Are you using Microsoft Planner to manage individual projects or Microsoft Teams to collaborate with others in your work area? While these tools are very useful on their own, you can also combine them for even more effective results.

First, a quick refresher:

• Teams provides a collaborative workspace where all the members of your work group can communicate and share files in one central location. Once you form a team channel for your workgroup, you can post messages, chat, and share and live-edit documents. To learn more, see our previous Tech Bit, as well as the Microsoft Teams website.
• Planner is a project management tool that allows you to create a visual dashboard of your project components and their statuses in one convenient place. For more information, see our previous Part 1 and Part 2 Tech Bits, as well as the Microsoft Planner website.

Now, let's suppose your department is using Teams to collaborate on next year's budget. By adding Planner to your team channel, you can create, assign and track tasks, and group them into buckets. Everything appears in one place -- within the team channel.

To get started:

1. Log in to portal.office.com. Then click the App launcher  on the upper-left portion of the screen and click Teams.
2. If prompted, you can click the link to download the desktop app or click Use the web app instead.
3. When Teams opens, click Teams on the left navigation bar and then click a team channel.
4. Click the plus sign (+) near the top of the screen under the search bar to add a tab and select Tasks by Planner and To Do.
5. When prompted, either create a new plan or select an existing plan and click Save.

A new tab now appears at the top of your Teams channel, where you can view/update your plan. The tab name will be the same as the plan you created.

To learn more, see Use Planner in Microsoft Teams.