Planner allows you to organize tasks for your team. What
you could do is you could assign tasks to team members. You could check in on progress of tasks
with your team. It allows you to efficiently track and distribute work across a team. Now, one way to
think of it is it's like a to do list. If you've ever used a to do list before, it's very much
focused on you as an individual. With Microsoft Planner, what it does is it's much more focused on
the team. If you've ever used any products before, say, for instance, Monday.com or Trello, Microsoft
Planner will seem very familiar. Now, today, to show you what Microsoft Planner is like, I
pulled together a lot of how to YouTube videos. Now, it's really just me as an individual doing
this. But imagine I had a team of people. Let's say I had some employees part of my company and
we're pulling together videos. I'm going to show you how Planner could help with that. All right.
Well, enough talk. Why don't we jump on the PC, and I'll show you how you can get
started with Microsoft Planner. OK, well, here I am on my desktop, and I
have Microsoft Teams open. And what I want to do is I mentioned that I have this how
to company with all these employees. Now, I don't know where I got the funding for all
these employees. But let's say I have all these employees. What I'm going to do first is I'm going
to create a team with all of my employees. And so, all the people who are part of this team will
have access to my planner. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on first off, create
a team. And I'm just going to go ahead and create just an other type of team. And so, what I could
do here is maybe I'll call this team YouTube Video Creators. So that'll be the name of my group. I'm
not going to enter a description and I'm going to make this a public group. And then I'm going to
go ahead and click on next. And this is going to create my team. Next, it's going to ask me to add
a few team members. And since this is an example, I might as well recruit a few people to my
company. You know, the more help I could get, the better. So let me pull in, let's say, three
employees. And I'm going to go ahead and add all of them to my team. And it looks like all of them
have been added as members. So, this looks great. And there I go. I have three members of my team,
including myself. We have four. And here I'm now in the general channel of my team. So, some of the
things I have here, we have our conversation view. I have my file view. But what I want to do is I
want to use Microsoft Planner to help organize the team. So, to do that, what I'm going to do is up
here on the tabs across the top, there's this plus icon to add a new tab. I'm going to go ahead and
let's click on that. And it shows me a bunch of different types of tabs I can add. And today, what
I want to do is I want to add a Planner tab so I could organize my team. So, I'm going to go ahead,
let's click on this one, and I'm going to create a new plan. And this will be maybe the video plan.
So, this way we could organize and structure the videos coming up. You could also use an existing
plan. So, let's say I already have a Planner that exists in Microsoft Planner. I could pull
that into Microsoft Teams. In this case, though, I don't have any existing plans. So, I'm going to
go ahead and just create a new plan. And what I can also do is post to the channel about this tab.
This is a nice way where if I do this, it'll post it in the chat so everyone can see it and everyone
can easily access it. So that seems like a good idea to check that. And now I'm going to save this
and let's see what happens. OK, so now I'm back in the the main view here, and it looks like it
dropped me directly into the planner under video plan. Before we jump into video plan, what I want
to do is I'm going to go back to posts quickly, and here you can see that it automatically created
a post telling everyone about the new tab at the top of the channel. And clicking on this will
bring me in. Or alternatively, I could simply go to the tabs on top of the page, and I could also
access my video plan by clicking on this text. So, for all of the members of your team, you simply
go to the appropriate channel and then you can very quickly get into the plan. So, I'm going to
go ahead and click on this plan. And right now, it's a little barren in here. So, I have all these
employees, but we don't have anything to work on. I should probably come up with some work for the
team to do. Otherwise, I'm paying a lot of money and I'm not getting much return. So, what we could
do here is there are different buckets within this view. And so, I need to create buckets of work.
The way you could think of a bucket is it's a logical grouping of work. And so, in the case of,
let's say, a YouTube video, maybe a bucket is each individual video. So, I'm going to click on this
standard one to do that plan are automatically added. And I'm just going to retitle this to how
to use Google Meet. So maybe that's one video that we're going to pull together as a team. I'm going
to add another bucket and maybe this is how to record screen using Microsoft PowerPoint. Yes,
Microsoft PowerPoint has a screen recorder built in. It's not very well known, but it does do
that. And I did a video on that in the past. And then for a third bucket, let's throw one more
video in. And maybe this one is just how to use Microsoft Teams. If you're trying to figure
out how to use Teams, I have a video on that, and you could check it out. So here are
the added three buckets of potential work. Let's say in your organization, just think of
a logical grouping of work and that could be a bucket. And so, within this bucket, what I can do
then is I have the option to add a task. And so, I'm going to just focus on this, how to use Google
Meet. And what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add a task here. And maybe the first
task for creating a video is, well, we need to write a script. And what I could do is I could
assign a due date on this and today's Thursday and, you know, my team works really hard. So maybe
we're going to set this to be due on Saturday on the ninth. My team might not like having work
due on a weekend, but let's see how they react. And what I could do now is I could assign a person
to this. So, Adele is a very good script writer. So let me assign this task to her. And there is
the first task as part of this bucket of work. And what I could do then is I could go ahead and
create some additional tasks. And so, another one that I might want to do is we need to film
and we need the script first. So, I'll set the due date on this for the 10th. Once again, on the
weekend, my morale will probably be low because of these due dates set on these different items. And
for the filming, I could assign Adele and maybe Isaac. I want him to be involved as well. And so,
you could select multiple people, or you could assign a task to multiple people. And then what I
can do is I have the due date, I have the people, and I'm going to go ahead and add that task. And
now I'll just add a few others. Maybe one of them is to upload the video and maybe I'll set this
for the 11th, and I could assign this to myself. You know, I should probably be doing something
as well versus having my team do all the work and I'm going to add that. And then as a very last
task, maybe once we put the video up, we want to respond to comments. And for this, maybe I'll
wait a few days and we'll do this on the 14th, and I'll have Isaac take care of this task. So
now I'll just go ahead and let's add that task. And so, what you could see now is within
this bucket, I have a number of tasks, all with different due dates set on them. What
I can also do here, so within this view here, I could click in, I could very quickly assign a
label. So, you have these different colors. You could define what these different colors mean. You
could add additional people to assign the task to. If you want to reuse this task, let's say for
Microsoft Teams or for this PowerPoint screen recorder, I could copy the task over since
those will probably have very similar tasks. I could copy a link to the task if I want to
email or message it to someone. I could also move the task to a different bucket, although an
easier way to do that is simply drag and drop. And so within this task, now, if I click into it,
this will give me a more detailed view of all the items within here. So here for write a script,
what I could see is it sits within this bucket here, too. I could also change the bucket. I could
set where it is right now. It's not started. Is it in progress or is it completed? I could set
the priority on this. I could set a start date, the end time, which I already did. I could
also type in a description here if I want to add some more details. So, I'm going to write
a quick bit of text. And what I could do is I could even choose to have that show up on the
card if I want. I'll go ahead and check that. And what you could do is one way to think of it
is these tasks are your top-level tasks within a bucket. What you can also do is you could also
add sub tasks here. So, I'm going to go ahead and add a few items. So, what we're going to do
is first, we're going to have Adele go ahead, create the document. She's going to write a draft
and she's going to share it with the team, and then we'll incorporate any edits so I can add all
of these. And once again, I also have the option of having these show up on the card as well. So,
we could see that on the top level if we'd like, or we could simply hide that. So, either way,
I'll go ahead and show that on the card for now. And then what I can also do is I could add
attachments. Let's say if I have any content that might help Adele with this task, I could go
ahead and add that here. And then you could also type comments and have a discussion on the task
item here. All of this looks great. I'm going to go ahead and now close this task. And so here I
can see the overall view, and I have the subtasks showing up within here. And what I could do is
I could go through for these other video ideas, and I could add similar tasks under them, or I
could assign different people. So, here's where I could keep track of all my different tasks. Now,
what I've done is I've entered some initial tasks to really help the team get started. But the power
of Planner is in all the different ways you could view the different tasks that you've created.
So, what I'm going to do next is I'm right now I'm on the board view. So, this gives me all
the different items. If I click into charts, what's interesting is this will give me a nice
visualization of all the work going on across the team. So here I could see that across the entire
team, we have four tasks that we still need to get done. I can see what bucket they sit in, so all
of them fall under this how to use Google Meet. But here I can see how we're progressing against
each video idea. I can also see the priority that you could set on each task. So, all all of my
tasks are a medium priority, but maybe one of my tasks is urgent. So, this way you could track the
priority level on the different tasks. And then in terms of load balancing, you know, I don't want
to overwhelm any one team member with too many tasks. This allows me to see how many tasks are on
each member's plate. So here I could see Isaac has a little bit of a heavier load, but not too bad
compared to the overall team. What I can also do, not only can I look at a visual view of charts,
but I can also click into a schedule view. And what I did is for my different tasks, I assigned
due dates. And what's nice here is it will give me a month view. And here I'm in the month of May
2020. Here I could see all the different tasks and when they're due on a calendar. So, I could
very quickly get a good sense of when different due dates are approaching. And here, even if
I click on this plus icon on a specific day, what I can do is I can simply click on that. Now
I'm going to go back to the board view, and I want to show a few different ways you can filter and
also visualize all the different tasks coming up. And to do that, we're going to go over to the
right-hand side where we have the filter. And with the filter, what you could do is you could filter
on different tags that you've applied to your different items. So here I could filter based on
due dates. So, let's say I want to see everything that's due today or maybe next week or what is
due this week that isn't done yet. So maybe I could help out my team. You could also filter
based on the priority labels, different buckets, and also by the person. So here if I'm, let's say
I'm having a meeting or a one on one with Isaac, I could click on him and I could just get a view
of what he's working on. So nice way to filter down the data to give me what I care about. And
then lastly, there's also another dropdown here called group by bucket. And so, what's interesting
here is right now, all of these are grouped by the bucket. What I can also do is I could group by
assigned to. So, let's say you're having scrum or a meeting where each person gives an update on
what they're working on. You could pull up this view to see what tasks sit under each individual.
Clicking on the group by again, I could also group by progress, and here I see that nothing has
been started. And so maybe what, uh, maybe Adele has already gotten started. So, I'm going
to drag this over to in progress and maybe she's already created the document and she's written
it. She's written a draft. Uh, so here I could see that two of four are done. Um, and this task is in
progress. Of course, we haven't started filming, uploading or responding to comments yet because
we're waiting on writing the script. Uh, so neat way, especially if you say have a standup meeting
or a scrum within your organization, uh, you could very quickly visualize, uh, where tasks sit.
And I can't move it to completed yet until I check that one off. And so maybe that's done, and
we've moved on to the filming stage and that's now in progress. What I can also do is here I could
filter by or group by due dates. So here I could see this week, everything else that's coming up.
And it looks like we've finished all the tasks that are due this week and I can see for next
week what's coming up. And here I could also group by different labels. I haven't used labels
here. They're all under no label, but let's say red might be urgent or a specific meaning, and so
you could put tasks under there. And then lastly, you could also group by priority as well.
So, there are many different ways you can visualize the data very quickly. Now, this is
the core Planner view within Microsoft Teams. It's a great way to organize your team.
One other way you can also access Planner, if you open up your browser and you navigate
to the website office.com, what you can do is you could click into Planner directly from here.
If you don't have it on your homepage, you could click into all apps and then enter Planner through
there. In this case, I've used it before, and it shows up as one of my core app tiles. I'm going
to click into Planner, and this will load Planner on the web and not in Microsoft Teams. And here
too, what I could do is here I could see all of my tasks. And so, I'm on point to upload and I'm also
on point to create a thumbnail for another video. So, I have a few different tasks showing up in
here and this offers similar functionality where I could get charts or I could pull up the schedule
view. So, lots of similar functionality within Planner on the web. Here within Planner on
the web. What I can also do is I'm going to click back into my video plan and here I
get a similar view to what I had in Teams. All the functionality is pretty similar. If
I click on the ellipses or the dot, dot, dot, I get a few additional things here where I could
add it to my favorites or maybe I create a copy of the plan. I could even export the plan to Excel.
So, I have a few additional options that I don't get in Teams, but overall Microsoft Teams provides
all the core functionality within Planner. In fact, there's an easy way to get back to Microsoft
Teams directly from Planner. All right, well, that was a quick overview of how you could
use Microsoft Planner to organize your team, whether you're doing it from within
Microsoft Teams or whether you're doing it through the web by accessing Planner through
office.com. Either way, allow you to get to it. Anyway, if this video helped you create your
first plan and start to organize your team, please give this video a thumbs up. If you want
to see more videos like this in the future, hit that subscribe button. That way you'll get a
notification anytime new content like this comes out. And lastly, if there are any other videos
that you want to see me cover in the future, leave a comment down below and I'll add it to
my list of videos to create. All right, well, that's all the content I had for you today. I hope
you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.