Convert Outlook email to Planner task with automation

“I frequently receive project requests by email that need to be tracked as tasks. Is there a way to directly convert an Outlook email into a Microsoft Planner task without manually recreating all the information? Our team uses Planner for project management, but the disconnection between our email communication and task tracking creates extra work and opportunities for things to fall through the cracks.”

The challenge of managing email-based task requests

In today’s business environment, emails remain the primary communication channel for task assignments and project requests. However, this creates a significant workflow challenge when teams use Microsoft Planner for task management. The manual process of copying information from emails to create Planner tasks is time-consuming, error-prone, and often results in lost context or missing details. Organizations need a seamless way to bridge Outlook and Planner to maintain productivity and ensure accountability.

Power Automate: The solution for sending emails to Planner

Using Microsoft Power Automate, you can create an automated workflow that converts emails into Planner tasks. This solution will allow you to forward specific emails to a designated address, triggering an automated process that extracts the email content and creates a corresponding task in your Planner board integrated with Outlook. This approach requires no coding experience and can be implemented with standard Microsoft 365 tools available in most business subscriptions.

Step-by-step guide to create an email to Planner task flow

When setting up your workflow, ensure you properly configure the task creation settings. You’ll need to map email properties to task fields by configuring the task title to use the email subject, setting the task description to include the email body, and choosing appropriate start dates. For seamless integration, consider syncing your Outlook appointments with your task management system to maintain consistent scheduling across platforms.

  • Set up your Power Automate environment by signing into flow.microsoft.com with your Microsoft 365 credentials, ensuring you have the necessary permissions to create flows and access both Outlook and Planner resources within your organization.
  • Create a new automated cloud flow by clicking on “Create” in Power Automate and selecting “Automated cloud flow,” then giving your flow a descriptive name like “Convert Emails to Planner Tasks” that clearly identifies its purpose.
  • Select “When a new email arrives (V3)” as your trigger from the Outlook connector options, configuring it to monitor a specific folder such as “Planner Tasks” that you’ve created in Outlook specifically for this workflow.
  • Add a condition to check if the email subject contains a specific keyword such as “[Task]” to ensure only intended emails are processed, which prevents accidental task creation and gives you control over which communications become tasks.
  • Insert a “Create a task” action from the Planner connector, selecting your target Plan and Bucket where tasks should be created, ensuring the workflow places tasks in the appropriate location for team visibility.
  • Map email properties to task fields by configuring the task title to use the email subject (minus any special keywords), setting the task description to include the email body, and choosing appropriate start dates and due dates based on your workflow needs.
  • Add an attachment action if you want to preserve any email attachments, selecting the “Add attachment to task” action from Planner and mapping it to any attachments from the original email to maintain all relevant documentation with the task.
  • Include a notification action to alert team members when new tasks are created by adding a “Post message in a chat or channel” action from the Teams connector, providing visibility when the system automatically creates tasks from emails.
  • Save and test your flow by sending a test email to the monitored folder with your trigger keyword in the subject line, then verifying that a corresponding task appears in your Planner board with all the expected information.

Pro tip: Create a dedicated email address or folder specifically for this automation to keep your regular inbox separate from your task creation system. This improves organization and makes it easier to track which emails have been converted to tasks.

Troubleshooting forward email to Planner issues

  • Permission errors may occur when the flow fails to create tasks in Planner due to insufficient access rights, which can be resolved by ensuring the flow owner has appropriate permissions in both Outlook and the target Planner plan and asking an administrator to verify service-to-service permissions.
  • Email formatting issues can cause inconsistent task descriptions when HTML-rich emails are converted to plain text in Planner, requiring you to modify the flow to either strip HTML formatting completely or preserve it using appropriate Power Automate functions like ‘replace()’ to clean the content.
  • Workflow timing problems might delay task creation when dealing with high email volumes or service throttling, which can be mitigated by implementing error handling in your flow with retry policies and configuring notification alerts when tasks fail to create properly.