How to add a checklist to a Trello card

Estimated read time 4 min read


Jack Wallen shows you how easy it is to add checklists to Trello cards to future extend the information you can offer to your team members.

Ryazan, Russia - April 29, 2018: Homepage of Trello website on the display of PC, url - Trello.com.
Image: sharafmaksumov/Adobe Stock

Trello has slowly but surely become my go-to project management platform. With Trello, I can not only manage my various projects with different tools such as Kanban, Gantt, multiple workspaces, templates, swimlanes and more, but I can also add a good deal of important data to individual cards.

The ability to add considerable details to cards means you can supply your team with more than enough information to get the task at hand complete. And this is a case where more is most certainly better. When you don’t offer the necessary details for a task, your team could wind up confused or simply be without the information they need to complete any given task.

To that end, I am constantly searching for more ways to add detail to my cards. One feature I’ve recently started using is checklists, which make it very handy for team members to quickly check off sub-tasks that have been completed, tools that have been acquired or even individual team members to sign off when they understand what’s at stake with the task. There’s really no limit to what you can use checklists for in your cards.

One very handy aspect of the Trello checklist feature is that, once you’ve created a checklist, the items can be imported into other checklists on other cards. This reusability makes the feature even more efficient to use because you can create multiple checklists and then quickly import the items.

Let’s dig into this and see just how this feature works.

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What you’ll need

The only thing you’ll need to work with Trello Kanban card checklists is a Trello account and a board to use. This feature is available to all plan types, so even if you’re using the Free plan you can use checklists.

With that said, let’s get to work.

How to add a Trello checklist to a card

Log into your Trello account, go to a workspace and open the board you want to use. Once you’re on the board in question, open a card for which you want to add a checklist.

Within the card, you should see the Checklist entry on the right side of the card (Figure A).

Figure A

We’re about to add a new checklist to an existing Trello card.

Click Checklist and, when prompted, give it a name (Figure B).

Figure B

Creating our first checklist in Trello.

After creating the checklist, you’ll see it appear near the bottom of the card (Figure C), where you can start adding items.

Figure C

Our checklist is ready for items.

In the Add An Item field, type your first item for the checklist and hit Enter on your keyboard. This will save the item and allow you to type another. Keep adding items in this manner until you’ve finished the checklist.

After adding all of your items to the checklist, you can close the card. Using a checklist is very straightforward. One nice feature I’ve found with this is that when you check off an item from a list, it doesn’t vanish and you also see a progress bar, so you know when all items are taken care of (Figure D).

Figure D

Huzzah! We’ve taken care of all our items on the checklist.

How to reuse a Trello checklist

Head over to another card and create a new checklist. After giving the list a name, click the Copy Items From drop-down and select the checklist you created earlier (Figure E).

Figure E

Adding items from a previous checklist to a new one.

This will populate your new checklist with items you previously added, so you don’t have to completely re-create the checklist for every card. Click Add and your checklist will be created for the card.

And that’s all there is to adding checklists to Trello cards. This handy feature will not only make it possible for you to get even more granular with your project management tasks but also makes it more efficient to do so.

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