Duplicate/Copy Planner Plan within same Team

Question

I have a template for a plan that my team uses for new events all year around. I need a way to duplicate this Planner plan as a new Planner tab in Teams.

Using Planner's own Copy/Duplicate feature will create a NEW group and a new Team.

Looking at Microsoft Teams and Planners UserVoice I can see that it is currently not possible:

• https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/35387329-add-a-planner-tab-using-an-existing-plan-problem
• https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/37078834-copy-plan-to-existing-group

Answer 1

Using Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) we can create a listener for a new message in a team channel that checks for a specific message. If this message contains a notification about the creation of a new tab, and use a prefix for this new tab to designate the planner template we can automatically fill a new empty planner tab with the contents of a template plan.

Usage:

• Create a Planner template plan directly in Planner
• Import the Power Automate script in your Power Automate (this works with free Power Automations)
• Set the Power Automate Script first variable to the prefix of your tabs (i.e. "Event:")
• Make sure all the correct variables in the Power Automate script reference the correct Teams channel, and the correct reference for the Planner Template plan.
• Goto the teams channel that you want to work with and create a new tab with a new Planner Plan, make sure
  1. That you start the tab/plan name with your selected prefix ("Event:")
  2. That you select "Post to channel about the creation of this Tab"

Notice how the plan is automatically populated with the tasks and buckets from the template plan after a few moments.

The PowerAutomate script can be downloaded here: https://content.zeal.global/shared/AutomaticCopyTeamsPlanner_20200215111249.zip

Answer 2

The online planner website now has the option to select the group to copy plans to. That also allows to select which parts of the plan you want to carry over.

Simply go to https://tasks.office.com/ click the three little dots on the "template plan" and select copy plan.

The script above is still (as far as I know) the only way to copy a plan within the same team directly from Microsoft Teams.