Hello Tech Community! The Planner Team is constantly striving to provide excellent service by adding and improving on existing features. We have noticed a need on improving upon labels, but would like to gather more feedback in order to get better understanding of your needs. We would like to learn more about how you utilize labels, specifically: 1) How do you use labels to organize your work? 2) How many labels do you need? 3) Would you like an ability to customize colors? If so, how would you use it? 4) How would you like labels to appear on task cards? 5) Is there anything else would you like to add in regards to labels? Let us know what you think in the comments below! Cheers, The Planner Team

Joanna Parkhurst Hello there, thanks for reaching out to the users :)1) I do three main different jobs in my work - Let's say application, animation and movie. So i tag respective task with one of the labels. Also, I use one for 'other', one for 'holidays' and I have one left.2) For now it's 5, but if I'd like to include other members in my company, I'd need around 10, but we are small company.3) Yes, we use in our company different colors for different products, eg. animation is somewhere near cyan, and application a pinkish one. It's additional, organizing thing, not neccessary, but nice.4) Task title could be in label color. But most important, on the schedule view, I'd love to have tasks colored as labelled. Work in progress colouring isn't necessary, as we have icon for it.5) Yes, moving them up and down :) But the most important thing for me is using it more to separate different tasks, based on labels. A must have for me is an option to make label color appear on the schedule view, like on the printscreen (I managed to color it through personal CSS using Stylish add-on).

Hi! Thank you for reaching out to the community about feature feedback!My personal opinion is that the colors should be customizable or at least you can change order on the labels!It would also be nice to be able to visualize label tagged tasks with the corresponding color on card somehow or some more visual way than today!

Joanna Parkhurst We create tasks that are relevant in a number of different ways to our teams. For example, I might ask someone from a team containing say 30 people to resolve a customer technical issue. This issue might be relevant to other customers too so it is worth thinking about that. It may also be something that we might then blog about to generate work in this regard. If it is such an interesting issue then we might discuss it at our team meeting. We used to use asana and we would tag the above task with the following tags/labels: Customer query (we would then collate all tasks tagged as such onto a customer query workflow board)Jeff's tasks (we can then identify all tasks of any nature assigned to Jeff)Ongoing product development (a board full of ideas to develop in future)Blog ideasTeam meeting agenda itemsOne of the weaknesses on planner is that I can't tag tasks with multiple tags as per the above to slice and dice the whole pool of tasks to arrive at individual task lists or marketing, blog, technical lists as described above. We would therefore like to have as many custom tags and labels as possible. Thanks

I use the Planner to manage a work 'pipeline' for a team. I use labels to be able to select appropriate views for different audiances. By Supplier or by works area and also to focus on work targeted for completion in the current delivery period. As there are so few labels then I use a hash tag in the Task title together with the text search filter to focus the view on differnet works areas, projects, work-packages etc. But I would rather not have to use this method as it is not possible to OR as it is with the Labels. I would like to have n+1 labels. The current visual layout is fine for me. I need to restrict others from changing the labels. I would like to allow users some freedom to add 'user' labels for particular uses. Thanks

Hello planner team,I believe it would be great the user could choose the number of labels, their colors and the order they will appear on the top of the task.Number of labels: the need of labels vary a lot depending on the project.Color changing: the way to use colors also vary a lot depending on the project. Sometimes I wish to have more red labels, for exemple, because it would be connected with the logic of a group of labels. So, making it free for the user to customize would be a perfect solution.Organization of the labels: The position of the labels on the top of card is perfect! But sometimes the label that matter most is not the first of the list. So, it would be great that we could change the position of the labels between themselves.Best Regards!Paula Vasconcelos

How should we improve Labels in Planner?

GamerzKris
Brass Contributor
May 06, 2022
Joanna Parkhurst

Good Morning Joanna,

I appreciate that the MS Planner Team has been making the efforts to reach out to the Planner community.

A couple things I would like to see. I've noticed a lot of the functions mentioned in previous comments have been implemented. I would hope to see the following:

1. For the actual 'Card', is it possible to change/manipulate its appearance either with Solid Colours, Gradiant Colours or Custom images, instead of just plain white cards, as well with the coloured labels? Even the option for a light grey so it is a little easier on the eyes.
2. For the MS Planner application in SharePoint, you are provided some backgrounds to use, but they aren't necessarily appropriate for our team, and would appreciate the ability to customize the background colour of the application, either with Solid/Gradient Colour or a custom background.

Thank you for your consideration, and I hope to see these recommendations be considered into future production updates

Cheers,
Kris Smith
Deanna2022
Copper Contributor
May 23, 2022
Joanna Parkhurst

We use all 25 colors.
I'd love to duplicate colors. We have categories across our teams. It would be nice to add additional category and assigned person as the same color.
We need to be able to customize the colors.
Hudsonk
Copper Contributor
Jun 15, 2022
Joanna Parkhurst In a project management context we use MSPlanner to record tasks that apply to approximately 100 different lines of effort, including about 60 different products, and about 40 different process categories. We use the Buckets to create a Kanban board (Backlog/To do/Doing/Blocked/Done), so that we can analyse where my team is stuck, and reallocate tasking or resources when certain lines of effort become higher priority. (we use the 'assign to' file for humans). We are used to dealing with the 'infinite' number of tags/labels available in Outlook (which is how we were previously tracking tasks). Most tasks have one label, however some tasks will have multiple labels (such as relating to product X, product Y and process )

At the moment, we are stuck because at 25 labels, we can only label the first 25 lines of effort.

Right now we need at least 100 labels, however I'd suggest it should be an infinite bucket. Setting a limit on labels seems to limit the use of MSPlanner to only very rudimentary tasking systems.

Colour coding is a nice visual cue to have, however it will not hurt at all if colours are re-used - there are only so many colours. It would be valuable to be able to set colours (as we can do in Outlook). More importantly, I would like the labels to sort A-Z (or be able to set the order myself).

Separately, we very much need to be able to distinguish assignment roles - including "leader"; "contributor"; "reviewer/approver"
- VinVenus
  Copper Contributor
  Aug 24, 2023
  @Joanna Parkhurst Please enable the customised ordering of labels - or at least order them by default alphabetically.
  
  The current order by recently used does not make sense when working collaboratly in a bigger team.

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How should we improve Labels in Planner?

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