liveplanner is for running work together: a Kanban board, a sprint, a bug triage, a retro, a roadmap, a budget or a launch. What you make is a plan, and a plan holds tabs along the bottom of the screen. Each tab is one of four kinds:
- Board: columns of cards your team drags through the work. See Boards.
- Sheet: a spreadsheet with formulas, formatting and charts, which can also count and add up your cards. See Sheets.
- Dashboard: rows of slots showing your boards, sheets, metrics and charts side by side, or one chart filling the tab, such as a Gantt chart or a due calendar. See Dashboards and Charts of Your Cards.
- Form: questions anyone can answer from a link, each response becoming a card on a board. See Forms.
The work itself is cards. Each card is an item (a task, a bug, a note or an idea) stored with the plan rather than with one board, so moving a card changes it for everyone at once, and the same card can show on two boards (a sprint board and a roadmap) and move on both. What fields a card has comes from its card type.
Start Planning
A new plan, and every tab you add with the + in the tab bar, opens on Start Planning: a picker in the middle of the screen. Its rail on the left lists:
- Recommended: the quickest ways to start, such as a Roadmap, a Kanban board, a To-do List, an Overview dashboard, an Empty Sheet and a Feedback form.
- Boards: every board type, from a Blank board to Kanban, Sprint, Retro, Roadmap and Bug Triage.
- Spreadsheets: an Empty Sheet, a table of your cards, and ready-made sheets such as a Budget, an Invoice or a Timesheet.
- Forms: form starters, such as a Bug Report, Feedback or an Event RSVP.
- Visualisations: one chart of your cards filling the tab, such as a Gantt chart or a due calendar.
- Dashboards: layouts of slots, and dashboards built from the boards and sheets your plan already has.
- Inspiration: ready-made ways to run real work, such as a Hiring Pipeline or a Content Calendar, set up across several tabs (see Plan Templates).
Type in the search box (Find a board, sheet, form or layout) to look across all of them at once, by name, what it's for or the card types a board takes. Pick one and the tab becomes that kind. Only people who can edit the plan see Start Planning.
Each board takes the card types its work is made of: a Sprint board takes Stories, Tasks and Bugs; a Bug Triage board, Bugs. The first board in a new plan brings just those card types (a Blank board lets you choose), and later boards add any your plan doesn't have yet.
The Bottom-Right Corner
Once a tab has a board, a sheet or a chart of your cards, the bottom-right corner holds:
- Undo and Redo. See Undo and Redo.
- One strip with the Trash (for editors, and not on a phone), New (a new card of any type), Find (any card in the plan, with a search) and Types (the plan's card types).
- Style, which opens the tab's style: its theme, colours and font. See Themes.
- On a Sheet tab only, zoom controls, which zoom the sheet's cells from 50% to 200%. Boards, dashboards and forms don't zoom.
On an empty tab, showing Start Planning, only Undo, Redo and Style are there.
Plan Templates
The templates under Inspiration set up a way of working across several tabs: each board on a Board tab of its own, set up for the job (columns, rows, card fields and widgets), and the charts and metrics that watch the work gathered on a Dashboard.
| Template | Tabs | Card types |
|---|---|---|
| Project Planner | Roadmap (projects on Now, Next, Later), Backlog, Sprint, Daily Standup | Project, Story, Task, Bug |
| Kanban Board | Board (with WIP limits), Requests, Flow (charts of where the work stands) | Task, Request |
| Bug Tracker | Triage (a row per priority), Fixing, Health | Bug |
| Team Retro | Retro (notes hidden until you reveal them, then a vote), Actions, Archive | Note, Idea, Action |
| Weekly Planner | This Week, Inbox, Calendar | Task, Action, Note |
| Content Calendar | Ideas (voted on), Production, Calendar | Content, Task |
| Hiring Pipeline | Roles, Pipeline (a row per role), Onboarding (a row per new starter) | Role, Candidate, Onboarding Task |
| OKRs | Objectives, Key Results (on track, at risk or off track) | Objective, Key Result |
| Product Launch | Timeline, Checklist (a row per workstream), Launch Day (go or no-go) | Project, Task, Launch Check |
| Feedback Board | Feedback (voted on), Delivery | Request, Task |
- Cards move between tabs. Boards on different tabs share some columns: move a task to This Sprint on the Project Planner's Backlog and it is on the Sprint board too. A card's Status in its panel lists the columns of every tab, so you can send it anywhere.
- Each board takes only its own kinds of card, and the plan has only those. A template brings just the card types its boards need, with the fields the work needs: a Candidate names its Role (so the Pipeline has a row per role), a Key Result has a Baseline, Target and Current, a Request says who it is Requested By. They are your plan's card types, to change like any other; Add Default Types there adds Project, Task, Note, Idea and Action if you want them too.
- Charts read every card, whichever tab its board is on.
- Picking a template on a new tab fills that tab and adds the rest straight after it.
- Every board opens on a worked example: a small team's cards (Maya, Sam, Priya, Leo and Ana's), dated from today, so the boards, charts and calendar show how the template runs. They are ordinary cards: move them, change them, or delete them as you start on your own work.
Some templates are a spreadsheet instead of boards: a Sheet already filled in from one of the Sheet templates, such as a Budget, a Timesheet or Contacts, with no cards and no card types. Task Tracker adds an Overview dashboard with a how-to note after its sheet.
Working on a Board
- Add a card: every column ends in + Add card. Press a type (Task, Bug, Note or any your board takes) and the new card opens straight away with its title selected, so just type to name it. See Cards.
- Move a card: drag it to another column, or up and down its column. On a board with rows (by assignee, priority, type, plan or any field), dropping it in a row also sets that field: drop it in Sam's row to give it to Sam.
- Open a card: click it. Its panel opens with the title and the card's tabs on the left and Details (status, assignee, priority and the rest) on the right. Every change saves as you make it. On a phone the panel rises from the bottom, with Details as its first tab.
- Assign a card: set its Assignee to say who is doing it. liveplanner does not yet list your team's members, so there are no teammates to pick from for now.
- Trash a card: drag it onto the Trash button in the bottom-right corner, choose Trash from its menu, or press Delete with it focused. Open the Trash to restore a card or delete it for good.
- Undo: Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac) undoes your card changes in order: a moved card goes back, a trashed card comes back. Votes and comments are not undone.
How to set up columns, swimlanes, WIP limits and the header's widgets is in Boards.
With the Keyboard
Tab to a card, then:
- Arrow keys move between cards.
- Enter opens the card.
- Shift+Left and Shift+Right move the card to the previous or next column; Shift+Up and Shift+Down move it within its column.
- N opens Add a Card for the card's column.
- Delete moves the card to the Trash, where you can restore it.
Screen readers hear every move ("#12 Fix login moved to In Progress, position 4 of 4").
On a Phone or Tablet
A finger on a card picks the card up, and holding it still opens the card's menu. A finger on the board's empty space (between cards, or a column's background) scrolls the board.
Together
Everyone with the plan open sees cards move, appear and change as they happen. A card someone is dragging or has open shows their colour and name. Voting and hidden writing are part of the board, so a retro needs no other tools: write, reveal, vote, then turn the top votes into actions. See Voting and Hidden Writing.
- Editors do everything on these pages.
- Participants can add, move and change cards, type into sheets and comment, but don't change how a board, sheet or dashboard is set up.
- View-only visitors can open cards to read them, and cannot drag, add or change anything. They don't see Start Planning.
A tab with boards or cards on it can't be added to another plan with the tab menu's Add to Plan, because its cards belong to this plan.
Where to Go Next
- Boards, Cards and Card Types for the day-to-day work.
- Items for how cards are stored, numbered and kept in sync.
- Sheets and Sheet Functions for spreadsheets.
- Dashboards and Charts of Your Cards to watch the work.
- Forms to collect requests and feedback as cards.
- The Plan Tour walks you around your own board or sheet in about a minute.
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