Copying a plan in Planner

Planner is a great lightweight planning tool that comes as part of Office 365. We’re seeing quite a bit of attention to it by Microsoft, and they’ve just released a new feature that I’ve had people request quite often… you can now create a new plan from an existing one. This means you can create a standard plan “template” that has all the items you normally want for a new project, and then use that for each new plan you create (as opposed to adding all the tasks manually). Here’s how that works…

Here in Planner, I have a plan called, creatively enough, To-Do:

I’d like the contents of To-Do to be the starting point for a new plan in Planner. To create the new plan based on To-Do, I click the ellipsis after the Schedule option and select Copy plan from the drop-down menu:

The Copy plan dialog panel appears, where you can name your new plan, set the Privacy options, and provide a description. After you do that, click Copy plan at the bottom of the screen:

In your left-side navigation, you’ll see a pop-up message saying your new plan is being created:

After a few seconds, that pop-up message will change to say that your new plan is ready, and you can find it listed in the Recent plans area. You also get a link to go directly to the new plan:

Here you see my new Copy of To-Do plan in the Recent plans area. I can go out to the new plan and mark it as a favorite so that it will show up in the Favorites area:

This is a great new feature for Planner, and I’m sure it’ll make a number of my co-workers happy that they can set up a standard plan for all their projects going forward, and set up new plans in a matter of seconds.