Microsoft Planner: Linking Plans to a Project task

Link to Planner is a feature put in Project Desktop to allow you to reference Planner tasks in your Microsoft Project Desktop Project Plans (.mpp files) published to a Project Web Access (PWA) SharePoint site. It is one-way only, i.e. you are only allowed to insert references to existing Microsoft 365 Planner tasks into your Project Desktop file. It does not work in the opposite direction, i.e. you cannot create tasks in a Project Desktop plan and publish them to Planner projects.

This feature ONLY works if You have:

• The subscription-based Project for the Desktop client installed, which is only available as a licensed download from a Microsoft 365 account,
• The Project 3 or Project 5 subscription attached to your Microsoft 365 user account,
• Deployed a PWA SharePoint site through the Microsoft 365 Administrative console,
• Published your plans to a PWA using the aforementioned Project for the Desktop client. 

Why care? Planner is nice for an Individual Contributor or Manager to manage tactical tasks. A nice side benefit is that these tasks also automatically show up in the Microsoft To-Do app under 'Assigned to Me'. Planner also provides nice web and mobile applications for these, and you can pin Planner projects in Teams Channels for easy collaboration at a working level. Some people also like to run Power Automate and Power BI against planner data for various other uses.

The Link to Planner feature is not a sync conduit to publish tasks created in the Project Desktop Client .mpp back to Planner. I imagine the poor development of these integrations comes from splitting resources to work on Project Online, a reimplementation of Project for the Desktop in Microsoft 365 using a Web Application. Unfortunately, the Project Online client does not provide feature parity with the Project Desktop client, and therefore is kind of useless as a replacement for complex .mpp projects requiring things like real resource management. 

I really wish Microsoft would improve their naming because all of this mess is terribly confusing, as they are attempting to keep brand consistency for the Project family, but are failing to articulate it effectively even in their own documentation. Looking at the 'roadmap', I sadly can't find a meaningful indicator they are actively developing anything but a token feature every now and again. Like Visio, the Project suite is probably too big to die and too small to resource effectively to properly evolve.

Good luck out there, there are alternatives, but many seem to be leaning towards the lighter weight side of project management and don't always provide a realistic replacement for some more complex or obscure features in Project for the Desktop . 

*PWA - a centralized SharePoint site with special extensions to support the Project Desktop Client.