How do you archive Trello cards and lists? And perhaps more importantly, where do you go to find those archive cards and return them to your board? In this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know. Now there's a few different ways in which we can archive our cards.
Archive Cards
Number one, you can open up your card and scroll near the bottom and you can see that there is an archive button here, which we can select. By selecting this button, we can scroll back to the top and we have this identifier telling us that this card is archived. If we want to return it to our board, this is synonymous with unarchiving a card. I can select this option. You can see that that label is now removed and this card remains on this board.
Fast Way
Now there's a faster way in which we can do this. From the front of our card, we can select this stylus, and here you can see there's an archive button here as well. But the fastest way to archive your Trello cards is to use a shortcut key. If you hover your mouse over a particular card and select the letter C key on your keyboard, that will instantly archive that card.
Undo
Now you'll notice down below we get a warning where we can actually undo that action if we want to. This can be very helpful if you accidentally hit the C key on your keyboard over a card when you didn't mean to archive it, and you can select Undo.
Now, while it is common to archive cards one at a time, there may be some cases where you will want to archive an entire list. A good example of this would be a completed list, a finished, a done, a published, any list that may be accumulating a large number of cards that you don't really need to see anymore.
Well, at the top of any list, we can select these three dots, this more menu, and come down to the bottom. Here, we can choose to archive all the cards in this list, but notice that we also have an additional option with a very specific distinction.
The last option here is to archive this list, meaning archiving not only all of the cards, but the list itself. If I go ahead and choose this option, it will remove that entire list from this board.
What is Archiving
Now, at this point, you may be asking yourself what exactly is archiving and why should I consider doing so? Now the good news is, is that by archiving any of your cards or lists, it is not the same as deleting, nor does archiving put it in a temporary state where it will be deleted in 30 days.
The most common use case for archiving cards is when you no longer need something viewable or no longer need something here within your Trello space.
Searchable Cards
Every card that is archived will remain searchable, so you can go back and find it and reference it at any time. If I come up here to the search bar, I'm going to type in the words meeting minutes 'cause I'm looking for a particular card with that title.
Here you can see at the top, I have found the card I'm looking for. It's from this board and it's telling me that it has been archived. By clicking on this result, it will open up that archive card, which is completely preserved with the way that I had it before.
So I can go through and reference and look at this information, and if I want to return it to my board, I can come down here and select send to board. But what if you don't know the search term? What if you want to see all of the cards which you've archived within a particular board?
Archived Items
Well, in that case, we can come up to the board more option and the third option down within the menu is archived items. By selecting this, you will see a complete list of all of the cards which you have archived.
You can scroll down and find the one that you desire, you can immediately send it back to the board if you want here, or you can choose to permanently delete by selecting the delete link. Now, what might be more helpful is to use the search feature here at the top.
This search field is only going to search archived items for this particular board, which differs from the global search up here, which will search all cards, lists and boards within your Trello account. But while we're here within the archive area, you'll also notice that there is a switch to lists button.
By selecting this, it will show us all of the lists in which we have archived and we are only one click away from sending them back to the board.
Remember this waiting for list, which we archived a few moments ago? I can come over here and select send to board, and not only is the name of the list restored, but all of the cards that were within that list when it was archived will be returned as well.
So now that you know everything about archiving cards and lists within Trello, what other Trello questions do you have? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
