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Making Planner Look Nice Again
On February 23, 2026, Microsoft announced a refreshed design for the Planner user interface. In truth, I haven’t spent too much time thinking about the Planner interface since Microsoft launched the grid view in 2023. The interface was like an old sweater: comfortable for those who knew it with a couple of holes to avoid. Instead, any time I spent on Planner was occupied figuring out the details of the Planner Graph API to fill gaps left in the product, like analyzing unfinished tasks.
In any case, Microsoft is deploying the new UX across Microsoft 365. The deployment will take a few more weeks to reach all tenants, so be patient if you don’t see “enhanced navigation, responsive layouts, a new goals view for setting objectives and priorities, and task chat” turn up soon. Figure 1 shows tasks in a Planner plan presented in the board view. It all seems very much like the To Do UX.
Planner Task Chat
The feature that took my attention is Planner Task Chat. This is very different to the old comments functionality where users could leave notes about their views about a task and its attachments, checklist, and so on. Task Chat is a threaded conversation similar to what you see when people add comments to Office documents (Figure 2). A rudimentary rich-text editor (complete with emojis) is enough to get a point across.
Plan members who are @ mentioned receive notifications in the Teams activity feed and via email. Selecting a notification from the activity feed or email opens the task card (Figure 3), and the user can interact with the task from there. However, they don’t seem to be able to continue with the conversation. When I attempted to respond, Planner created three buckets called “What”, “How”, and “Step” to match some of the words I tried to input. I’m sure this is a bug that afflicts the task card in Teams. The same issue doesn’t occur when chatting through the Planner user interface.
Unlike comments, which Planner copied to everyone in the plan, task chat notifications only go to those who are mentioned.
Investigating APIs for Task Chat
A Graph API is supported for the older comment-style conversations (threads). However, no Graph API is currently available for the new task chats. In the past, Planner has taken time to support Graph APIs, so we might not see an API soon.
The same is true for Copilot chats. This information can be accessed (in a way) through the compliance records captured for Copilot or the aIInteractionHistory API, but it’s not as easy as navigating something like the comments for tasks. In any case, we’ll wait and see what transpires.
Planner Tasks and Goals
If you refer back to Figure 2, you’ll see the option to connect a task to a goal. Microsoft introduced goals for Planner about a year ago, but until now Goals have been a feature of Planner premium plans (aka Project). In their announcement, Microsoft says that basic Planner plans now include “a dedicated Goals view.” However, you’ll only see the options to connect tasks to goals and expose the goals view if you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license or a Planner premium license.
Microsoft says that goals allow “teams to set clear, well-defined objectives to help prioritize work. By connecting tasks to shared goals, teams achieve greater alignment, gain clarity on priorities, and track progress and outcomes.” I guess that including goals for basic plans is a nice extra feature for those with Copilot licenses, but whether it’s worth an extra $10 month to upgrade to a Planner Plan 1 license is debatable. Choices!
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