Microsoft Project templates and lighter ways to plan a small project
Searching for Microsoft Project plan templates usually means one of two things. Either a licence already exists and the question is where the good templates are, or there is no licence yet and the question underneath is whether one is needed at all.
The two questions have different answers, and the second one has changed recently. Microsoft has folded Project into the Planner family, so the plans, the prices and the names on the purchase page are not the ones most guides describe. This covers what the templates actually contain, where they come from, what the licensing now looks like, and the lighter options for a team of five to fifteen people.
What a Project template actually contains
A Project template is a project file with the work already structured and the dates stripped out. Opening one gives a task list arranged into phases, durations on each task, dependency links between them, and often resource roles assigned to work.
The dependency links are the substantive part. A template for a software release does not just list "testing" after "development." It records that testing cannot start until development finishes, so that when development takes three extra days, testing and everything behind it move by three days without anyone editing them. That is the whole point of the file format, and it is what a task list in a document cannot do.
Resource roles are the second layer. A template may assign a developer to a task at fifty percent allocation rather than naming a person, so that when real names are substituted the workload view shows who is over committed. This is useful and it is also the part most often deleted, because filling it in properly takes longer than most small projects can justify.
Microsoft's guidance for starting from one is short: in Project desktop, File and then New, search or pick a template, then Create in the preview dialog. Its support page adds the sentence that matters more than the steps, which is to check that the resources, tasks and durations in the template suit the project, and to change them freely. A template is a starting argument, not a standard.
Where the templates come from
There are four sources, and they differ in how much you should trust them.
Built into Project desktop. The templates shipped with the application, reached from File and then New. Conservative, generic, and structurally sound. Good for seeing how a well formed dependency chain looks.
Microsoft's online template collection. Microsoft's support page for creating a project from a template points to additional templates on its templates site. Coverage varies by discipline.
Your organisation's own. The same page notes that organisations with custom templates may store them on a corporate intranet. If one exists, it is almost always the better starting point, because it already encodes how the company actually runs projects.
A previous project of your own. Often the most useful source. Microsoft documents this route too: open the finished project, change the start and finish dates under Project Information, then Save As under a new name. Durations that proved realistic last time are worth more than durations somebody estimated for a generic project.
The practical order is to start from a completed internal project if one exists, fall back to a company template, and treat downloaded templates as a reference for structure rather than a plan to fill in.
What the licensing looks like now
Project is no longer sold under the Project Plan names. The paid tiers now sit under Planner, and what a team gets depends on which one it lands on.
| Tier | Price | Relevant to planning |
|---|---|---|
| Planner in Microsoft 365 | Included with Microsoft 365 | Basic plan templates, Grid, Board, Schedule and Chart views, view task dependencies |
| Planner Plan 1 | $10.00 per user per month, paid yearly | Premium plan templates, create task dependencies, Timeline (Gantt) view, milestones, backlogs and sprints, custom task fields |
| Planner and Project Plan 3 | $30.00 per user per month, paid yearly | Baselines and critical path, advanced dependencies with lead and lag, portfolios, Project desktop and Project Online |
Prices and feature placements are as listed on Microsoft's Planner plans and pricing page. Two lines on that table are worth pausing on.
The first is that the Planner included with Microsoft 365 can view task dependencies but creating them sits at Plan 1. For a team whose main reason for wanting Project is the dependency chain, the included tier does not cover it.
The second is that baselines and critical path sit at Plan 3. A baseline is what lets a plan say whether dates have moved rather than only what they are now, and the critical path is what tells you which delay actually matters. These are the two features that most distinguish a project schedule from a task list, and they are on the highest of the three tiers.
For a team of ten, the difference between the middle and the top tier is $200 per month. That is a real number to weigh against how many projects a year genuinely need a critical path.
The sharing problem that templates do not solve
A schedule is only useful if the people who need to act on it can read it. This is where Project files have historically caused the most friction for small teams.
The desktop file format opens in Project. A client, a contractor or a manager without a licence cannot open it, so the schedule gets exported to PDF or rebuilt in slides before every review. Two things follow. The exported version is immediately a second copy that drifts from the first. And whoever owns the file becomes a bottleneck, because every question about the plan has to route through the one person who can open it.
The web based Planner tiers reduce this, since a plan lives in a browser and in Teams rather than in a file on someone's machine. It does not disappear, because viewing still requires a licensed account in the tenant. Contractors and clients outside the organisation are the case to check before committing, not after.
This is worth weighing against the template question, because it is the more consequential decision. A good template saves an afternoon. A schedule nobody outside the core team can open costs an hour a week, every week, for the life of the project.
The first hour with a template
Whatever the source, the work after opening one is similar, and doing it in this order avoids most of the rework.
Set the project start date before touching anything else. Every task in a template is positioned relative to the schedule, so changing the start afterwards moves work you have already adjusted and makes it hard to see what you changed deliberately.
Delete whole phases you will not run. Deleting early is cheaper than deleting late, because dependency links crossing into a removed phase have to be repaired by hand. Cut the scope down to what the project genuinely includes before editing any durations.
Replace the durations next, and only then the dates. Durations are the input. Dates are the output. Editing a date directly in a scheduled plan pins that task in place and breaks the reflow that the template exists to provide, which is the most common way a Project plan quietly stops being a schedule.
Check the dependency links after the cuts. Look for tasks with no predecessor that should have one, and for links that survived a deletion pointing somewhere unexpected.
Strip the resource assignments unless you will maintain them. Generic role assignments left in place produce workload views that look authoritative and mean nothing once real names are attached at real availability.
What a template does not fix
Templates fail in a predictable way, and it is not a shortcoming of the template.
A template does not know your durations. A generic estimate of ten days for a task your team does in three produces a plan that is wrong on day one and has to be rewritten anyway. The structure transfers between projects. The numbers do not.
A template cannot make the plan get updated. Every stale schedule was a good schedule once. What went missing was a fixed weekly moment where someone walked the list and recorded what moved. No file format supplies that.
A template encourages more detail than a small project needs. Templates are usually built to demonstrate capability, so they arrive with resource allocations, cost fields and fine grained percent complete. A percent complete field that reads sixty percent for four weeks is worse than no field, because it looks like information.
A template does not decide who owns the plan. Two people editing a schedule in opposite directions produces a plan that is confidently wrong. One owner applying changes that anyone can request is the arrangement that works, and it is a decision rather than a feature.
Lighter ways to plan the same project
For a team of five to fifteen running several concurrent projects, the shape of the need is often different from what Project is built for.
| What the team needs | Where Project fits | Lighter option |
|---|---|---|
| A dependency chain that reflows automatically | Strong, at Plan 1 and above | Manual predecessor chains, or a tool with a timeline view |
| Critical path and resource levelling | The main reason to buy Plan 3 | Rarely needed under about fifty tasks |
| Everyone updating their own tasks daily | Possible, needs licences for all | A shared board most people already know |
| Clients or contractors seeing part of the plan | Needs accounts or exports | A shared link scoped to one board |
| One place for the schedule, the board and the discussion | Board and schedule yes, chat via Teams | A tool that carries all of them together |
The honest split is this. If projects routinely run past a hundred tasks with genuine resource contention, and if the organisation is on Microsoft 365 anyway, Project remains the thing built for that job. If the work is a steady stream of smaller projects where the real problems are visibility and keeping the plan current, a project management tool where each person updates their own tasks and the board, the calendar and the timeline all read from the same records tends to fit better. The comparison pages set out which tools include a timeline view on which plan, since that is the feature most often held back to a paid tier.
Before committing either way, it is worth seeing what the first board or the first plan actually contains with real tasks in it. The getting started guide covers that for the lighter route, and Microsoft offers trials on the paid Planner tiers for the other.
What to change first
Before downloading another template, take the last project that finished roughly on time, strip its dates, and keep it as the starting point for the next one. Its durations are real and a generic template's are not. If the recurring problem turns out to be that nobody outside the core team can see the plan, try the next project's task list in a shared tool such as Pinateca instead of a heavier licence.
Q1. Are there free Microsoft Project plan templates?
Project desktop ships with templates, and Microsoft's support page points to additional templates on its templates site. Both require a licence that includes Project desktop to open the resulting file. Templates for the web based Planner tiers are listed as basic on the included tier and premium on Plan 1.
Q2. Do I need Microsoft Project, or is Planner enough?
It depends on dependencies and baselines. The Planner included with Microsoft 365 can view task dependencies but not create them. Creating dependencies and the Timeline (Gantt) view start at Planner Plan 1, and baselines and critical path start at Planner and Project Plan 3.
Q3. How much does Microsoft Project cost now?
Microsoft's plans and pricing page lists Planner Plan 1 at $10.00 per user per month paid yearly, and Planner and Project Plan 3, which includes Project desktop and Project Online, at $30.00 per user per month paid yearly. Basic Planner is included with Microsoft 365.
Q4. Can someone without a licence open a Microsoft Project file?
Not directly. Desktop project files need Project to open, which is why schedules usually get exported to PDF for clients and managers. The web based Planner tiers avoid the file entirely, though viewing still requires an account in the organisation.
Q5. Should I start from a template or from a previous project?
A previous project, when one exists. Microsoft documents the route: open the finished project, adjust the start and finish dates, then save under a new name. The durations in it are ones your team actually achieved, which a generic template cannot supply.
