Microsoft Planner: Task and Project Management Basics

Microsoft Planner is a visual task management tool included in Microsoft 365. It uses a Kanban board interface with buckets (columns), cards (tasks), and assignments. It's integrated with Microsoft Teams — add it as a tab in any Teams channel for team visibility. Creating a plan: go to planner.microsoft.com or open Planner in Teams. Create buckets to represent your workflow stages (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Review, Done). Add tasks to buckets, assign them to team members, set due dates, add checklists, and attach files. Tasks can have multiple attachments, labels (color-coded), and comments. Best practices: review the board in team standups to update statuses. Use the Charts view to see workload distribution across team members and catch overloaded individuals. Use the Schedule view to see tasks on a calendar timeline. Planner integrates with Microsoft To Do — assigned Planner tasks appear in each assignee's To Do 'Assigned to me' list. For more advanced project management (dependencies, Gantt charts, resource management), consider Microsoft Project instead.