Viewing Cards Your Way

Now that you know everything you can add to a card, you might be bursting with ideas of what to put in your Trello boards. Since organizing a lot of information is easy in Trello, you’ll find yourself adding many cards to a board. While seeing everything laid out in a board style is helpful, there are multiple ways to view your cards that unlock additional insights.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to change the data in your board so that you can view the cards that are most relevant to you. You’ll learn how to do the following:

• Set filters to show only the most relevant cards
• Create and view charts that visualize information about cards
• Plot your cards by date on a calendar and timeline
• Make your board look like a spreadsheet
• View your cards by location on a map

Filters

Filters can be used with every Trello view except Dashboards. They do exactly what they sound like – they filter all of the cards on the board(s) to only show a subset of cards based on criteria that you set.

Follow along and set up a filter with the cards you’ve already created. To access filters, click the gray Filter button at the top right of your board, just next to the Automation button:

Figure 4.1 – The Filter menu in a board

Clicking the Filter button reveals a menu of options showing you the filtering capabilities.

Dimensions to filter by

Filters are powerful for querying multiple dimensions of a card. You can combine them to get a clear picture of exactly what you’re looking for, such as your tasks for the week that are currently blocked, or what client tasks must be completed today.

Keywords

You can search for a word or phrase to only show cards that have that text in some aspect of the cards...

Accessing alternative board views

While filters help control which cards appear on your board, Board views give you alternative ways to display the cards that are shown. To access the other views in your Trello board, click the arrow next to the Board button on the top toolbar of your Trello board, just to the right of the board’s name:

Figure 4.6 – Board views picker

In the dropdown that appears, check the box next to the views you’d like to see. For each one that is checked, a button will be added to your board toolbar to help you navigate to that view. If you don’t have a Trello Premium account, you’ll be prompted to start a trial of Trello Premium to access these views.

Go ahead and check all of the boxes – we’ll be exploring each of these views in this chapter. To go to a view, click the button that specifies the view’s name, such as Calendar.

The rest of this chapter will look at each...

Dashboard

The Dashboard view is a lightweight solution for visualizing statistics about your cards. Users get a quick overview of their boards and cards and see how they compare across various attributes:

Figure 4.7 – Charts (tiles) on a Dashboard view

If you need robust reporting features, you’ll likely need to add a third-party Power-Up to get more customized charts and insights. We’ll talk more about those in Chapter 14, but if you’re looking for some quick insights about your workflows, the Dashboard view can highlight workload balance, the feasibility of timelines, or blocks in your workflow stages.

Adding a new tile

To customize your dashboard, you can add new charts or remove existing ones. To add a new chart, click the + button in the gray box at the bottom of the existing charts (called tiles):

Figure 4.8 – Tile with an empty box for adding a new tile

A modal will appear, asking...

Calendar

While due dates are valuable for reminders, notifications, and filtering your boards, they’re also useful for visualizing your cards in a calendar format. This is most helpful for anyone working with dates to check bandwidth and quickly redistribute or change deadlines as needed.

Although used by a variety of teams, the ones that will find this most valuable are those with content calendars, shift schedules, or event planners:

Figure 4.10 – Cards organized in the Calendar view

Cards and checklist items appear over the day(s) from their dates, including the start date if one is provided. This helps you analyze how long projects might take and create your own Gantt charts.

From this view, you can see the card names, labels, and members. To view other details about the card, simply click on it from the calendar – the back of the card will appear, just like from the Board view.

Changing the cadence

If you’d...

Timeline

The Timeline view is similar to the Calendar view as it also plots your cards by date, but it allows you to add another attribute to help you get a clearer view of your cards.

This view is most helpful for managers or anyone coordinating a project that needs to be aware of time frames and priority, status, capacity planning, or anything else represented by lists or labels:

Figure 4.15 – Cards grouped by date and list

Just like the Calendar view, you can select the period and cadence that appears by using the calendar picker or select the Week button to get more cadence options, such as Day, Week, Month, Quarter, and Year.

From this view, the front of the card shows its name and members. To view more information, click the card to open it and view all the fields.

Adding another dimension

The beauty of the Timeline view comes from its last configuration, which is the vertical axis. By default, this view shows cards by list, allowing...

Table

If you love Trello but miss your spreadsheets, you might just love the Table view. Instead of plotting your cards on a Kanban board, this view shows the fields of your cards as rows of a table:

Figure 4.16 – Cards organized in rows

This view is particularly helpful for showing a group of tasks together that might be across multiple lists. For instance, if you want to share a screenshot of what your team is working on this week, you can gather it easily here. If you need to view more information about a card, click the card’s name to view the back of the card. The Table view is also useful if you need to quickly update many cards.

Editing cards

While you can’t add more columns to this view, you can see the most important properties, such as name, list, members, and due date. You can quickly edit these properties by clicking their sections of the row. This is much easier than opening a card and setting those values, then...

Maps

This is perhaps the most unique view I’ve ever experienced in a project management tool. While other tools will typically offer calendar or table formats of their data, I’ve yet to see another one that provides a native feature that allows you to view your cards plotted on a map!

While the Map view is not useful for every board, whenever you’re dealing with location data in your cards, this is a game-changer. It’s helpful for anyone planning routes, such as a local repair company sorting out jobs for a day or a flower shop making deliveries. For personal use, it’s perfect for planning trips and grouping nearby activities on the same day:

Figure 4.19 – Cards plotted over a map

The Map view plots your cards by their location, which is set on the card. A blue pin represents each card, and if they’re close to each other, you can see groups of cards once you’ve zoomed out far enough. Click the...

Workspace views

So far, all the views we’ve discussed relate to cards on a specific board. If you’d like to create views that incorporate cards from multiple boards, you’ll want to use Workspace views.

Workspace calendar views

We talked about viewing cards in a calendar from a single board, but what if you want one calendar that shows cards from all of your boards? This is possible with the Workspace Calendar view.

You can access this view from the left sidebar on any board. If this panel is not already showing, click the > arrow just before the board name or press [ on your keyboard. Click the Calendar option near the top of the menu in the Workspace views section:

Figure 4.22 – The left-hand side panel of a Trello board showing workspace settings and views

This will open a Calendar view that looks just like the view we saw on our board, but this time, we will also see cards from recent boards in the workspace....

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the different ways you can view your cards in Trello. Although Trello is perhaps best known for its Kanban-style Board view, having these extra views gives you more information about your cards and helps you quickly figure out actions to take.

You can filter cards to zoom into the information you need at any moment, and you can visualize your cards in the ways that are most important for you and your team. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how to bring it all together with specific use cases and templates!