Planner's new copy plan feature helps streamline work management
Published Mar 11 2019 07:00 AM 82.6K Views
Microsoft

We are pleased to share that we've added the ability to copy plans to Microsoft Planner.  We built this feature as the first step to address your feedback that you'd like to reuse project plans and repeat business processes.  With copy plan, you can now easily duplicate plans and get organized quickly.

 

Copy existing plans to use for future projects 

It takes a lot of time to build the perfect work management plan. This is especially true when a plan includes a lot of tasks or are part of a repeated process.  Manually recreating plans can be tedious and takes time away from actually doing the work.  That’s where copy plan comes in.  With this feature, you can now create a new plan by duplicating an existing one.  From the Planner hub, simply select “Copy plan” under the “…” menu on the plan you'd like to copy.  You can also copy a plan from the "..." menu when looking at a specific plan.

 

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Copy plans from the Planner hub or within the Board view.

 

The overall plan structure like, buckets and labels names, are copied over, in order, to help keep the copied plan organized.  The task themselves, as well as their descriptions, checklists, and labels are also copied over.  Copying a plan does not copy over members.  Similarly, task assignments, due datesattachments, comments aren't carried over, and task progress is reverted to “Not started” so you can start with a clean slate.  We’ll continue to listen for your feedback on what options you'd like to see copy plan support.  For additional details on copy plan and the most current list of what’s copied over, please read our support article.    

 

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Rename the copied plan before publishing. In this example, the copied plan is renamed to “Sales Conference - South Region.” 

 

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Start with a clean slate: copied plans automatically remove details like task assignments and progress so you can start fresh with your new plan. 

 

Up next for us, we plan to add copy plan to our Microsoft Teams experience, as well as support copying a plan within the same Office 365 group 

 

We love hearing from you, so please continue to tell us how we can improve your Planner experience through our UserVoice site.  We’re always interested in hearing how you’d like to be able to further customize what is copied over, how copy plan fits into your work process, and if you find any gaps or limitations with this new feature.  Feel free to leave a comment below to engage with us directly on the new copy plan feature and keep checking our Tech Community site for the latest feature releases and Planner news. 

77 Comments
Iron Contributor

This is a great update - thank you very much!  :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:  One minor thing - above it indicates that "Copying a plan does copy over members" - assume just a typo and it is meant to be "does not copy over members" - I only ask as it mentions this in the support article - https://support.office.com/article/copy-a-plan-50401e13-a25f-40df-93c6-b608cc28c3d4 - just wanted to confirm.  

 

Thanks again - cheers!

Microsoft

Yes @Tammy Schwark -- that was a typo -- thanks for reporting it!

This solves a key use case for a lot users. Thanks!

Copper Contributor

Fantastic Thanks! Will there be any functionality to use Flow to copy plans and then amend key elements?

Copper Contributor

News excellent! This feature will be widely used.

Copper Contributor

This is just great! It helps to utilize the ease of use of Planner on repetitive short term projects! Man Happy

Copper Contributor

Thanks for this!  Greatly expands how we can use the product!

Iron Contributor

Is there an existing option or future plan to allow a plan to be copied (or moved) to a Different Team?

Deleted
Not applicable

Thx great feature, @Eray Chou any information if it will be also available through Microsoft Graph ?

Brass Contributor

Please consider adding an option to copy over files/links.

 

We're still maintaining a Basecamp account for certain types of repeating projects, things that involve quite a few steps and a number of those steps require that the user refer to forms to complete (both as files or as URLs) or to other documents/locations for more information. I realize we can square peg / round hole our way through it via the task's description field (e.g.: "copy and paste this URL into your browser...") but that's pretty clunky. 

 

I 100% "get" that not all use cases for copying a board would want to maintain files/links, but I suspect a lot of use cases would find it handy. 

Copper Contributor

Enhancing the copy functionality with a choice which parts to copy (esp. the ones that are currently not copied) would be very helpful; with that enhancement the copy functionality could e.g. also be used to create a (frozen) backup of a plan for a certain point in time.

Brass Contributor

Implementation in Teams is the feature we still waiting for. Teams is the central hub, I can't explain the Teams-Members to go a new Planner-site every week.

Steel Contributor
Dear @Eray Chou, That is a great improvement, and will probably help a lot to use Planner across any customer use cases. My 2 cents comment is related to another expectation, because your Copy Option is a full Planner/Group/Team/… copy and will create a new fresh O365 Group with the Planner object loaded from the source. The requestor will have to invite the members as he needs to. From my point of view, I wanted to duplicate only the Plan option into the same O365 Group (as subplan) or into another existing O365 Group. Is there any plan from your roadmap for that modification ? Thanks for your feedback. Fab
Copper Contributor

This is a welcome very improvement especially when managing repeating templated plans, hopefully the required integration with MS Teams will now follow quickly. I can now duplicate Plan templates using the MS Planner web app which is great, but I cannot currently see these duplicated plans listed for selection when adding a new MS Planner Tab within MS Teams. As a workaround I am adding a URL for the MS Plan web app to the Conversations tab on the MS Teams Channel ... not ideal but hopefully just a temporary work around. Thanks :)  **Further Update - Add a new TAB for WEB SITE and paste the URL to the Copied Plan and you can then continue to work directly from within MS TEAMS on your web planner

@Eray Chou : does this follow just recently GAd naming conventions? 

What happens if user is not permitted to create a Office 365 Group? In those orgs where Groups and Teams are created using a centralized process.. 

 

Microsoft

@FFessler ; @DetSch ; @Fabrice Romelard ;  Thanks for the feedback!  Yes, now that we've shipped the initial version of copy plan, we'll be working on supporting copy plan within the same group and team next.

 

@Vesa Nopanen ; Yes, copy plan does follow group creation policy.  If Office 365 group creation is disabled for a user, that users will not be able to copy a plan (the user will see an error stating that creating and copying groups has been turned off).   When we do support copying a Plan within the same group/team, we expect to allow a user to copy a plan within an existing group/team.

 

 

Brass Contributor

All I can say is AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!!!!!! This will save me A LOT OF TIME. 

Copper Contributor

Thank you so much!!! this just won me a customer that was going to Wrike !! (project too complex - planner too basic)

A great addition would be to be able to propose a Plan Template repository where we can save a list of plans accessible to all users  (feature such as COPY as TEMPLATE)  

Copper Contributor

Copy Plan  + MultiPlan????  please...... 

typically when I need to copy a plan is because we have exactly the same type of project (so the same group will do that)

Copper Contributor

This is definitely a fantastic feature but seems to be missing something (or maybe I need a bit of guidance) Smiley Happy

 

I have a group, Project Management, with multiple plans associated (Client A, B, N). When I copy one of the plans under group "Project Management", it creates a new group for the plan. I couldn't find a way to create a copy and maintain the group association. I also didn't find any way to link the new plan to an older group. 

 

Is there a way to achieve this?

 

Copper Contributor

This is great but limited without being able to copy within an existing O365 Group.  With Group policy creation in place, this is not useful in our organization.  Let us know when that will land on then road map.

Copper Contributor

First, thank you, this enhancement will be very useful. 

 

We are very interested in expanding our use of Planner but the lack of updates / enhancements to Planner lately have made us concerned about Microsoft's Road plan for Planner. 

 

We need Export-to-Excel capabilities and other enhancements that are very popular in UserVoice (and were previewed at MS Ignite.)  Even though these enhancements are in a 'Scheduled' status in UserVoice, there's little information on if the enhancements are progressing or if development is stalled.

 

Is Microsoft going to continue enhancing and developing Planner? 

 

It's a great tool, but I'm getting concerned about its path forward.

 

Thank you

 

YT

Brass Contributor

This is a great new feature for a plan, however, we need to be able to copy plans in TEAMS. We need to be able to take an existing plan and copy it into a team as a template. The loss of assignment info and due dates would be acceptable.  

Silver Contributor

Why does copying a Plan create a new Group? this is not nearly as helpful as I was expecting. My customers just need to create a copy within the same group, and to be able to copy a plan to an already existing group. Am I doing something wrong or misunderstanding how this works?

Iron Contributor

No posts for over a monh - is planner still "on-going"?

Silver Contributor

@Ian Cunningham  from everything I can tell, the Planner team at Microsoft is not very active in any of the social media, including this community.

The blog is mostly used for new feature announcements, so for Planner a few blog posts every month or two is expected. This isn't SharePoint that has a million features/use cases.

Copper Contributor

being able to copy to other existing groups or teams would provide more templatizing options as the only way to limit permissions currently is by creating different teams, whereas if private channels were able to be created copying of plans to other channels within a team would solve this problem as well

Iron Contributor

@Eray Chou

Eagerly awaiting the function to copy a plan in Teams.

Our use is so much oriented around a team of people working on multiple projects with most of the projects having the same structure of buckets and tasks. The ability to copy an existing plan within Teams would allow us to have "templates" of typical plan types and then just assign tasks to people in the team.

Copper Contributor

Aloha! 

 

With this comment, I'd like to encourage the developer team to allow us to copy an existing plan not just within the same group (or teams) but instead of copying it into an existing group (or teams).

 

I thought I am smart by creating a template group (teams) to create different default structures. Soon I realized I cannot copy into a different group and was bumped since I felt that should be doable.

 

Thanks!

 

 

Copper Contributor

Any update on the copy plan to existing group feature? Need ASAP as our company is trying to transition to Teams and this is a do-or-die feature for us, especially since we can't even batch copy tasks or copy buckets of tasks which would also be great features.

Not that I know of any.

But why don't you create a BOT or other application that uses Graph API to extract plan information from old plan and creates a new plan based on that? It could be done already.

Or you can create a PowerShell/etc script that can do just that - without creating a bot. But for usability / user friendliness an application/bot would be a great solution. Of course you should use that bot to something else as well, since someday this feature (copy plan within a team) will emerge.

Copper Contributor

@Vesa Nopanen  Can you expound upon how to create or give an example of how to create such a bot or application or the powershell script to run to be able to do that? 

 

The reason why (at least for me) to request these feature updates is that I do not have the knowledge or time to invest in writing the code as a workaround for a product that I have not developed Cat LOL

 

Now if they come out and say no to something or there is not enough demand then, by all means, I will consider it if the feature is that big of a must and there is not another solution

@mdooley checkout Laura Kokkarinen's blog post first. She also have a link inside article to her Flow to copy a plan and tasks. 

  

https://laurakokkarinen.com/cloning-teams-and-configuring-tabs-via-microsoft-graph-configuring-the-p...

 

Hopefully that will help you get started.

Copper Contributor

The fact that my team is unable to copy an existing template for project implementations managed within Microsoft Teams.  Since existing plans cannot be copied across projects in MS Teams or Planner, this is a non-starter for me.  I seriously hope this gets addressed.  Thanks.

Copper Contributor

Hi, I am having a problem. I want to copy a plan within the same Team in Microsoft Teams and use the two plans separately. However, after I copy a plan and edit it, the changes made to the new plan also reflect on the old plan as if they are linked together as the same plan and not two different plans. Is there a way to get around this?

Copper Contributor

Hi, very good functionality, thanks.

To make it perfect, it would be good to give the possibility to choose what to copy (assignee, attachments)

Copper Contributor
We can copy plans and copy tasks. Will we get the ability to copy buckets? I am using a project to store a series of courses I am creating and using a separate bucket for each course. I may have 8 buckets with the same tasks in them and that is a pain to copy each task over to each of the buckets. Thanks, Cindy
Copper Contributor

Is it possible to disable the ability to copy plans?

Copper Contributor

Liking MS Planner, my team has created a sandpit in Planner where we build a template for projects. As this is an iterative design I have one question.

Following copying the template plannner and renaming the the new planner board, does it delink from the template i.e. any changes on the new board wont be reflected in the new board or if you delete the new board does it delete the template.

Copper Contributor

It would be great if a Planner can be copied to a different MS Team or copied as part of a MS Team template for every new project team - we would use it to create the process steps that must be followed within every single project.  Saves time for onboarding new PMs if all the instructions can be maintained in the template then copied into every new project.

Copper Contributor

Hi all of you that commented here that we should be able to copy a plan to an existing team /group - Uservoice has this logged here: https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/37078834-co...

I dont see any updates from MS but it would be great to get an update on when this will be available. 

@Eray Chou  any updates?

Copper Contributor

Has anyone come up with an efficient method to have attachments and their association to tasks added to the copy?  We have a plan that has several template documents that are attached to tasks and it is imperative that these are associated to a copied plan.

Iron Contributor

@Eray Chou 

Any news on the function to copy a plan in Teams.

It has been 6 months and no update on progress or expected date for release.

 

UPDATE:

As E commented on September 27, 2019 in

https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/37078834-co...

I have tried copying a plan setup as an "empty" unassigned template with all tasks, buckets, checklists and notes in Teams. This then after renaming is shown as a different plan for a new project BUT every change made to the new plan changes the original copied plan so this is not a recommended workaround.

 

Copper Contributor

This is good, but this copy function always creates a totally new group.

 

There is still no possibility to copy a plan template within the same Teams group, or from one group to another

I'm working within an event planning unit where we gather all Planner projects according to event type in the same Teams group.

 

It is VERY time consuming to copy each task individually to a new Planner tab.

Copper Contributor

@Eray Chou - It has been 8 months since your post about adding the ability to copy plans to an existing O365 group. Has any progress been made on this? Do you have an anticipated release date for this?

Copper Contributor

When will his feature be able to copy from one group to an existing group?

Copper Contributor

Has there been ANY movement on this?  Not being able to have a planner template in a Team / Group, that can be copied (and not tied to the original as it is now) clean to another existing Team / Group, is a fantastic oversight. 

 

Again, can we get an update on the progress to this end?

The best way to progress this is to vote & comment the User Voice article that was previously linked in this thread. 

https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/37078834-co...

 

During Microsoft Ignite the Tasks -application was announced - which combines personal To Do tasks and Planners from different teamspaces together. So there has been movement around Planner/tasks but will this one include copying a plan or not - it wasn't revealed. Meanwhile: use the User Voice to make yourself heard. 

Copper Contributor

This is a step in the right direction, however you cannot link this copy plan to the same Team.  I want to clone a Plan into the same Team group and the only way I can manage this is via a third party app unless I am missing something here.

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