Trello - Saviour of post-it notes

Increasing your work-flow, and managing all your ongoing projects can be a battle that is hard won, notes scribbled and jotted down everywhere, a desk full of unorganized post-it notes can become quite the challenge.

To combat that the on going struggle, there's Trello.

What is Trello? Well its a very simple online tool to help you organise yourself/your team and your projects, making everything a whole lot easier.

A quick breakdown -

Boards, these are projects or anything that you wish to group together. For example if you start a new project you would create a board, this then will have everything relating to that project inside it.

Cards, Inside your boards you have the option to create new lists which will hold your cards and these generally are tasks or things to remember.

For example, if you was starting a new project you would first create a board, from that you would go into the board and create your lists, these can be anything depending on what you need in the project like To Do, In Process or Completed. Then inside your lists you can create cards. Cards are tasks, things to do, notes, messages.

Using this on a daily basis now I’ve come to learn a few things that help to make things, easier and better, so heres a few examples of what you can do and how to do it.

P.s - It's really simple.

Creating cards from text -

I'll start with what is arguably the greatest feature I’ve found on Trello. If you have a list of text that you need copying into Trello to create cards all you have to do is copy all the text into a card and it will ask you do you want to create cards for everything you’ve just pasted in which can save a whole lot of typing time, and more organisation!!

Learn the shortcuts -

Just a few of the ones I use the most theres a long list for you to familiarise yourself with.

Using the Labels effectively, on Trello you can set specific meaning to colours and you can tag your cards, while hovering a card you can press the numbers 0-9 to add or remove a colour from that card, not only this but you can also add a short description on each of the labels so each one has a specific meaning, An example of this would be, the colour Red could mean 'Uncompleted' or that Yellow means 'General Comment'.

Assigning Members, this is most useful if you share a board with multiple people and want to assign certain members to different tasks, just hover and press 'm' which will bring up a list of members currently assigned to that board from that you can select who you want asigned to that specific card.

Subscribing, using the letter ‘s‘ while hovering you can subscribe to the card, this will notify you if any changes are made to the card itself.

Archiving, using the letter ‘c‘ while hovering a card will archive it.

Menu, pressing the letter 'w' will open the menu for you so that you can make changes quickly.

Attachments -

On each card you can attach, images, links etc, if you have some screenshots, handwritten notes, or images you need to refrence again, you can just drag them in to a card as an attachment. Very usefull for organising everything in one place.

Using Markdown on your cards -

This has to be another of my favorite features, adding text to a card you might want to make some words stand out or to create a list and you can do that rather easily.

Bold Text - surround word or sentence with asterix

**Bold Text**

An Unordered list, just place each sentence you want on a separate line and add a - to the beginning.

- One
- Two
- Three

To add in a block of code you can create this but adding four spaces to the beginning of your code. Which can be Very useful for us developers.

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