Boosting the Planner mobile experience with recent enhancements

[PlannerTeam]

The Microsoft Planner team posted a blog about working remotely the other week. We covered a lot of well-known features and shared some not-so-traditional use cases—ever thought of Planner as your at-home whiteboard?—but didn’t talk much about Planner mobile for Android and iOS. Our goal, especially these days, is to give you a robust task management experience no matter where you need it.

(As a quick aside, if you don’t already have Planner mobile you can download it for Android through Google Play and iOS through the App Store.)

Here are five recent improvements—two for Android, two for iOS, and one for both—that will help you meet impending deadlines while working remotely.

Widget and landscape mode (Android): Both improvements bring traditional Android features to the Planner app. The Planner widget shows tasks assigned to you across all your plans and enables you to complete those tasks without opening the app. Read through these short instructions on the Android Help page if you’re not sure how to add a widget to your device. Landscape mode is exactly what it sounds like: turn your Android device horizontally and Planner will display longways without UI issues. There’s nothing you need to do to enable landscape mode—give it a try before reading on!

The Planner widget (left) and landscape mode (right) bring flexibility to the way you manage your tasks.

Attach files to tasks (Android): Before this release, Android users needed to add task files through the Planner web experience. But no longer: today, you can attach a file to a task from your Android device. To do this, select a task card and then the paperclip icon. You can attach a file that’s stored locally on your device or in the cloud through OneDrive or SharePoint.

Offline read-only mode (iOS): Getting consistent Internet access can be struggle while working remotely. With offline read-only mode, you can review all your plans without web connectivity. Plans will be current as of your last connected login and can only be viewed; editing is only available with Internet access.

Shared to Planner (iOS): If you’ve ever pinned something online then you’ve already got the gist of this feature, which lets you create a new task from any app or mobile web browser that supports sharing to Planner. After finding the right website, video, image—really, almost any content—select the Action (  ) icon on your iOS device then tap Planner. The resulting screen allows you to choose which plan and bucket to add your new task. Once the task is added, the content you selected will appear as an attachment in the newly added task.

Creating a new task from external content is easy: find your content—in this case, an image—select the Action icon, determine the right plan and bucket, and tap “Add task.” The new task will appear in your plan with the associated content linked in the task’s attachments.

Priority field (Android and iOS): You can now set a task’s priority to Urgent, Important, Medium, or Low and group your tasks by priority from your mobile device. Read our web release blog for examples of using the Priority field in Planner.

“Urgent” or “Important” tasks are marked with an icon—a ringing bell for “Urgent” and an exclamation point for “Important”—to help plan members quickly identify the most-pressing tasks.We’d love to hear how these features, or Planner in general, are helping you transition to working from home. Leave us a comment below with your experiences or tips for other users. We also have several new features being released in the coming months, all of which will be announced here on Tech Community—so keep visiting! And if you have a feature suggestion of your own, drop us a line on UserVoice.

[Harold van de Kamp]

Thanks for adding support for Offline read-only mode.

[ben_howard]

Thanks for adding support to attach media from android :) 

[dontbeaboot]

It's great that you added this. Now.... about that Tasks and Teams integration, tell us more about that!