Forum Discussion
Project desktop vs Planner + project Plan 3
We are trying to plan our projects using ms Planner Premium (Plan 3). However, I get very confused because of the so many product names, subscription name, soon ending products, etc. my questions are:
- Which desktop tool of microsoft for project planning is running currently. If it's "Microsoft Project Online Desktop Client MSO" can this be synced with the planner premium (Plan 3)?, if yes how?
- I have an excel list of a Project plan with the columns below: can i manage my project in planner premium? if yes, are all this custom fields deployed in dataverse, so that I can access them from power bi?
i have a project plan in an excel file with this columns. now i want to create this project plan in project plan 3, how to do it?
Company
Cost Center Name
Company Number
Account Number
Cost Center Number
Accounting Project Number
Project Number
Sub- Project number
Project Leader
Concept
Vendor (provider)
Total Cost (in contract
currency)
Contract Currency
Project Initiated/Not Initiated
Committed/Not committed
Priority
January, 2026
February, 2026
March, 2026
April, 2026
May, 2026
June, 2026
July, 2026
August, 2026
September, 2026
October, 2026
November, 2026
December, 2026
Q1/27
Q2/27
Q3/27
Q4/27
2028
2029
2030
- What is the best practice project planning approach when i have complex projects that I have to manage, with resources, costs, projects, sub projects, sub sub projects. How do this on desktop and online? And also colaborative?
- when project managers have to input thier budgets, how can I create a mapping where they can input thier budgets and project related facts.
Thank you in advance for you inputs and help
F.A
1 Reply
There is no connection between MS Project Desktop and Planner. Project online and Project for the Web have both been sun-setted (end date for Project Online is 30 Sept 26).
The guidance provided by MS for Planner is split over the old Teams planner, MS Project, Project Online and a CRM Dynamics solution. It is very confusing.
In terms of managing multiple projects you can either buy a solution from a third party or download and install the Microsoft project accelerator, which is a Power Apps app created by Microsoft. it is an old solution and is still branded as 'Project'. It also comes with a bespoke Power BI report. The PowerApps app allows you to organise plans by programs and has out of the box fields for cost, state, stage, RAID, etc. There are licensing implications so you might need to upgrade to Plan 5 to use all of the features you need.
Custom fields: I have tried to solve a similar problem by creating template plans with the custom fields, and copying the template plan in planner. Custom fields are clearly somewhere in Dataverse, but there isn't currently an API to surface them. The only way I found to report on custom fields was to download the plans as excel files and aggregate the information using Power BI.
In terms of the dates if you are pulling data into Power BI then you can use Power BI date tables and connect to the task start and finish dates to organise by quarter, year etc. It is possible to pull out data on a daily basis relating to schedules for uncompleted tasks, (try the Resource TimePhase table) but not for completed tasks.
