Benefits of using a dashboard
- [Instructor] Trello doesn't make it easy for us to get a high-level picture of everything that is going on within our Trello accounts. But what if you could create a customized dashboard, like the one you see here, where you can show the key information that you want across all of your boards.
And best of all, you can dive down into it and get access directly to each and every individual card. Well, it only took me about 10 minutes to create this dashboard, and I think you can do so as well.
So let me show you how. (high-pitched hiss) This video is sponsored by Crumble. If you want to use your Trello board as a CRM system, don't, unless you use Crumble.
Crumble allows you to manage your entire sales pipeline by turning your Trello board into a powerful yet easy-to-use CRM. You can store all of your contact details and history in Trello cards and get more advanced reporting and details on how things are performing with your sales and all of your clients.
Not sure if Crumble CRM is right for you? You can get started with a 21-day free trial at crumble.com, or click the link in the description down below. Creating a helpful dashboard within Trello, which gives you the information that you're looking for, is a lot easier than you think.
And in fact, anyone can create a dashboard just like the one you see here without spending any additional money. Yes, we are using a Trello Power-Up, but it is completely free. In fact, the Power-Up is designed by Trello themselves.
So just before I show you how to create this dashboard, let's show you the example and how powerful creating something like this can be. Here you can see at the top, I have four different lists:
Projects, Assigned to Me, Team Tasks and Overdue. And what is so important here is that all of the information that is being displayed is coming from across multiple boards, not just a single board, not just one or two.
No matter how large your Trello workspace is, you can bring in information from everywhere.
So starting with my projects, you can see I have some key numbers showing me all of the tasks which are due on these three boards No longer do I need to be jumping back and forth between my browser tabs or coming up here and finding the board I want to look at.
I can see at a glance what is due right now. And if I click on one of these cards, I can dive down deeper into what those tasks actually are.
And, yes, I can click on these and go directly to that card. In my second list, I want to get a high-level view of all of the tasks that are assigned to me across all of my Trello boards.
And right now it's about 14. But better than just having that number, once again, I can click on this card and go directly to any of those tasks. It'll even show me the due date here within the card itself. Next, I have a list called Team Tasks which can be fantastic if you are either managing other members of your team or just want to see what do they have on their plate right now.
Here I can see that both Jessica and Tiffany have three team tasks assigned, while Sam has two. And just like the other cards that I've shown you,
you can dive deep into what those are. Last but not least, I've created a list called Overdue.
I want to know exactly how many cards are currently overdue across all of our boards.
And so this can be a great starting place that I begin in my morning or maybe at the end of the day, gives me a great high-level view of everything that's going on, and I can dive in deeper whenever I want to.
Adding the Dashcards power-up
So in order to build your own dashboard, like what you see here, we are going to make use of a free Power-Up called Dashcards.
If you come up here to the Power-Up icon and then select Add Power-Ups here, within the Power-Up search bar, I'm just going to type in the word dash, and you'll see a number of other tools which also provide dashboard capability, but we want this one here called Dashcards.
Now, once you've installed this Power-Up, it's actually going to be listed as Track in your browser.
I think they've chosen that just so it's a smaller word than Dashcards. But here with the dashboards Power-Up installed, we can select this option and start to add any type of Dashcard that we like. Now, when you first select the Dashcards Power-Up, you'll be presented with this menu.
And it will give us a number of templates, a number of defaults, which we can get started with right away.
Now we can either select the Track option which will add it directly to our board, or we can select Customize, which means we can edit those particular settings.
Of course, in the lower right-hand corner, you can start with a fresh Dashcard without any filters assigned. But for this first example let's start with one of the defaults.
So perhaps I'm going to select this one, Assigned to me on all Workspace boards. All I need to do is select Track, and it will input it in the top left of my board. If I close this dialog, here you can see this 14 Assigned to me on all Workspace boards.
And just like any other Trello card, I can move it wherever I want to. I can put it in any list,
and I can sort it in any way that I like. But let's keep it up here just for our example.
Now, if I go and click on this card, here with inside the Trello card, you can see under the description area, here is where we have all of the Dashcard information.
So regardless of how many cards matches this criteria, it will show a maximum of 10 right here.
Editing your Dashcards
And yes, we can click on them and go directly to that card. But at the end of that list,
if we want to see everything, here we can see we have 14, or if we want to edit this Dashcard, we can select the Explore and edit button. This will bring up the full view of the Dashcard where we can see everything that is contained, and we can work within this mode as well.
So for example, if I want to sort it by the create date, I can do so very easily here. If I want to sort it by the due date, I can do so as well. So this can be a very powerful way to sort and filter and view everything that is related to this criteria.
But let's go in and edit this particular Dashcard, because you are going to have some specific needs and some specific numbers that you want to keep track of. Here if I select on Edit filters, it will show me what is currently applied:
Assigned, Includes any of, and here is my username. But let's go one step further and add some more filters because I already have a Dashcard that is showing me all of the things that I'm assigned to across my Workspace boards.
So if I select More filters, here you can see I have a full list of all the criteria I can use, including any of my Trello custom fields. Yes, if you've created custom fields you can create a Dashcard based on that criteria as well. But let's keep things fairly simple in this example.
Maybe I want to see all of the cards that I'm assigned but also have a specific label. So I'm going to select Labels in this case.
I'm going to come down to this dropdown, and I'm going to say Includes any of and then it's going to give me an additional dropdown.
Now, this dropdown may be quite large depending on how many different Trello boards you have. Because remember, it's going to bring in every single label across all of your boards. Maybe I only want to see the things that are assigned to me and have the label New project.
So I'm going to select that checkbox there. I could of course select as many additional labels if I want to, but in this example, I'm just going to select this single one. When I'm happy with that, I can hit Save.
And you'll notice that down below, but also the number up above will change dynamically. So now this Dashcard is ready to go. If I come back to my Trello board, here Assigned to me on all Workspace boards. But wait, that title isn't exactly accurate anymore, is it?
No, so in order to change the title you'll just go into the title of the card itself, just like you would with any other regular Trello board, and change it to your needs. I'm going to say Assign to me, and then maybe in parentheses I'll say New project, just so I know that that is what it's showing to me.
But wait, maybe I want to change the look of this card as well.
Well, if we click on this and, again, come down to Explore and edit, here in the top right-hand corner, we can change the tile background. Now I can do one of two things. I can either choose from one of the standard colors that they have here, or I can search for a stock free photo.
So in this case, it's a new project. What if I type in the word new? What does that come up with here? Hmm, maybe something like this, the open road. I'm going to choose that. All I need to do is now close that Dashcard.
And when I'm returned to my Trello board, I have the new background image.
So if you want things to be distinct, maybe from my team members here, which I've chosen to use just a solid color, versus a more dynamic or maybe a more visually pleasing background color, you can do so here as well.
So if you want a better way to view all of your Trello information across all of your boards or just some specific boards, be sure to build your very own dashboard by using Dashcards.
And if you have any questions on how to build or maintain such a dashboard, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video.
And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
