Posted On 03 Nov 2020

Microsoft has recently introduced a new integration between its Planner and To-Do apps as part of its Office 365 Enterprise and Education offerings. According to the company, this is the most requested modification from users who wanted all Assigned to Me tasks in Planner to appear on their personal To-Do lists, integrating team tasks with individual responsibilities.

Planner is where teams can collaborate and everyone can see who’s doing what; To-Do is where the individual user can see what they have to do.

The new function has to be enabled, and this must be done within the To-Do app, it is not possible to enable it in Planner. Office 365 software should have been automatically updated and so the next time you turn on To-Do you should see a banner asking “Track tasks assigned to you in Planner?” Accepting this will mean the integration will be automatically launched.

If you have overlooked the invitation, you can still initiate integration by choosing the gear icon at the top right corner of the screen when in To-Do and clicking on “ To-Do Settings”. You will see a pop-up window in which you simply choose “Connections” and turn on “Tasks from Planner”.

Once you have enabled this integration, every Assigned to Me task in planner will appear on your To-Do list, you can edit titles and descriptions, review what needs doing and when it’s due, mark tasks as completed or not complete, see who else is working on the task and so on. Tasks that are due will appear in your Planned list and you will also be offered the option to add tasks with imminent deadlines to the My Day list. With his new integration you can also search for any tasks in Planner directly from your To-Do desktop.

There are a number of tasks that don’t have the full functionality of Planner when working in To-Do. It is not yet possible to create Planner tasks when working in To-Do, you can’t add or edit attachments or assign tasks to others, create recurring tasks, and the drag-and-drop functions of Planner for changing the order of tasks in lists or changing the order of steps in a specific task are not available.