The number one power-up that I recommend all of my clients enable when they start out with Trello is the Custom Fields power-up. That's because our businesses, our organizations, our teams all require some type of custom field.
I'm sure that there is a text box, a number box, or a drop-down menu that is specific to your team's needs—or even if it's a personal project—specific to your personal needs that you would like to add to your Trello cards. Well, in today's video, I want to share with you three Custom Fields features that you may not be aware of.
So let's get things kicked off with actually creating our custom fields. Now you can edit your custom fields in one of two ways.
Edit Custom Fields
You can go into the power-ups menu—you'll find that by clicking on the menu and then selecting Power-Ups. You can either search for Custom Fields to enable it if you haven't enabled it yet, or in this case, because I do have it enabled, I can just go find it here.
By selecting that option, I can hit the gear icon, hit Edit Power-Up Settings, and now I can go into this. I can relabel the text field here and name this as a checkbox field—I can relabel that here as well.
But there's another way you can do that. You can go into any of your cards, find the Custom Fields button, and once again, when you click on those items—this may be the faster or the quicker way—you can just go into a card, and you can edit those things.
Dropdown Menu
So, tip number one has to do with the drop-down menu. In this case, I have a priority drop-down, which is very handy.
Here, I've got a high-priority item; maybe I want to change it to medium or to low. The great thing with Custom Fields is that you have the choice of actually showing these fields on the front of the card.
So let's go back to the high-level view, and there you can see I have a priority label. I have my priority Custom Field visible on the front of the card.
But what if I want to make this stand out even a little bit more? Well, the nice thing is that within the last year, Trello introduced colored drop-down labels.
Here I have my medium and high for my priority drop-down, but let's give it some more punch, shall we? Let's make medium maybe yellow—let's use the classic traffic light system and red for high.
So now, not only will I see that color here within the card, right? That makes it nice and easy.
If I change that to medium, I get that yellow label. But even on the front of the card, now I can see there's my medium level.
Let's change this one down here—let's change this to a high-priority level. So now I've got even further Custom Field capability here.
Not only do I get to make those choices, but they stand out that much more for myself and my team. So make sure to color code your drop-down menus, if applicable, depending on how you are using that drop-down menu.
Reorder
Now the second tip I want to share with you is something that we often overlook. Once we've started dealing with our Custom Fields for a while, we may determine that we want to reorder them.
Sometimes we forget that we can do that within Trello. No, you can't just drag them here within the card, but if we go back to that Custom Fields option, the Custom Fields button, you can simply drag and drop and reorder your Custom Fields.
So in this case, maybe I want priority number one—maybe that's the most important thing. So I'm going to drag that to the top of my list there.
Then I want to have name, and then yes, my satisfied checkbox and the start date. So now it's a bit of a cleaner look.
You can see, depending on what combination of Custom Fields you have, you may want to reorder them in a particular manner. So don't forget that you can reorder your Custom Fields.
Sort by
The third and last tip I want to leave with you when it comes to Custom Fields within Trello is don't forget that you can sort by certain Custom Fields and also filter by those Custom Fields as well. So at the very top of your list, you will find these three little dots that give us some additional functionality.
Here we have the Sort by option. Now the first three are going to be found on all of our lists—date created, date created oldest or newest, and card name alphabetically.
But look at this—I actually have a Custom Field because, of course, we can sort by start date. So I'm gonna select this option—Sort by Start Date—and now it's going to... I think I already sorted this just a moment ago, so nothing has actually changed in this particular case.
Let me drop this one down and maybe this one down to the bottom. Let's do that one more time—I'm going to come up here, I'm going to say Sort by Start Date, and there it has reordered.
You'll notice I don't have the start date on the front of the card—remember, you can always do that as well. Let's go to our Start Date option, and I'm gonna tick this option—Show Field on Front of Card.
You can do that with any one of your Custom Fields. So now, with that selected, I see that start date on the front of my cards.
Filter by
Lastly, don't forget that you can use the Filter Cards option as well. For example, you may have noticed that one of my Custom Fields had to do with a name, and one of those names was Kelly.
Well, I can find that card immediately just by typing in Kelly here. No, it's not the name of the card—it's not the description—you can't see it on the front of the card, but Kelly is the name here within the Custom Fields.
So yes, you can even filter by that option as well. I hope you found this useful, and I would love to hear from you next—how do you make use of Custom Fields?
I'd love to hear your tips and tricks, and I'm sure there are others who would like to take advantage of the way that you are using Custom Fields within Trello as well. Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you give this video a thumbs up, that you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel, and don't forget to leave me a comment down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult—in fact, it's very simple.
