Microsoft Planner Tips for Checklist Items and Complete but Open Status - HLS Show Me How

[Mike Gannotti]

Today I had a meeting with a customer around their use of Microsoft Teams. During the session one of the attendees brought up two areas of challenge she was seeing in the use of Planner for their tasks. In the first instance she wanted to be able to assign individual users to a given checklist item within a task. In the second instance when a task was completed they wanted to be able to visually mark it complete but not have it close as it does when a task is marked complete.

In this HLS Show Me How per customer questions I demonstrate how to indicate a person is assigned to a Task Checklist Item. I also demonstrate how to visually mark a task completed but keep it actively open for review and re-use.

Resources:

• To Learn more about Microsoft Planner visit the Planner Help page
• Check out Microsoft Planner video training
• Learn to manage Microsoft Planner and other Office 365 services at the Office 365 Admin help center

Thanks for visiting - Michael Gannotti

[Mark Terry]

Great tips thanks Michael!

I am hoping that Planner allows us to choose a user for subtasks soon, this will help the reporting, but also any notifications. One thing that stopped me using it was the ability to estimate or allocate time at a task level.

Allowing individual users to say how much time they have spent on tasks and enabling us to report on that would be hugely valuable as would the ability to allocate a meeting to a task would be very powerful.

[Mike Gannotti]

Hi Mark,

Those are great ideas! I highly encourage you to submit them to Microsoft's User Voice for Planner for the product teams consideration. You can find Planner User voice here https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum

Thanks for the feedback!! 

[Bram_UNSW]

Another way to keep tasks open when they are finished is to use a traditional Kanban set of "Buckets" i.e. Backlog (not started), Parking Lot (blocked), Doing, Done. You can change the bucket for the completed task to "Done", and it moves it to that column but it is still open. At the end of a Sprint, or to remove it from common view, you can change it to Completed status.

[Bob Cook]

Set up a "Template" Task

We have set up a "Template" bucket for repeating tasks such as wire transfers that involve several people.  The initiator of the request uses the 'Copy task' function from the template, fills in the date and amount, and drags the item to an "Initiated>>Release" bucket (i.e., the wire has been initiated in the bank application by needs approval and releasing by an authorized individual).  The person who authorizes the wire completes that step, then drags the item to the "Released >> Post" bucket (i.e., the wire has been released for processing by the bank and the transaction needs to be posted in our financial system).  Finally, when the approved item has been posted in our financial system, that person check the task as complete and moves it to a "Completed" bucket.  We also attach related documentation at each step of the task so at the end we have a complete record of the steps and documentation for the transaction. 

[Lilania]

Any suggestions on how to get the completed checklist items to stay visible on the 'card' in the board view?

[Mike Gannotti]

@Lilania  At the end of each Bucket of Tasks there is a dropdown arrow with accompanying text that says Show Completed and next to it number of completed tasks. Click on the dropdown and it will display all the completed tasks 

[GillianSIT]

@Mike Gannotti Is there a limit of 20 checklist items per task? I'm trying to add a 21st item and the "Add an Item" option is no longer available. Hoping there is a work-around! Thanks

[Mike Gannotti]

@GillianSIT Yes there is a limit there you are hitting

[JoeINdy313]

Adding initials is a workaround and in large project not a good best practice (ie Subtask creation) especially since you cant search checklist text or text in notes or comments for that matter. I miss JIRA... 

[soorya2305]

Hi @Mike Gannotti , Whenever I export the planner data into Excel, the items which get completed, For E.g : 3/5 items completed. Is there any possible way to differentiate those 3 items from the total 5 items in MS Excel interface. ? The problem is that I need to create visuals for the Completed Checklist items For Eg a Pie chart for 3/5. hope you could get my query.

[Mike Gannotti]

Hi @soorya2305 This article is about 5 years old and have havent covered Planner for a few years now. You might want to ping the Planner folks over at Planner Blog - Microsoft Community Hub 

Hopefully they can help.