Printing your project plan: how do you get your planning from Microsoft Planner Premium onto paper or a slide?

At the steering committee meeting, the project plan should be on the table as a printout or on a slide in the status report. But it’s planned on screen, in Microsoft Planner Premium, with all its tasks, dependencies and dates. And that complete plan is often too much for the meeting: too many rows, too small a font, and it rarely fits on a single page. People end up taking screenshots and piecing them together into slides – and with the next status update, it all starts over again.

That’s not down to the plan, but to its purpose. The plan in Microsoft Planner Premium is your working tool: complete, with every task. The printed plan is the summary for the meeting: it shows at a glance where the project stands. That’s why you choose what it shows – only phases and milestones for the steering committee, one more level for the project team, individual tasks deliberately hidden. Your complete plan stays untouched.

This article first looks at what makes a good printed project plan. Then it shows you how to print your project plan in PlainPPM – with one click, as a clear Gantt chart, straight from Planner Premium.

The feature on video

Just over a minute (in German): from the plan in Planner Premium through the settings to the finished printout.

Watch on YouTube

What a printed project plan needs to show

A project plan on paper has a different audience than the plan in your planning software. The people holding it aren’t involved in planning – they’re making decisions. It should answer four questions:

• How far along is the project? Phases and milestones, not every single work package.
• Where is it stuck? Delayed tasks need to stand out without anyone having to compare dates.
• What is time-critical? The critical path shows which tasks determine the project end date. If one of them slips, the end date slips too.
• What depends on what? Dependencies show which tasks build on each other.

The right level of detail depends on the audience, and the format depends on the purpose: A3 for the wall, A4 for the meeting documents, 16:9 for the slide.

One plan, one source

The most important principle is easy to overlook: the printed plan must not become a second version of the truth. It’s the summary – your working tool remains the plan in Planner Premium. If you rebuild the plan by hand for the meeting, in Excel or PowerPoint, you end up with two versions that drift apart by the next meeting. It’s better to have a printout that comes straight from the working plan and can be printed again with the same settings next time.

How to print your project plan in PlainPPM

One click from the project view. In PlainPPM, you plan with Planner Premium, directly in your Microsoft 365 tenant. In the project view, the printer icon opens a small menu: Print this page or Print project plan. The second option shows the project’s plan as a clear Gantt chart – no project selection, no export.

Choose what the summary shows. Show all levels, or only down to level 1, 2 or 3. With the Always show milestones switch, milestones stay in view even when their level is hidden. If you like, an additional filter shows only milestones or only summary tasks, and you can hide individual tasks – or show them again – with a checkbox.

Delays at a glance. Delayed tasks – past their end date but not yet completed – appear with a red border and a red end date, and the plan header shows how many there are. The % column shows their progress.

Critical path and dependencies. When you need it, you add the critical path: the tasks that determine the project end date then appear in red instead of blue. You can also show the dependencies between tasks as arrows – so you see which tasks build on each other – and, if you wish, the assigned resources next to the bars.

Format and font. A3 landscape, A3 portrait, A4 landscape or 16:9 for presentations, plus three font sizes. PlainPPM spreads longer plans across several pages.

Set it up once, print it the same way every time. You save your settings per project. The next time you print, the plan looks exactly the same – for everyone else who opens the project, too. Anyone who can edit the project can change the settings; everyone else can view and print the plan.

One click, and your plan is ready as a PDF.

One thing the printout deliberately doesn’t do: it’s a summary, not a second working tool. Nothing is edited in the Gantt chart; if you want to change a date, you change it in Planner Premium and print again. A comparison with the baseline and a freely selectable time window aren’t available yet. And no more than 150 tasks are printed at a time – for larger plans, choose a lower level of detail.

What you need

• A plan in Planner Premium that’s linked to the project. Without a linked plan, PlainPPM shows a notice instead of a Gantt chart.
• A structure with summary tasks. This is what makes the level of detail meaningful – a flat plan has only one level.
• Well-maintained milestones – they’re the backbone of the printed plan.
• Dependencies in Planner Premium. Without them, there are no arrows and no meaningful critical path.
• Up-to-date progress. Delays and percentages are only as good as the upkeep of the plan.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

In the steering committee, a project plan doesn’t win people over through completeness, but through clarity. With “Print Project Plan,” you create this summary straight from the plan in Planner Premium – at the level of detail your audience needs, with delays and the critical path, and with the same settings next time. If you want to see all the projects in your portfolio on one timeline instead, use Gantt Visual in the Projects module.

Try it out for yourself. “Print Project Plan” is ready for you in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk: open it with sample data in the trial environment, choose the level of detail and format and switch on the critical path – without changing anything in your own environment. If it meets your needs, we’ll build it into your PlainPPM environment; the core of PlainPPM remains untouched.

PlainPPM is project and project portfolio management built entirely on standard Microsoft 365 – native to Microsoft 365, optimized for Microsoft Teams, built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Book a demo