General-Use Power-Ups

You’ve already learned about some Power-Ups created by Trello that will help you improve your workflows, but it’s time to step outside the internal ecosystem and explore Power-Ups created by others. In this chapter, we’ll explore a few Power-Ups that aren’t made by Trello but instead are made by other companies and developers. Although I’d have to write a million books to talk about all of them, we’ll cover a couple that work well with a handful of use cases and solve the most common challenges I am asked about.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the following topics:

• Approvals for Trello—streamlines your team’s review and approval process
• Amazing Fields—adds custom fields to your Trello cards for a more comprehensive overview of your projects
• Bulk Actions—simplifies your workflow by letting you perform actions on multiple cards at once

It’s a lot, so...

Approvals for Trello

This Power-Up is useful if you have any approval process as part of your workflow in Trello. For instance, maybe you need to keep track of your content calendar on Trello, and before any content can be published, your manager or other teammates must approve it.

While you can build your own approval system with Trello’s custom fields and labels, why not use a Power-Up that gives you everything you need out of the box? That’s where Approvals for Trello comes in.

It’s a Power-Up built by the AppFox team, the makers of other much-loved apps for Jira, Confluence, and monday.com. Approvals has been added to over 75,000 Trello boards worldwide and is free to use, although there is a paid subscription plan that adds some cool extra features.

Why use Approvals?

Adding an approval process in your workflow can help ensure everyone is on the same page about who is working on what. It eliminates the “I had no idea that was going out!...

Amazing Fields

Trello’s native custom fields are powerful and versatile, but for something called custom fields, you can only “customize” so much. There are only five types of fields and you can’t style anything about them, other than the colors of the drop-down options for the drop-down field type or the name of the field. While they’re useful for holding data, if you want to type longer notes (or anything more than about 20 characters), the text gets cut off and is hard to read. And hey—they work great for many use cases! But sometimes you just need a little bit more.

Amazing Fields takes custom fields a step further, allowing you to create additional fields on your Trello cards and customize where and how they appear. Amazing Fields is built by the Amazing PowerUps company and has been added to over 100,000 boards! Just as with other Power-Ups, there’s a free plan that has plenty of functionality and a Premium version that lets...

Bulk Actions

While making changes to any one Trello card isn’t all that difficult, making changes to many of them at once can take a while. As of 2022, Trello doesn’t natively offer a way to quickly edit multiple cards at once, such as adding members, changing due dates, or removing labels. But this is possible with the Bulk Actions Power-Up!

Bulk Actions is built by AxoApps and has been added to over 100,000 boards! There is a limited free plan that allows actions on a maximum of 5 cards at a time, but you can edit more cards for as little as $1 a month per board.

Why use Bulk Actions?

Whether it’s spring cleaning, project dates shifting, or new members added to (or leaving) a team, you’ll find there are a lot of situations where you need to quickly make sweeping changes in your board.

It’s possible to do all of this manually, but it takes so much time. If you ever find yourself in situations where you have had to quickly move a bunch...

Summary

I’ll say it once more—these are just a couple of the hundreds of Power-Ups that are available. There is no perfect answer to “What are the best Power-Ups for every Trello user?” because everyone uses Trello so differently! But these Power-Ups work well for just about any use case because most involve getting stakeholder approval, adding custom data, and making changes to many cards at once.

Explore the Power-Up directory to learn about Power-Ups for your use case. For instance, if you’re managing contacts in your Trello boards, you’ll want to use Crmble to add contact fields and pipeline reporting to your board automatically. If you want to build your own app on top of Trello, such as a hiring portal or a blog, you can use a Power-Up such as Hipporello to create apps for your users that let you operate in your Trello boards. Even email has Power-Ups in Trello, such as SendBoard and Cardbox that let you manage your inbox from Trello...