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Hello everybody, it's Matt. Welcome to Collaboration Coach.
In this video I'm gonna give you some tips on how to create tasks in Planner.
Actually, creating a task in Planner is very very simple.
All you do to create a task is go to the bucket that you want the task in,
and press "add task".
You give the task a name and that's it - you've got a new task.
What we're going to show you today though is what you can do once the task has been created...
...to use Planner more effectively.
And to demonstrate that,
I'm going to show you how we at Collaboration Coach use Planner
to manage the YouTube videos that we create for this channel.
So let me start by just talking a bit about how we actually use tasks for creating videos in Planner.
The way we do it is that every video has its own task
and, for example, you can see here I have one called "Tips for Creating Tasks"
which is in the Planner bucket so it's a Planner video
and the video is going to be called "Tips for Creating Tasks.
If I open one of these tasks up you can see it has been assigned to someone,
it has some information about when it's due
and it also has a checklist of items that need to be completed before the task can be closed.
This checklist is the workflow - all the things that need to get done before the video can be published.
So you can see here we've got things like "write the scripts", "record the video",
and eventually "publish on YouTube".
Because each video has to have that checklist in it,
what I've done (and here is my first tip) is created a template for the task.
If I just close this down, you can see I've got this "Task Template" task.
Because there's no templating in Planner unfortunately,
to work around that I've created this task which is a template
so every time I want to create a new video I do a copy of the task
and you can see within that task I've got my checklist
so I don't have to write out the checklist every time.
So all I do is go ellipsis, copy task,
I type in the number of the video and the name
and then I can also include other bits like the assignment - so who it's assigned to,
progress and dates - I don't want to copy those because they're always different
but these four items are always the same:
description, checklist, attachments and labels.
Notice that I can also add a bucket name.
For example, I'll choose the technology that this video is going to be for,
and then I hit copy and then you can see the task has been added to the bucket called "Planner"
and then within the task I've got my checklist all ready to go.
My next tip is around how to use checklists.
Because every video that we create for the YouTube channel has two people working on it,
first of all there's me who writes and records to the video
and then there's a second person who comes along and edits and publishes it
so for that reason we've used checklists to split up the tasks into those various parts.
So if I open up this "Tips for Creating Tasks" here for example,
you can see here the first four items on the checklist are all mine
so they are the things I do, and I gradually go down and check them off as I complete them
and we do this also because we can have a number of different videos going on at the same time.
Sometimes it gets difficult to track what stage of the video you're at
so a checklist is really good to keep track of that.
Once I've done the first four items I then assign that to someone else - the editor,
who will then complete the edit and the publishing to YouTube.
So checklists are really useful in this situation.
So our next tip is around using due dates.
For every video we create, we want to specify when that video is going to be published to YouTube
and we use the "due date" field to do that.
If I click into it I can just pick a date from the picker
and what we do is use the due dates to build up a contents schedule,
so if I close that task once I've set the due date
and go to the schedule view you can now see that task's on the calendar view in schedule.
If I just click on to that day and then go to the week view
you can see there it is, and I can click and open it.
What that does is show us very clearly which videos are going out on which day.
While they're in the process of being made we can see them on the calendar
and when they're actually published to YouTube we can close this task down
and it will be removed from the calendar.
My final tip is around copying and moving tasks.
Particularly copying is useful to us
and we find that we can reuse the tasks in other plans that we have.
For example, I have training courses on Teams
and sometimes I want to take a task that I created for YouTube and copy it into my Teams plan.
Let me show you what I mean.
So if I opened this "Tips for Creating Tasks"
and I come to the ellipsis here and go "copy task",
you'll see that as well as copying the tasks...
...I can actually move it to another plan.
So right now it's in YouTube but if I drop this down I can choose my other plans
so I can move it to my Teams Champion, my SharePoint Champion and so on.
These are other plans where I manage other aspects of the business like my training courses.
I can also change the bucket so if there's a specific section that I want to drop it into
I can choose that here too, and then I hit copy
and now a copy of that task is in that plan.
Okay so there are your tips for creating tasks using Planner.
I hope that was useful. Thanks for watching,
and if you like videos then please subscribe to the channel
and I'll see you next time.
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