Microsoft Planner to get a new feature to save hours of your time

Microsoft has announced an upcoming feature for the Planner app within teams called Status Reports. If you’re involved with project management at work, there’s a good chance that you’ve created status reports, but creating them can be time consuming and boring. With Status Reports in Planner, Microsoft wants you to be able provide comprehensive project updates within minutes.

The new feature generates reports that auto-synthesize your plan progress, milestones, risks, and next steps in just one click. On top of this, you can highlight wins, surface blockers, and give data-backed snapshots of your project’s health for teammates, leadership, or customers.

If you are only interested in reporting on a certain timeframe, Status Reports lets you choose which period should be covered. You can also manually define the reporting goals, and adapt the tone for any audience with flexible parameters. Management of reports is easy too, you can instantly view reports generated by your team, manage or browse archived reports, and refine them together in real time.

If you ever want to share a report, Microsoft said “drop a Loop component in Teams, copy to Outlook, or transform the report into a SharePoint newsletter for regular updates and engaging communications".

To use the feature, open Microsoft Teams and open the Planner app. From there, open a Premium plan or a Plan with Project Manager that has at least ten tasks. You then need to make sure the plan is shared with a group, if not hit the Share button in the top right and do so.

Once shared, go to the Reports tab and select Get Started on the top banner. To add a reporting time period, go to Choose reporting period and select the dropdown to choose the period of time to cover. Under Provide more details, you can add specific details that should be included in the report.

Select Generate and the Project Manager agent will synthesize the information from the plan to make a tailored report. The report will be in a Loop Canvas to support co-editing and you’ll get an in-app notification with a link to the report. You can copy the Loop component to Teams or Outlook or choose Share as newsletter to generate a SharePoint email.

The feature will arrive in the Project Manager agent in the coming weeks for English-US customers. To use the feature, you must have access to Project Manager which is in public preview and requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot and a Microsoft Loop license. If you only have one of these, you can collaborate on plans, but you can’t interact with Project Manager to assign tasks to the project manager or generate a status report.

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