Archive Tasks Option

Copper Contributor

We use planner a little different than most users I imagine. We are a sign shop and we use a plan as our orders queue for our clients and then use tasks for individual orders. We then move orders/tasks through buckets/departments (estimating, design, production, finishing, shipping, invoicing. Once these tasks are completed we would love to be able to archive each order/task whether we are saving it in Sharepoint or our local server as we will need to reference this info in the future. An archiving option seems like it would be easy enough to develop for each task. My only solution right now is to take a screen shot of each task although it isn't ideal. So far this is one of the only flaws I see with the program for us and may make it so it doesn't make sense for us to use it.

7 Replies

@Riverwookie Hi, my understanding is that you want to archive individual tasks once they are completed?   Why not create an "Archive" bucket and once tasks are completed, move them into there?  They will still be accessible on the system for reference....

There is an archiving request on user voice, but it is at the plan level - https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/11094762-pl... - as you say, you use Planner slightly differently to most people.

@Riverwookie Moving completed tasks to Archive bucket will work for small projects. When the number of tasks is more, you need a better system to use. We use Planner to manage customer support tickets and when days go by, it became difficult to have tasks in Archive bucket as it impacts app performance. So the choice is to use third-party apps to archive the plans to read-only view for future reference. 

Replying to this because it has been requested for a long time and is still an important feature.

We use a very large plan with upwards of 900 open tasks for tracking service work in our customer area. Every month there is a turnaround of some 200-300 tasks being completed and created. We need to be able to archive old completed tasks to prevent the plan from bloating beyond usability.

Currently I create a backup of the plan via export to excel, then delete old completed tasks. A built-in feature would be much better.

@Akampen You can use third party apps to schedule this backup for you. 

Do you have any third-party apps you can suggest to schedule a backup?

We have a very similar issue where a Plan has over 6000 tasks and we are now starting to experience issue trying to load the Plan and staff are starting to not use it because of this.
Hi,
I'm thinking about an automation that collects the data from tasks which are done and lets say older than 3 months, save that info into an excel sheet and delete the task. With that the task would be "archived" and the board would be keep clean.
TRELLO has the archive feature. its great! that is probably the biggest thing missing in planner for me to switch to it.
we really need this feature.
MICROSOFT if you are watching - create an archive for old tasks that you can still search through but doesnt bloat the app!