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Trello Review: Learn How to Use Trello to Manage Your Business’ Projects

To get you and your business started with Trello, here’s a basic Trello review and information on how to use Trello’s free application. Thousands of businesses use Trello, and if you’re here, your business may be using it too. Companies, Kickstarter, Braintree, Buffer, Chartio, Disquis, GoSquared, and many others use Trello as part of their workflow.

The platform helps companies boost team productivity and administer projects. Its simple design helps teams collaborate and organize businesses’ daily activities. Compared to other project management platforms, it’s visual design allows quick, intuitive set-up. Here we’ll help you get started, and you’ll see your team collaborating with Trello in no time.

Trello’s Free and Paid Versions for Your Own Trello Review

Atlassian, Trello’s developer, offers powerful free version and a paid business class and enterprise options. It even offers an inexpensive Trello Gold version with some of Trello’s more advanced features, for businesses and individuals on a budget. By using the free option, you’ll soon know whether your business needs one of the paid options. Many businesses do fine without the paid subscriptions, and the free version’s great for learning how to use Trello.

The Trello Home View

Once you start setting up projects (Boards), tasks lists (Lists), and tasks (Cards) on the Trello platform, you’ll see that it becomes an information-filled dashboard to help you monitor, delegate, and follow-through on project activities.

The home view, for example, shows

  1. “Up Next” cards with due dates of upcoming or recently overdue projects
  2. Recently viewed cards, or tasks (middle)
  3. The main menu (left site)
  4. Starred cards (right)
  5. Links (lower right)
  6. Team highlights (on the “Up Next” cards)
  7. Information (the “i” icon in the upper right hand corner)
  8. Notifications (the little bell in the upper right hand corner) and active conversations

The Home view in Trello basically tells you what your team members have acted upon and what items require action. It’s an excellent central dashboard from which to begin your workday.

Trello Boards

The Trello Board, together with Trello Cards, has come to distinguish the platform from others. It’s so popular that most project platforms have added their own version of the boards and cards to their software features. The board itself represents a project or place where collaborators can share information and monitor progress.

A board-sized project might include something like one of the following:

  1. Getting your business set up on YouTube
  2. Start using the Facebook Pixel to retarget visitors to your business website
  3. Search engine optimize your eCommerce website

On the board, you and your collaborators will organize your tasks. You can see all of your projects by using the Boards view in Trello, like this:

Note that its strongly visual design sorts boards in a single column of rows, organized by team (for example, in the above example, “Personal Boards,” and “ePromos,” making it easy to keep track of what each team should be working on.

Each board (rectangular, titled images in this view), remember, represents an individual project. The individual boards appear with both titles and images for quick, easy identification and personalization.

Trello Cards Function as Configurable Tasks

Both the Home and Board views of Trello help collaborators get a big view of the active projects, viewable as different boards. The card functions as the Trello Board’s fundamental unit. Within the board, each card represents a task or idea that must be done to complete the project (board).

For example, the board, entitled, “Search engine optimize your eCommerce website,” might have the following cards, or tasks, that need to be completed to complete the project:

  • Website SEO Checkup
  • Website Non-Text Media SEO Audit
  • Website Content SEO Audit
  • Finished Tasks

See how the cards look below.

You can organize cards by category, like the first three above, or by workflow, like the last column, where individual collaborators drag and drop each card once they’ve finished.

Project administrators and designated collaborators can create more elaborate workflows where collaborators drag and drop cards across lists. For example, one can create a list of cards like this:

  1. Waiting for action
  2. Cards in progress
  3. Finished cards

Each Trello card, as a task, has options to allow viewers to create:

  1. Lists to help keep cards organized and divide projects into manageable tasks
  2. Progress on listed activities
  3. Space for a text description of the project and any other details
  4. Configurable member access
  5. Labels
  6. Checkable checklists
  7. A due date
  8. File attachments
  9. Power-ups (integration with other apps, like Google Drive and MailChimp)
  10. Utility functions (move, copy, archive)
  11. Ability to watch the card (monitor it)
  12. Sharing
  13. A comment string
  14. An activity list

Alternatively, one can use lists as simple physical spaces to keep ideas and information. Users can create unlimited lists and arrange them in any way that works for collaborators.

You’ll find that the boards, lists, and cards work flexibly in any sort of organizational scheme that includes hierarchical organization. Users can name their lists anything to fit any needs.

Any sort of workflow that you can visually organize, like Kanban, sales pipelines, marketing calendars, or project management schemes works in Trello.

The Trello Menu

The Trello board and Home and Boards views all have a menu on the left-hand side. It’s pretty self explanatory and helps navigate through the different levels of Trello. It’s also useful to manage members, control settings, filter cards, and enable Power-Ups. The menu also has an activity feed to keep you informed of what’s been happening since your last login.

Trello Teams and Collaboration

Once you get a handle on Trello’s organization of Boards containing Lists that contain Cards that have all sorts of configuration options, you’ll want to start putting together teams and collaborating. It’s really as easy as creating a group in Facebook or Whatsapp.

To create a team, just go to the main Menu and choose “Create a Team.”

Once you click on it, you’ll see a pop up box, where you just add a title for the team, and create your Team.

Once created, Trello will send you to a Team page, where you can add more information and members to the team. It’s very intuitive and menu driven. You can see that tabs allow you to delegate boards, add members, and configure options for the team.

It’s easy to add members or teams to cards in Trello. Simply use the card menu option, on the right hand side of the card, entitled “Members,” like this:

If you’re visually oriented, you’ll love Trello. Its drag and drop organization, along with its menu-driven simplicity take users through the steps. Even newbies catch on quickly, and anyone who needs to learn how to do something can go to Trello’s detailed, easy-to-understand Trello Guide.

We hope that our Trello Review helps you learn how to use Trello and gets you started so that you and your business colleagues can enjoy it’s fun-to-use platform. Remember that despite its apparent simplicity and ease of use, it’s configurable and has plenty of features to satisfy big corporate project management. So, get started with the free version and join the corporate ranks in managing your business projects.

 

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