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Anonymous

Plan your weekly meals with Planner and Flow

There are so many ways you can utilize Office 365 services. In this blog post I show how our family has solved two common problems:

 

  1. What’s for dinner next week?
  2. After we have decided what to cook, what I should buy from a grocery store?

Let’s see how these problems can be solved with Planner and Flow.

 

Planner for planning next week meals

 

First, I make a new Planner plan. It has three buckets:

 

  • All fish & vegetarian foods our family like to cook (and to eat)
  • All meat & poultry foods our family like to cook (and to eat)
  • Plan for next week dinners

I also label all recipes (blue = fish, red = meat, green = vegetarian and orange = poultry).

 

planner-plan-2.png

 

 

Now it is easy to drag and drop recipes to the ”Next week dinners” bucket. We try to have at least one vegetarian and one fish dinner every week. By using labels you can easily see if this will happen.

 

Two first buckets are ”backlog” for the dinners. After I have added there all the recipes our family likes or wants to try, it is super easy to sit down on a Sunday and plan our next week dinners. Before this solution, we ate pretty much same food every week…

 

Build a shopping list based on chosen recipes

 

Our family uses shared OneNote for the shopping list. All family members can update and read shopping list everywhere with mobile phones. No return to the paper ones.

 

But could we build a weekly shopping list automatically based on the chosen recipes from the Planner plan? Sure.

 

For that, I have to add ingredients for all the recipes. I add them (comma separated) into the Planner cards description fields.

 

planner-task-details-2.png

 

 

Finally, I can start building my Flow!

 

I like to start Flow manually after we have planned our next week meals with the Planner. First I get all tasks from the ”Weekly meals” plan into my Flow.

 

flow-foods-step-1.png

 

After that, I loop through all tasks and check if the task is in the ”Next week dinners” bucket.

 

flow-foods-step-2-2.png

 

 

Next, I add ingredients to the shopping list. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this with OneNote. Therefore I choose to use Todoist.

 

With all Planner tasks that are in the ”Next week dinner” bucket I do the following:

 

  • Get task details for the task
  • Get ingredients from task description field and store them in the array (Split(body(’Get_task_details’)?[’description’],’,’))
  • Add each item in the array as a new task in Todoist Shoppinglist project

 

 

Screen Shot 2018-07-17 at 20.54.20.png

And that’s it!

 

How does this all work together?

 

First I decide what we will eat during the next week. I use Planner for that.

 

demo-1-3.png

 

When I am ready I start Flow on my mobile phone.

 

demo-2-2.jpg

 

 

After a few seconds, I have automatically generated a shopping list to my Todoist App.

 

demo-3-2.jpg

 

 

Of course, you can modify the shopping list also manually.

 

Next step is to build a SharePoint list where I store all the ingredients with an order number. When generating the shopping list I use that stored order number as a todoist task order number. After that, all the recipients are in the same order in my shopping list than they are in my favorite shop!

 

But let’s do that one another time.

 

Tip: In my Flow, I need to know the bucket id for the ”Next week dinners” bucket. Just run List tasks action and find from the outputs any task currently in ”Next week dinners” bucket. And grab the bucket id for that one.

 

how-to-find-bucketid.png

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About the Author
  • Experienced Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Office 365, Azure, SharePoint Online, PowerShell, Nintex, K2, SharePoint Designer workflow automation, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, PowerShell, Active Directory, Operating Systems, Networking, and JavaScript. Strong consulting professional with a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) focused in Information Technology from Mumbai University.
  • I am a Microsoft Business Applications MVP and a Senior Manager at EY. I am a technology enthusiast and problem solver. I work/speak/blog/Vlog on Microsoft technology, including Office 365, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Teams Etc. I am helping global clients on Power Platform adoption and empowering them with Power Platform possibilities, capabilities, and easiness. I am a leader of the Houston Power Platform User Group and Power Automate community superuser. I love traveling , exploring new places, and meeting people from different cultures.
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  • I am the Owner/Principal Architect at Don't Pa..Panic Consulting. I've been working in the information technology industry for over 30 years, and have played key roles in several enterprise SharePoint architectural design review, Intranet deployment, application development, and migration projects. I've been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 15 consecutive years and am also a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Masters (MCSM) since 2013.
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