MS Planner / MS Planner Frontier Agent - Can you use an external plan i.e. Excel, MS Project etc and input into MS Planner to produce a plan?

Hello @Leigh, Daniel CWK,

Thank you for your question.

At the moment, Microsoft Planner (including the Planner Frontier/AI agent) does not support directly importing an external plan such as from Excel or Microsoft Project to automatically create a new plan. The Planner Agent is designed to generate plans based on prompts or goals rather than ingesting existing files, and Planner itself does not currently provide a native import function for Excel or Project files.

As a workaround, if your plan is already in Excel, you can use Power Automate to help bridge the gap. For example, you can structure your Excel file as a table and create a flow that reads each row and creates corresponding tasks in Planner. While this requires some setup, it is the most commonly used approach today to bring external data into Planner. For Microsoft Project plans, a similar approach can be used by exporting the data (for example, to Excel) and then using automation to recreate the tasks in Planner.

If you're looking for a way to achieve this using Power Automate, I recommend posting a new question on one of our dedicated support platforms: Microsoft Power Platform Community Forum Thread 

For Power Automate-related questions, it's best to post on dedicated platforms like the Microsoft Power Automate Community. These forums are actively monitored by experts and product teams, increasing your chances of getting accurate, timely, and detailed guidance. Plus, your question may help others with similar needs.

If this kind of direct import capability would be valuable for your scenario, I encourage you to submit this feedback to show demand from the community at Planner · Community. The Product Team is in-charge of the feedback site, and they are constantly checking the comments and feedback from our customer. Many features have been developed or improved based on users' comment.    

After submitting your request on the site, you can return here and paste the link into this thread. That way, other users who visit this discussion can click the link and upvote your request to help bring more attention to it.   

Please note that Q&A forum moderators do not have access to backend systems or the ability to change app behavior directly. Our role is to assist based on available documentation and guidance from Microsoft based on our knowledge.    

In the meantime, you can check Microsoft 365 Roadmap for updating features in the future.    

I will continue to monitor this case and keep an eye on any updates. If there are any changes or new information regarding this feature, I will make sure to share them with you promptly.   

I genuinely appreciate your feedback and share your goal of making Planner better and more user-friendly.  

Thanks again for reaching out, and I hope this helps clarify the current capabilities. Please feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

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