No. The new Planner unified your plans, but its workload rollups track plan status, not what any one person is carrying across those plans. The 2024–25 merge of To Do, Planner, and Project added Portfolios and a Roadmap timeline, both of which report on plans in aggregate. Neither answers the actual manager question: how loaded is this teammate across everything they’re assigned to?
What did the “new Planner” actually merge?
Microsoft folded three tools into one. The new Planner “brings together the simplicity of Microsoft To Do, the collaboration of Microsoft Planner, the power of Microsoft Project for the web into a simple, familiar experience,” and it began rolling out to general availability in Teams starting late 2024. Project for the web was retired and its users moved into this unified Planner.
That’s a real consolidation. Your to-dos, your team plans, and your premium projects now live under one app. But merging the apps is not the same as merging the view of a person’s work. The thing that got unified is where plans live, not a lens on who’s overloaded.
Does Portfolios show workload across plans?
Portfolios is the closest the new Planner gets, and it’s still plan-level, not person-level. Microsoft’s documentation says Portfolios let you “track key deliverables and milestones across multiple plans” and monitor plan details “such as percent complete and status.” The Roadmap tab draws each plan as a row on a timeline.
Read those fields carefully. Percent complete. Status. Milestones. Every dimension is about a plan’s progress. There’s no per-assignee axis. You can see that Plan A is 60% done and Plan B is at risk. You cannot ask “what is Sarah holding across Plan A, Plan B, and the three others she’s on.”
Two more limits worth knowing before you lean on it:
- It’s gated behind the top licenses. You only get the My Portfolios tab to create portfolios with a Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 license. Everyone else gets read-only.
- The numbers are pulled, not computed for people. Percent complete is a read-only field the connected premium plan calculates and the portfolio syncs. It rolls up plans, so it can only ever reflect plan-shaped questions.
What about the People view in Planner Premium?
The People view is real, but it stops at the plan boundary. Inside a single premium plan you can sort tasks by the person they’re assigned to. That’s genuinely useful for balancing one project. The catch is that it’s exactly that: one project.
Holert’s breakdown of the premium tier is blunt about the ceiling: you can display a project’s tasks sorted by resource, but “effective cross-project resource management is not possible with Microsoft Planner Premium,” and there are clear “limitations in cross-project project and resource management” (Holert). So if someone is spread across five plans, People view hands you five separate pictures. Adding them up in your head is the manual step the new Planner never removed — the same wall you hit trying to list Planner tasks by assignee across plans.
Can’t “Assigned to me” already do this?
For yourself, yes. For your team, no. The Assigned to me view does aggregate across everything: it shows “all of the tasks that have been assigned to you across Microsoft Teams meeting notes, basic plans, premium plans, task lists in Loop, and shared lists in To Do.” It’s a great personal cross-plan list.
But it’s scoped to me. There is no “Assigned to them” for a manager. The one cross-plan, all-tasks lens Microsoft built points at your own work only. The moment you need the same picture for a teammate, or for the whole team side by side, you’re back to opening plans one at a time.
Can you build the workload view with Power BI instead?
This is the workaround most teams reach for, and it’s telling that Microsoft points to it too. In a Microsoft Q&A thread asking for exactly this — “viewing resource workload across multiple projects” — the community moderator concedes there’s no native answer: “there is no direct unboxing function to meet this requirement,” and suggests you “export Planner data through Power Automate and connect it to Power BI” (Microsoft Q&A).
So the cross-plan, per-person picture is buildable — but as a data pipeline you stand up and maintain, not a screen that ships in Planner. You wire a Power Automate flow to pull tasks out, land them somewhere, and design and refresh a Power BI report on top. For a team that just wants to see who’s overloaded this week, that’s a reporting project standing in for a view. It’s the same gap, moved from “no view” to “build your own.” Our Microsoft Planner workload view writeup covers what that view should actually show once you stop hand-assembling it.
What the new Planner unified vs. what it still doesn’t
| The manager question | New Planner answer |
|---|---|
| Status of each plan | Yes — Portfolios (Plan 3/5) |
| Plans on a timeline | Yes — Roadmap view |
| My own tasks across all plans | Yes — Assigned to me |
| One teammate’s load across all plans | No native view |
| Whole team, per person, across plans | No native view |
The pattern is consistent. Every row the new Planner answers is either plan-shaped or scoped to you. The two rows a manager actually reaches for, one person across plans and the whole team across plans, are still blank.
Seeing the people, not just the plans
The new Planner unified your plans. Team Workload unifies the people on them. It reads every plan your team touches and shows one screen per assignee: everything a teammate is holding across all of their plans, side by side with the rest of the team, so you can see who’s buried and who has room before you assign the next task.
It’s the cross-plan, per-person view Portfolios and People view stop just short of — a true capacity and resource view — and it doesn’t need a Plan 3 or Plan 5 license, a Power BI build, or a Power Automate pipeline to answer the question the merge left open. Plans got unified. This is how the workload catches up.