Can Power BI Connect to Planner?

You can absolutely connect Microsoft Planner to Power BI to track your team’s progress, but it’s not as simple as selecting a pre-built "Planner" connector. The best way to get this done is by using a tool you likely already have access to - Power Automate - to act as a bridge. This article will walk you through the entire process, step-by-step, transforming your task data into a powerful, automated project dashboard.

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Why Connect Planner to Power BI?

You might be wondering if this is worth the effort when Planner has its own "Charts" view. While Planner's built-in view is decent for a quick glance, it's very limited. When you pipe your Planner data into Power BI, you give yourself project management superpowers:

• Track multiple plans at once: Get a complete overview of your entire department's workload, not just the progress of a single plan.
• Create custom metrics: Report on exactly what matters to you. Want to track the number of tasks completed per person each week? Or the average time it takes for a task to move from "To-Do" to "Done"? You can build that.
• Measure workload accurately: See which team members are overloaded and which have capacity by filtering out completed tasks to see a true snapshot of active work.
• Combine with other datasets: Imagine a master project dashboard that pulls in task data from Planner, budget information from an Excel file, and time-tracking data from another app. This is how you get a true 360-degree view of your projects.

Simply put, this connection turns Planner from a simple to-do list into a robust data source for serious project reporting.

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The Step-by-Step Guide: Using Power Automate and SharePoint

The most common and effective method to get your Planner data into Power BI is by using Power Automate to export Planner tasks to a SharePoint List. Power BI has a fantastic connector for SharePoint, making that a perfect intermediate storage spot. The process looks like this:

Planner → Power Automate → SharePoint List → Power BI dashboard

It sounds like a lot of steps, but once it's set up, it runs automatically in the background, keeping your dashboard up-to-date without any manual work. Let's build it.

Step 1: Create your "Database" in SharePoint

First, we need a place for our Planner data to live. A SharePoint List is basically a smarter, cloud-based spreadsheet that’s perfect for this job.

1. Navigate to your SharePoint site. Click the New button and select List.
2. Choose the Blank list option. Give it a clear name like "Planner Task Data" and click Create.
3. By default, you'll have a "Title" column. We need to add more columns to hold our Planner task details. Click Add column and create the following columns. Use the "Single line of text" type unless specified otherwise.

Your SharePoint List is now an empty container, ready to receive a daily download of your Planner data. Next, we’ll build the flow that fills it up.

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Step 2: Build the Power Automate Flow

Power Automate is the engine that will do all the heavy lifting. We’ll build a "flow" that runs automatically every night, finds all the tasks in a specific plan, checks if they're already in our SharePoint List, and then either updates them or adds them as a new row.

1. Go to Power Automate and click Create > Scheduled cloud flow.
2. Give your flow a name, like "Sync Planner to SharePoint," choose a start time (e.g., 2:00 AM), and set it to repeat "1" "Day." Click Create.
3. Now we're in the flow builder. Click + New Step and search for the "Planner" connector. Select the action called List tasks.
4. You'll need to specify which plan you want to pull data from. Select the correct "Group" (usually a Microsoft Teams name) and the "Plan Id" from the dropdowns.
5. This next part is the most important for avoiding duplicates. We're going to use a loop to process each task found and check if we already have it in SharePoint. Click + New Step and add an Apply to each control. For its input, select "value" from the "List tasks" step in the dynamic content window.
6. Inside the "Apply to each" loop, click Add an action. Search for the SharePoint connector and choose the Get items action.
7. Now, we'll check if the flow actually found anything. Click Add an action inside the loop and add a Condition control. The condition will check if the search turned up empty.
8. In the If yes branch (meaning the task is not in SharePoint yet), click Add an action. Choose the SharePoint Create item action.
9. In the If no branch (meaning the task exists and needs updating), click Add an action. Find the SharePoint Update item action. For "Id" select "ID" from the "Get items" dynamic content. Then, map the same Planner fields as you did for the "Create item" step. This ensures any changes (like due dates or progress) are updated daily.

Congratulations, your automated data pipeline is complete! Run a test to make sure it works, and you should see your SharePoint list populate with tasks.

Step 3: Connect Power BI to SharePoint

This is the fun and easy part where everything comes together.

1. Open Power BI Desktop.
2. Go to the Home ribbon and click Get data. Find and select SharePoint Online List and click Connect.
3. Paste in the URL for your SharePoint site (just the base URL, not the full path to the list).
4. Power BI will show a navigator of all lists on that site. Find your "Planner Task Data" list, check the box, and click Load.

Your data is now in Power BI! You can go into the Power Query Editor to clean things up (like removing extra SharePoint columns you don't need) or just jump straight into building visuals.

Dashboard Ideas for Your New Planner Data

Now that the connection is made, what can you build? Here are a few essential visuals to get your project dashboard started:

Tasks by Status (Donut Chart)

• Values: Use "Title" and select Count as the aggregation. This counts all your tasks.
• Legend: Drag your "Status" column here.
• What it shows: A beautiful, high-level overview of work that is Completed, In Progress, and Not Started.

Team Workload (Bar Chart)

• Axis: Drag your "AssignedTo" column here.
• Values: Use a Count of "Title".
• Filter: Go to the filter pane, add the "Status" column, and select everything except "Completed".
• What it shows: You'll see exactly how many active tasks each person has on their plate, giving you a real sense of current workload.

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Progress by Bucket (Stacked Bar Chart)

• Axis: Drag "BucketName" here.
• Values: Count of "Title".
• Legend: Drag "Status" here.
• What it shows: A clear view of projects moving through your workflow, from to-do to done, for each major bucket or stage.

Final Thoughts

Creating a live, custom project status dashboard by linking Planner to Power BI is an incredibly powerful reporting move. While it isn't a direct connection, the Power Automate and SharePoint method gives you complete control over your data, building a flow that automatically keeps you up to date on team progress and potential roadblocks.

The manual setup and troubleshooting in BI tools can often feel like the biggest barrier to getting started with data analysis. After all, your goal is to get insights, not to spend hours wrestling with connectors and workflows. At Graphed , we’ve built our platform to eliminate this exact kind of friction for your sales and marketing data. Just connect your sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce in a few clicks, and then describe the dashboard you want in plain English. We handle the data wrangling and build the visuals for you, turning hours of technical setup into a 30-second conversation.