Microsoft To Do or Planner: which one should your team actually use?
Microsoft To Do is the personal task app included with Microsoft 365, and for years the advice was simple enough: To Do for your own list, Planner for your team’s work. That advice is now out of date, and the reason matters more than most people realise.
Microsoft has spent the past two years consolidating its task tools. The new Planner brings together the old Planner, Project for the web and To Do into a single app, and your To Do lists now appear inside it under My Tasks. To Do itself still works, still syncs, and is still included in your licence, so nothing has been taken away.
But Planner has since been added to the Outlook sidebar, and Microsoft’s investment is very clearly going in one direction. If you have been wondering whether to keep using To Do, that is a fair question rather than a paranoid one.
What follows is what has actually changed, a straight comparison of the two, which one suits which kind of work, what happens to the lists you already have, and an honest recommendation depending on how your team works. Nothing here requires you to move anything today, but it should stop you building a habit you will have to unpick later.
Quick summary
The confusion here is not really about features, it is about direction of travel, and once that is clear the decision becomes straightforward:
The sensible position is not to abandon To Do, but to stop treating it as a separate destination and start treating it as one view of your tasks among several.
What is Microsoft To Do?
Microsoft To Do is a personal task management app included with Microsoft 365. It holds simple lists, one line per task, with due dates, reminders, notes, file attachments and a daily planning view called My Day that starts empty each morning and invites you to choose what you will actually do today.
Its real strength has always been what it connects to rather than what it is. Flag an email in Outlook and it appears in To Do. Assign yourself a task in Planner and it appears there too. That makes it the single place where one person’s commitments gather, regardless of which app created them, which is why people who use it properly tend to be quite attached to it.
It is free with every commercial Microsoft 365 plan, and also available at no cost with a personal Microsoft account, so cost has never been the barrier to using it.
What has actually changed
This is the part that generates the confusion, so it is worth setting out plainly.
In 2024 Microsoft launched the new Planner, consolidating three previously separate products: the original Planner for team task boards, Project for the web for lightweight project management, and To Do for personal lists. The app formerly called Tasks by Planner and To Do was renamed simply Planner. Microsoft’s own frequently asked questions about Microsoft Planner documents the change.
In practice, that means your personal To Do lists now appear inside Planner under My Tasks, alongside tasks assigned to you from team plans and your flagged Outlook emails. It is the same data, presented in a second place, not a copy.
More recently, Planner has been added directly to the sidebar of the new Outlook, so tasks sit next to mail and calendar without switching apps. That does not remove To Do, but it does tell you where Microsoft expects people to manage tasks in future.
Worth knowing (bordered aside box):
Nothing needs migrating, and this is the point that reassures people most. To Do and Planner are not two systems holding separate copies of your tasks. Planner’s My Tasks view reads the same underlying To Do data, so a task ticked in one appears ticked in the other. If you decide to shift your habit from To Do to Planner, there is no export, no import and no cut-over. You simply open a different app and find your lists already there.
To Do or Planner: the straight comparison
The two apps are built for genuinely different jobs, and the distinction has survived the consolidation intact.
| Microsoft To Do | Microsoft Planner | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | One person’s own tasks | Work shared across a team |
| Task ownership | Yours, private by default | Assigned to named team members |
| Structure | Simple lists, one line per task | Boards with buckets, or grid, schedule and chart views |
| Sharing | Individual lists can be shared | Designed around shared plans from the start |
| Outlook integration | Flagged emails become tasks | Now appears in the Outlook sidebar |
| Reporting | None | Progress charts and, on Premium, timelines and dependencies |
| Cost | Included in all commercial plans | Basic included in all commercial plans, Premium is paid |
| Microsoft’s direction | Maintained, not the focus of investment | The strategic destination for task management |
Read across that table and the rule of thumb writes itself. If a task belongs to you alone and nobody else needs visibility of it, To Do is still perfectly good and arguably quicker. The moment somebody else needs to see it, own it or depend on it, it belongs in Planner.
Which should your team use?
The honest answer depends less on features than on how your team already works.
Stick with To Do if
Your people mainly track their own commitments, your task management is genuinely individual, and nobody needs visibility of anyone else’s list. To Do is lighter, faster to add to, and its My Day view is a better daily planning habit than anything in Planner. There is no urgency to change.
Move to Planner if
Work is assigned between people, deadlines affect colleagues, or anyone has ever asked for a status update by email. Team work in a personal task app is invisible work, and that is the single most common cause of things quietly not happening. Our guide to Microsoft Planner covers getting started properly.
Use both, deliberately, if
Most teams land here, and it works well provided the split is explicit. Planner holds anything shared and accountable. To Do, or Planner’s My Tasks view, is where each person sees their own slice of it alongside their private commitments. The failure mode is not using both, it is using both without agreeing which is which.
Where the other Microsoft 365 apps fit
Task management confusion rarely stops at these two apps, so it is worth placing them against the rest.
- Notes are not tasks. Reference material, meeting notes and research belong in Microsoft OneNote. A note saying “chase supplier” is not something anyone is tracking.
- Records are not tasks. If you are tracking issues, assets or requests with a status and an owner over time, that is structured data and belongs in Microsoft Lists, not a task list.
- Conversation is not tracking. Actions agreed in a Microsoft Teams chat are lost within a day unless somebody puts them somewhere deliberate.
The common thread is that each tool has a job, and most task management problems come from using the wrong one rather than using any of them badly.
Common mistakes worth avoiding
A few habits cause most of the trouble when teams try to sort this out.
- Running team work out of personal lists. If a task affects a colleague and lives only in your To Do, nobody can see it, chase it or cover it when you are away.
- Assuming a migration is needed. It is not. The two apps read the same tasks, so there is nothing to move.
- Introducing Planner without agreeing the split. Two task systems with no rule about which is which is worse than one used imperfectly.
- Treating My Day as a backlog. My Day is deliberately cleared each morning. Filling it with everything defeats its purpose, which is choosing a realistic day.
- Paying for Planner Premium too early. Basic covers assignments, due dates, boards and progress. Premium adds timelines, dependencies and resource management, which most teams do not need. Confirm you have hit a genuine limit before buying.
Sort those out and the two apps stop competing and start complementing each other.
Is your team’s work scattered across four different places?
Most task management problems are not about the tools, they are about nobody having agreed which tool does what. Our hands-on Microsoft 365 training walks your team through where tasks, notes and records each belong, using the way you actually work rather than a generic example. Tell us how your team operates now and we will tell you honestly what would help, or whether you have already got it right.
The bottom line on Microsoft To Do
Microsoft To Do has not been retired, and there is no reason to stop using it tomorrow. It remains included in your licence, it still syncs with Outlook, and for personal lists it is quicker and simpler than the alternative.
What has changed is where it sits. To Do is no longer a separate destination, it is one view of your tasks alongside Planner’s My Tasks, and Microsoft’s investment is going into Planner rather than into To Do. The practical consequence is not urgent migration, because there is nothing to migrate. It is that when you build a new habit, or introduce task management to a team for the first time, Planner is the sensible place to build it.
Get the split right, personal commitments in one place and shared accountable work in the other, and this stops being a question at all.
If your team would benefit from working this out properly rather than defaulting into it, our Microsoft 365 training courses cover how these apps fit together in practical sessions. Making new habits stick after training matters just as much, something Vantage 365 Support has written about separately.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Frequently asked questions
What is a pivot table used for?
A pivot table summarises a large table of data into a compact report, grouping and totalling it by whichever fields you choose. Typical uses include totalling sales by region, counting orders by month, averaging figures by salesperson, or comparing categories across time periods. It answers questions about data you already have, without altering the source.
Do I need to know formulas to use a pivot table?
No. Basic pivot tables involve dragging field names into four areas and letting Excel do the arithmetic. Calculated fields exist if you later want custom formulas inside a pivot table, but they are entirely optional and most people never need them.
Why is my pivot table not updating?
Because a pivot table works from a cached copy of your data taken when it was created. Right-click it and choose Refresh, or press Ctrl+Alt+F5 to refresh everything in the workbook. If new rows are still missing after refreshing, your source is probably a fixed range rather than an Excel Table, so format it with Ctrl+T to make it expand automatically.
What is the difference between Rows, Columns, Values and Filters?
Rows group data down the left-hand side, Columns group it across the top, Values holds the numbers being summed or counted, and Filters restricts the whole table to a subset without displaying that field. Phrasing your question as a sentence maps it directly onto these four areas.
How do I add a slicer to a pivot table?
Click inside the pivot table, go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and select Slicer, then tick the fields you want buttons for. For date fields, choose a Timeline slicer instead, which lets people drag across a range rather than ticking individual dates.
Can I use pivot tables on a Mac?
Yes. Pivot tables work in Excel for Mac with the same core functionality, including slicers and pivot charts. Some advanced features, notably Power Pivot, remain Windows-only.
Why are my numbers counting instead of summing?
Almost always because those values are stored as text rather than numbers, often after being imported from another system. Excel usually marks these cells with a small green triangle. Convert the column to a number format in the source data, then refresh the pivot table.
