Planner Milestone Timeline

OnePager builds timelines from Microsoft Planner by importing key milestones, and then grouping them into swimlanes, based on the phases of your project, like this:

If you don't already have OnePager, click the button above to download a free trial. Then, follow these instructions to get started:

1. Start with your project in Microsoft Planner and switch to the Grid view. This example project has several different phases, each with a series of sequential tasks and milestones:

   

2. To import milestones from this Microsoft Planner plan into a OnePager timeline, launch OnePager from your desktop:

   

3. On the OnePager start screen, choose New to start building a new Planner milestone timeline:

   

4. From the import wizard, go to Select > BROWSE Planner. You may also see this option called Browse Project for the web which is Microsoft's original name for Planner:

   

   If this is your first time using OnePager with Planner, you will see a sign-in screen to allow OnePager to connect to your Planner account.

5. Once connected to Planner, OnePager will display a list of all of your available plans. Click on the one that you'd like to import, and then click OK:

   

6. Back in the import wizard, select the Select tasks by custom filter option:

   

7. Here, we can create a filter to only pull in activities from Planner when they have a duration of zero days, meaning that OnePager will ignore all of the tasks in Planner and only display the milestones:

   

8. Click OK to apply the filter, and then click Create new chart. OnePager will import your key milestones from Microsoft Planner and initially create a Gantt chart that looks like this. In the coming steps, we'll change the layout of a chart from a Gantt chart to a timeline, and also assign different colors and symbols to the different families of milestones that were set up in Planner.

   

9. To switch your Planner milestone chart from a Gantt Chart to a timeline, go to Home > Chart Properties > Rows/Swimlanes. Choose the Timeline option, and tell OnePager to align milestones into timelines when they are rolled up to the same summary task in Planner, known as the Level 1 Summary Name:

   

   For a timeline layout, we also recommend making the rows in your chart taller, which you can do on the Page Layout tab of Chart Properties.

10. Click OK, and OnePager will rearrange your Planner milestones into a timeline, like this:

    

11. To create an even cleaner chart, we can assign unique colors and symbols to the different families of milestones from Planner. To do this, go to Home > Chart Properties > Milestones, and click on the Manage Rules button:

    

12. For each family of milestones from Planner, we can assign a distinct color and symbol format to help them stand out in the timeline:

    

13. Click OK, and OnePager will apply conditional formatting to your timeline:

    

14. Since this timeline has the same milestones in each phase, we can eliminate the text and use a legend to decode the milestone types instead. To do this, go to the View, tab, and check the Legend box to enable the legend. Then go to Home > Chart Properties > Milestones, and uncheck the box for Milestone Labels. These two changes will remove the text from each milestone, and instead put it in a legend on the upper-right-hand corner of the timeline chart:

    

15. With the milestone text out of the way, we can use the available whitespace to show the dates for each Planner milestone instead. Return to Home > Chart Properties > Milestones one final time, and check the Date Labels box. This will show the finish date for each milestone in place of the milestone name. If you need to customize the date format or text position, you can click on the Date Label Properties button to the right of the checkbox. Here is the end result:

    

    Feel free to add a month to the start or end of the timeline if you need more whitespace to accommodate the date text

Get started today by downloading a free trial.