R/Bash scripts for downloading Microsoft Planner data in a given Group/Team to a CSV.
A modified version of these scripts (pointing to the AAGI-AU Team and Channels by ID specifically) is used for the technical operations of the AAGI-AU leadership team, under GRDC investment UOA2301-005OPX. The scripts in this repository are general and can be used with any Microsoft Team/Group, and are released publicly under the MIT licence.
The scrape script is missing some try-catch structure to handle the cases where the Microsoft Graph server does not respond/denies the request. We noticed these errors cropping up now and again in AAGI-AU ever since the script has started making hundreds of requests over the dozens of managed projects. On rare occasions the request will fail, and the script fails very ungracefully by terminating and discarding any information it has already scraped from the Team. Other than this issue though, these scripts are considered complete for operational purposes in AAGI-AU. Contributions and feedback are welcome, as always, but it is not anticipated that further work will happen with these scripts. This repository is considered to be in an inactive state of development.
In 2026, the strategy to further automate and robustise the Microsoft Planner data downloads is to set up a Microsoft Team Workflow, which would populate a spreadsheet with the information without needing manual intervention and with built-in retries. Details of the Workflow setup will depend on how the new Adelaide University M365 tenancy works, but the general structured will be documented and added to an AAGI-AUS GitHub repository. It is expected that the finished Workflow will completely supersede these scripts.
The R script download_planner_data.R defines a function download_planner_data that takes two important arguments:
api_token: This is your unique Microsoft Graph API token. (See the section below on finding your Microsoft Graph API token.)group_id: This is the unique ID for the Microsoft Team (or Microsoft Group) associated with the Planner/s that you want to download. (To find the ID for your Team/Group of interest, see the section below on finding the ID for a particular Team/Group.)
The function returns a data.frame containing a row for every Task of every Bucket of every Plan associated with the Microsoft Team (or Microsoft Group). Assigned Personnel, Labels and Checklists associated with a Task are returned as a comma-separated list inside curly brackets, e.g., {label1,label2,label3}.
The Bash shell script download_planner_data.sh is just a convenient wrapper for the R function, which also exports the constructed data.frame of Planner Tasks to a CSV file.
The example R script example.R shows a basic template for how to use the download_planner_data() function to download Planner data for a given Microsoft Group/Team to a data.frame, and then export it to a CSV.
NOTE: In our experience, these Microsoft Graph API tokens are very ephemeral. The lifetime for the tokens is only a day by default. The token lifetime can be extended, and (even better) an allowlist of applications with arbitrary access to the Graph API can be specified. However, both of these settings are strictly controlled by the Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator, who will usually be your University/Organisation's IT Support team. If you want try asking them about organising this for you, best of luck! In AAGI-AU's case, our ITDS team considered either of those options to be an "unacceptable security risk for miniscule gain", so we're instead left with a 'semi'-automated process where we have to manually regenerate a daily token.
To find your (current) Microsoft Graph API token:
-
Go to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer in a web browser,
-
Click the 'Sign in' button on the top-right, which should take you to your Organisation's SSO for Microsoft 365,
-
Click the 'Access token' tab, and copy the token to the clipboard.
If you are using the Bash script download_planner_data.sh, then the copied API token is to be pasted as the singular argument when running that script from a Linux command line. So for instance, I manually generate the API token (every Monday morning), copy-paste it into the shell variable API_TOKEN, and then run the script with:
./download_planner_data.sh "$API_TOKEN"You also need the Group ID for the Microsoft Team (or Microsoft Group) with which the Planner Plan is associated.
The straightforward way: If you are using Microsoft Planner as a tab inside a Microsoft Team, then the Team's Group ID can be found in a very straightforward way by:
- Clicking the dropdown for the Team options, and clicking 'Get link to team',
- And then scrolling right in the Team link URL until you find the section
?groupId=.... The string of text that appears there (before the next&or the end of the line) is the group ID associated with the Team.
The complex-and-tedious-but-foolproof way: Another way to find the Group ID, which also works if your Planner is associated with a Microsoft Group rather than a Microsoft Team (a Planner will always be associated with at least a Group, if nothing else), is to run one of the sample queries on the Microsoft Graph API Explorer to list groups that you belong to. The id fields in the returned JSON are the Group IDs that we need, so scroll through until you find the ID associated with the group that you want.
If you are using the Bash script download_planner_data.sh, make sure to modify your copy of the script to include your group ID on line 41 as appropriate. (The group ID does not ever change for a Microsoft Team or Microsoft Group, so this is safe to hard-code in the script I say.)