You are running a bigger initiative across several Planner plans at once, one per department or per project phase. To work out where things are stuck, you click through every single plan one after another, because until now there was no link between them. At the same time, every row in Grid view looks confusingly similar, whether a task has been overdue for days or was finished long ago. This is exactly where Microsoft is stepping in for Planner Premium in September 2026 with two new features. Connected Plans link related projects directly to each other. Conditional Coloring automatically highlights important tasks in colour, much like you already know from conditional formatting in excel.cloud.microsoft. Here is how both features work and how you can combine them in everyday use.
Step 1: Where you start: Premium plans instead of Basic plans
Since August 2025, Planner has been the official successor to Project for the web and now covers classic project planning as well. Both new features, however, require a plan that was created as a Premium plan rather than a free Basic plan. You can tell whether an existing plan is already Premium from the label right next to the plan name. If your team is already using Timeline, Sprints, Dependencies or the critical path in a plan, that plan is already running as Premium and both new features will appear there automatically once the rollout reaches your tenant. For new plans, choose Premium instead of Basic deliberately when you create them, if you want to use Connected Plans or Conditional Coloring. Premium features require a Planner and Project licence, typically Plan 3 or Plan 5. 📅 The rollout of both features starts worldwide in September 2026, first on the web and in Teams.
Step 2: Setting up Connected Plans
Open the plan you want to link to one or more others, for example through planner.cloud.microsoft or directly in the relevant Teams channel. Here is how it works once Connected Plans is live for you:
- Open the plan's further options through the menu icon in the top right.
- Choose the option for connecting plans.
- Look for the existing plan or plans that belong to your current initiative, for example separate plans for communication, testing and training around the same rollout.
- Confirm the connection. It applies automatically in both directions.
Once connected, the plan gives you a direct way into the linked plans and you switch there with a single click, instead of first hunting through Teams for the right channel. For a bigger initiative with four or five sub-plans, this saves you a noticeable number of clicks in daily work.
Step 3: Turning on Conditional Coloring
In the plan you want, switch to Grid view first, since that is where Microsoft implements Conditional Coloring technically. From there:
- Open the Conditional Coloring section through the column menu or the view options.
- Create a new rule and choose the attribute it should apply to, for example due date, priority or progress.
- Set the condition, for example "Due date is in the past" or "Priority is Urgent".
- Set the colour Planner should use to mark matching tasks and save the rule.
The principle is exactly the same as conditional formatting, which you already know from excel.cloud.microsoft, except that here entire task rows get coloured instead of individual cells. Keep in mind that this feature is only available in Premium plans. A Basic plan will not even show the option.
Step 4: Useful colour rules for everyday project work
Three or four rules are plenty. Any more just creates visual noise instead of clarity. In my consulting practice, these combinations have worked well: red for overdue tasks, yellow for high-priority tasks with a due date within the next three days and green for tasks completed ahead of their planned date. Make sure you use the same rules across all connected plans, otherwise red means one thing in one plan and something else in the next and the whole overview slides back into chaos. 🎨 Agree the colour logic briefly with your team once and everyone will immediately understand what a colour means without having to look up the rule themselves.
Step 5: Using Portfolios and My Tasks alongside it
Connected Plans and Conditional Coloring work best together with two existing features. With a Planner and Project licence, you can also group several Premium plans into a Portfolio and see the timeline and progress of every plan it contains at a glance in Roadmap view. On a personal level, it is also worth using the My Tasks view, which brings together your tasks from every plan, whether or not those plans are connected to each other. If you also use Copilot's Planner agent, you can ask it on the spot for a short status summary across an entire portfolio or a single plan, without going through every row yourself. 🤖
Step 6: Preparing the rollout for your team
Before Connected Plans and Conditional Coloring show up for your whole team, a little preparation pays off. Start by letting the people who are responsible for several plans at once know, since they are the ones most likely to notice the difference. Agree within the team which plans genuinely belong together and should actually be connected, rather than linking every existing plan indiscriminately. Also check which of your plans are still running as Basic and whether it is worth moving the relevant one to Premium. Sorting out these three points in advance saves you follow-up questions and inconsistently maintained colour rules later on.
My practical tip from consulting
Set up your first colour rule in just one plan as a test before rolling it out to every connected plan. Within a day or two, you will see whether the condition you chose actually marks the tasks you expect, or whether, for example, completed tasks accidentally turn up red as well. Only once a rule works reliably in the test plan do I carry it over to the rest of the connected plans. All up, that costs you no more than ten minutes extra, but it saves you a tedious correction across several plans if the first version of the rule was not quite right.
Conclusion & CTA
Connected Plans and Conditional Coloring take away the two biggest friction points of running several projects in Planner Premium at once: constantly jumping back and forth between plans and the tedious hunt for the tasks that actually matter in a long list. Both features start rolling out worldwide in September 2026. You can find the details directly in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry for Connected Plans and the Roadmap entry for Conditional Coloring. As soon as both appear for you, get started straight away and connect your most important active plans. Give it a go now.
