Recurring tasks in Microsoft Planner with Power Automate

Do you use Microsoft Planner on your team to easily define tasks?

Then you have already noticed that a simple, but still quite useful attitude is missing. It’s about recurring tasks in Microsoft Planner!

Unfortunately, Microsoft Planner does not provide the ability to define a task so that it recreates itself at certain intervals and automatically reassigns it to the affected people.

So here’s how to show you a solution, how you can implement this quickly and easily with a SharePoint list and Microsoft Power Automate as well as with you as a team.

In a clear list I define my tasks:

• Title
  The name of the recurring task to create.
• Interval
  The interval in days in which the task should be repeated.
• LastCreationDate
  This column is for logging only. If you don’t need it, you can safely omit it.
• NextCreationDate
  This date indicates when the task should be created the next time.
  Once your flow runs, this column is automatically filled with the recalculated date. When defining the task, you can simply enter the first installation date here.
• UserToAssign
  This is a multi-user field in which we define the users to assign.
• Description
  Here you can provide a short description in addition to your task title to describe your task a little more.

The basic structure for automating task creation consists of 3 steps:

First, we specify the repetition of the flow. We then read out all relevant entries from our task definition list. Finally, we create the corresponding tasks from these entries and update the definitions.

Let’s take a look at the steps in detail:

In a concise and simple way, we define how often you want to search for tasks to be created. In this example, we check the list once a day and create the corresponding tasks.

A simple query on our task definition list provides us with the tasks to be created. For this purpose, only a filter is set on the field NextCreationDate. It then checks whether this date matches today’s date. If so, we will include the entry in the list of tasks to be created.

First, we calculate the due date of our task:

Accordingly, we also calculate the NextCreationDate:

Now that we have all the parameters we need, all we need to do is create our task in Microsoft Planner.

In the “Create task” step, we assign all our parameters to the task.

Unfortunately, it is not immediately possible to define a description of the task. Therefore, we still need the step update task. Here we add our task description to the task.

Once all this is done, we’ll adjust the task definition in the Update Item step to be ready for the next build.

That’s it! This is how quickly and easily you can map recurring tasks in Microsoft Planner using SharePoint and Microsoft Power Automate.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by clicking on the button!

In this article we will show you how to implement recurring tasks in Microsoft Planner with the help of templates.