Personalize your plans with smart backgrounds
Published Jan 12 2021 07:00 AM 41.1K Views
Steel Contributor

Planner enables us to visualize our work in a fun and flexible way. But it can be difficult to identify which plan you are in, especially when you’re a member of 50 different plans that look the same.

 

That’s why we’re excited to begin rolling out smart backgrounds, which lets you customize your Planner boards to make them your own and help others quickly find the right plan. We’re starting to roll out smart backgrounds in Planner for the web this week.

 

With smart backgrounds, you can choose from a variety of image recommendations to liven up your Planner boards. Smart backgrounds is powered by the same Designer feature that suggests creatively designed templates in PowerPoint. Designer works in the background, trying to match the title of your plan with relevant and unique high-quality background images, like a coffee scene for your Coffee Store plan, a business backdrop for your Online Marketing plan, or a city skyline for your Town Hall Meeting plan.

 

To access recommended background images, click on Plan settings from the dropdown menu under (). With one click or tap, you can personalize, differentiate, and more easily identify your plans and task cards.

 

smartbackgrounds.png

 

Smart backgrounds is currently only available in the Planner web experience.

 

Tell us what you think! We love hearing feedback from the Planner community, so leave a comment below or head over to Planner’s UserVoice to vote on and share new ideas. And keep checking the Tech Community Blog site for the latest Planner updates and other task management news.

34 Comments
Brass Contributor

Thank you for adding this. 

 

I would like the option of selecting just a solid color background, like a solid gray / solid black. 

Iron Contributor

This is great, thank you!  Is there any way to see ALL background choices, rather than just the "suggested" ones?  (looks like suggestions differ based on the plan name?)

Copper Contributor

Ist es möglich diese Funktion generell abhzustellen?

Brass Contributor

With 'Smart Background' You have introduced a very sophisticated feature. But I would just like to select a solid colour or a customised (uploaded) image as background. Such a feature has been perfectly integrated in Trello for a long time, can we please have this in Planner?

Brass Contributor

As a workaround to get a wider selection, change the board temporarily until 'Smart Backgrounds' suggests a background you like. It seems that it will be retained if you change your board title back to the original title.

Brass Contributor

I don´t understand why we not are able to select our own background?!

I am not interested of having backgrounds that almost give you an epileptic attack every time you open the Planner.

 

I only need a calm one-colour background or our companys logo in the background. MIss that feature.

 

 

Brass Contributor

Thanks.

 

A less smart feature would be even more appreciated. In other words: ability to upload custom backgrounds.

In the meanwhile, I think that blank backgrounds will be a suitable alternative, especially for people having visual disabilities or in case of very formal context where activities are carried out.

 

Bye.

Copper Contributor

A welcome feature, no doubt.

 

An enhancement would be providing each member with the option to set their own background i.e. without it affecting the choice of others. If such an option is not used as the default setting, another option could be added for the plan owner to choose whether other members can or cannot change the background set by the owner, though freedom of choice is more than welcome here, as each member could personalize their own background regardless of what others are using. The feature is good, but it could be great!

 

Thanks.

Brass Contributor

That is a nice update, however, the best visual change imo is to allow for a dark theme. I have dark themes for almost everything and Planner is one of the few exceptions.

Iron Contributor

@Martin Meraner :  As a work-around, you can add Planner as an app within MS Teams... and if you have Teams set to dark mode, your Planner boards will load within that dark mode.  (Obviously not as convenient as simply being able to change to a dark mode w/in Planner... but at least it's a way to do it.)

Copper Contributor

Thanks great idea, when would I be ability to upload custom backgrounds mostly project related?

Brass Contributor

Please allow users the following options:

  • "Dark Theme" option (same as other Microsoft products)
  • "Custom Background" (upload your own image)

Thank you

Brass Contributor

Is this available for GCC High?

Copper Contributor

In addition to uploading your own background, I'd like to see the option to pin favorites to re-use. Currently, just typing in the same search term (in Planner title) does not return the same "suggested backgrounds". Thanks. 

Brass Contributor

IMO, Microsoft should scrap this version of planner, then throw Millions at https://trello.com and incorporate their code.  No offense to the MS programmers, but it seems like they still have a way to go to catch up with similar offerings.   Unfortunately, my team / co-workers have pretty much abandoned planner as a whole so I'm not really sure how to get them back into using this tool unless they are forced.  People would literally write things down on a paper napkin.  

Copper Contributor

Why can't people choose a solid background color or their own background? The light grey background in the app is far better than the horrible desktop backgrounds. When I can choose my own background color on both desktop and mobile then we will use Planner. 

Iron Contributor

I'm in total agreement with @MatthewWagner.  Microsoft can't figure out how to make it possible to edit comments in planner, but you're taking the time to do this instead ?  Talk about rearranging the chairs on the titanic.   Planner is totally unusable for most of our use cases because it's missing stupidly simple features that can't be that hard to implement given that they're in every other competitive product.

Brass Contributor

Besides Trello, I've also used Redbooth with another 3rd party agency and found it to be incredibly useful when tracking a project and communicating with the agency's team.  Simple things like adding a file attachment were head and shoulders much more user friendly than Planner is currently.  I WANT PLANNER TO BE AWESOME -- Thank you

Copper Contributor

It's interesting that that people find this useful rather than extremely annoying. When introducing intrusive 'features' like this, the ability to switch them off should also be clearly available.

Copper Contributor

Why when I go to select a background under the 3 dot, then Plan settings, it is telling me it couldn't load more backgrounds???

 

Copper Contributor

As many others here have mentioned, could you implement an option to upload a custom background? None of the backgrounds "smartly" selected for my planner match its purpose or content.

Copper Contributor

Can you please make this available in the Teams experience as well? Most staff use Planner in the context of Microsoft Teams. Also agree with needing a custom background option where you can select your own.

Copper Contributor

I find it mind-boggling that a user cannot choose a simple color for a Plan.  And if you do want to modify your logo (but don't want to use a "smart background" which is comically named) you must edit the Plan outside of the normal Plan view?  (Load an Outlook window.). And even then you must "upload an image"?  My goodness...  I simply want some plans to be red, blue, orange, green, etc.  Coffee cups for a background? You're dealing w/ adults who want to be able to quickly identify the Plan they're searching for...  Not middle school students who need to be entertained at every step of the process.  KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.

Copper Contributor

completely irrelevant pictures are selected by the designer,  what is behind it? random image selector? it cant even find a color close to azure when the plan name is 'Microsoft Azure', the same with 'google cloud', it can be any picture but with colors used by Google, useless feature.

Copper Contributor

+1 vote for custom backgrounds! It would be really useful to be able to add our own backgrounds, and for those to be surfaced into the Teams app.  Using Planner in Teams should replicate the web view.

Copper Contributor

Hello Everyone. 

I agree that ability to create custom backgrounds would be a very smart feature to add, and surprised it doesn't exist. 

Ran across a hack to open up more background options that may be helpful to some of us as we wait to see if this feature is added. 

 

HACK

First ( open your plan, click the three-dot icon at the top of the plan, and then select “Plan Settings” from the drop-down menu )

Next: In the selection panel, delete the name of your plan and enter various key words in that field. This will prompt the "smart" selector to pull up additional backgrounds. 

Finally: Once a background has been selected, Re-type the name of your plan in the Plan Name box and hit "Enter"

 

-theFactor

Copper Contributor

Hello, I am a government employee, can we use this options? I don't see it?

Brass Contributor

@PlannerTeam 

Will this be available in Government Community Cloud (GCC)? And if so, is there an ETA when? 

This feature has been out so long for standard tenants that the roadmap item for smart backgrounds seems to have fallen off the list.

FYI @JATS1942 @heydru 

Copper Contributor

So,if I can see it in the Air Force Government version it won't happen?

Copper Contributor

 

@TillT your suggestion on the workaround is brilliant. Thank you. I was wary of having to change the planner name but that was not needed, so I would add here that you can use the planner title box as a search box while editing the background. Then select one, put the original name back in and close. So for example if you need some nature background, replace the whole title with something like "tree" and some pictures of trees will show.

 

Copper Contributor

@MatthewWagner

BesidesTrello, I've also usedRedbooth ... I WANT PLANNER TO BE AWESOME

Planner does some things really well. I was on the fence between using Trello or Planner...filtering/grouping, list (grid) view...haven't used Trello in a while so they may have added features after Atlassian acquired them. Trello has the power-ups which Planner doesn't have so there are always trade-offs.

 

Happy to hear something positive about Redbooth...have an account but need to take a closer look now!

Copper Contributor

Nice feature, i would like however to either be able to search for other images, or to upload one myself. 

Copper Contributor

It's almost like they rolled-out a POC of the background concept in 2021 and then sort of forgot it so it never made the full version with adjustable fill colors and uploadable images. 

Copper Contributor

The "smart" feature would be a welcome addition (rather than replacement) to allowing the users to choose basic colored backgrounds or upload our own. 

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‎Jan 11 2021 02:11 PM
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