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.