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About this lesson

Create a new plan in Microsoft Planner from scratch.

Quick reference

Create a Plan

Create a new plan from scratch to make it easier to determine if Microsoft Planner suits your project needs. 

When to use

We create a new plan from scratch whenever we want to create a new project plan that isn't based on an Outlook group plan or template. 

Instructions

Planner and Project don’t always have to be used for business-style projects.

We can use any project and task management tool to plan personal projects also, for example, a wedding or a home renovation project. These are huge projects in themselves with lots of different tasks that need to be completed to make everything run smoothly.

Let's create a plan from scratch for a kitchen renovation project. 

Create a New Plan

  • From the Hub, click New plan. 
  • Type a name for the plan, i.e. Kitchen Renovation. 

We can then choose to add the plan to an existing Microsoft 365 groups. Microsoft 365 groups are groups that live in Outlook. They are automatically generated when we do things like create a new channel in Microsoft Teams or create a new SharePoint site. If we want the same settings to be applied to our plan, we could choose to add to one of these groups. 

If we don't select a group, a new Microsoft 365 group will be created called 'Kitchen Renovation'. 

In this example, we are not going to add our plan to an existing Microsoft 365 group. 

Next, we need to choose the privacy for this group. 

Public groups are accessible to anyone in our organization. Private groups are only accessible to members we have chosen to add to the plan.

  • Choose Private. 
  • Expand Options. 
  • Add a Group description (optional). 
  • Click Create plan. 

The plan has now been created in Planner along with a corresponding Microsoft 365 group that can be accessed in Outlook. 

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  • 00:04 So let's start out by creating a brand new plan from scratch in Microsoft Planner.
  • 00:09 And you'll see as we do this, how easy it is.
  • 00:13 Now, the plan that we're going to create is a plan for
  • 00:16 a software development project.
  • 00:18 And you can see that I've got an Excel spreadsheet open on the screen,
  • 00:22 which just lists out some of the tasks involved in this project.
  • 00:25 So you can use this file and you'll find it in the course files folder, it's called
  • 00:31 software development project.xlsx, to add different tasks into your plan.
  • 00:36 So this is a really good file to practice with in planner.
  • 00:39 Now, before we start thinking about adding tasks to our plan,
  • 00:43 we need to create the plan itself.
  • 00:45 So let's jump across to planner and do that now.
  • 00:48 Now as I mentioned at the start of this course, it might be that when you start
  • 00:53 using planner for a while, you might find that it either exactly suits your needs,
  • 00:57 but you might find that it's a little bit too basic.
  • 01:00 And the only way you can determine that, is if you actually dive in and
  • 01:04 start using planner.
  • 01:05 So let's create a brand new plan.
  • 01:07 And if we cast our eyes over to the left hand menu,
  • 01:10 we have a new plan button at the top.
  • 01:12 So let's click and declick that button, and we are required to enter a plan name.
  • 01:18 So I'm just going to call this, Software Development Project.
  • 01:22 Now, notice directly underneath we have a clickable link that says,
  • 01:26 add to an existing Microsoft 365 group.
  • 01:29 Then we're going to skip over that at this stage because we do have an entire lesson
  • 01:33 dedicated to this.
  • 01:34 So, let's skip over it and go straight down to privacy.
  • 01:38 This is where we can decide what the privacy level is for a new plan.
  • 01:43 So we can have a public plan that is open to everybody
  • 01:47 in our organization to view and add items to.
  • 01:51 Or we can create a private plan,
  • 01:53 where only members that we invite can access the plan.
  • 01:57 So I'm going to create a private plan.
  • 01:59 And if we expand options, this is where we can add in a group description.
  • 02:04 Once we're happy, we can click on Create Plan.
  • 02:07 Once the plan's been created, it's going to jump us straight into the plan.
  • 02:11 And as you might expect,
  • 02:12 because we haven't added any tasks yet, what we're looking at is reasonably empty.
  • 02:16 Take a look over on the left hand side.
  • 02:19 You can now see under the All Section,
  • 02:21 we now have our software development project listed.
  • 02:25 So we're now at the point where we're ready to start adding in our tasks.
  • 02:28 So that's how simple it is to create a basic plan in planner.
  • 02:32 In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how we can create a plan based off
  • 02:37 of a Microsoft 365 Group.

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