Would you like to access any Google Drive file or folder directly from your Trello cards, and better yet, be able to edit them without ever having to leave your Trello account? Well, in this video I'm going to show you how to use Trello with Google Drive.
Adding the Drive Power Up
And to get started, we need to access the Google Drive Power Up right here from within Trello.
So I'm going to click on that power-up icon.
I'm going to select Add Power-ups.
And the easiest thing to do is come up here to the search bar and just type in Drive.
It's going to be one of the top five results.
Here it is, Google Drive.
We are going to select Add.
And now if I close this dialogue and come back to my Trello board here, you can see I've got that Google Drive power-up here in the top right-hand corner.
Now clicking it is actually not going to do a whole lot.
Yes, I could start a new slides presentation, but the real value is here when we open up a card.
So let me go ahead and open up this Trello card.
And in the past, I would attach maybe a link to a Drive file, or I might upload something from my computer.
But with the Google Drive Power Up installed here under Power-ups, we have this Google Drive button.
Create and Attach a New Drive File
Now by selecting this Google Drive button, we are given three options. We can create and attach Google Drive files. That's right, a doc, a sheet, and many other things we can create right here from within Trello, or we can attach an existing file or folder from our Drive account.
So let's walk through each one by one.
Let's start with Create and Attach. Here you can see we can either create a document, a drawing, a slide, a sheet, or a new folder, all here from within our Trello account.
I'm going to go ahead and select Create Google Document. What it's going to do is create this document and the link and also give it the name of the card that I'm on.
So here under attachments, you can see I've got something called Jane Ferguson. That's because this Trello card is called Jane Ferguson. I don't need to keep it that way. I can rename it. If I come over here to the right and select these three dots, I can say Edit. Maybe I'm going to call this Jane Ferguson Meeting Notes. This is where I'm going to keep my notes of the phone calls I have or the communication that I have with Jane.
But now if I click on this link, it's going to take me directly to this Google document where I can start to add my notes, edit existing notes, or whatever I want to do with this file. It is saved, stored, and secured within my Google Drive account, but I can access that information here.
Let me just put something here, like maybe this meeting notes template, just so we've got some boilerplate information here that I can show you in just a moment.
Because one of the best things of using this Google Drive Power Up is that not only can I access it immediately, if I click that link and see other relevant information, like when it was last updated, I can say Open Preview.
Now you may think, "Oh, this is just a preview of what's inside that particular document." No, I can edit my notes. So we had a call on Monday, and it went very well. This is actually an editable document, so even if I close it here, if I go to the original document file within Google Drive, you can see that everything I changed, everything I added is live.
I never had to actually leave my Trello account. Let me show you one more time. If I just hover over it, I'll be given this little popup window. I'm going to say Open Preview, which was I think meant to be a preview, but this is all editable.
Let's do one more.
Attaching an Existing Drive File
I'm going to come over here to Google Drive, and this time we're just going to attach a file. I'm not going to start with a new file. I’m going to select Attach a File, and maybe I'm going to come over here, click on my sample files, and I've got a simple sheet.
So once again, it's going to add it as a link. It's called Inventory C. I may be happy with that, but you can come over here and select Edit. I'm going to say these are Inventory Sales Numbers. Maybe that's what this is, so I'm going to give that a more relevant title.
It's not going to change the title of the file within Google Drive; this is just for your reference here within Trello. But once again, if I hover over and say Open Preview, this time it is a spreadsheet. I'm going to come over here and say, you know what? That is not the price anymore; it is now $1.95.
And we also sold a lot more pencils. We sold 203 pencils this week. So I've updated this spreadsheet, I’ve got the relevant numbers, and I'm still here within Trello.
Attaching a Drive Folder
Now the last thing we want to look at here is the third option: Attach a Folder. You might think that the name of the folder is just going to appear like we see here with the links, but it actually gets much better than that.
So I'm going to select this option, and I've got a folder here called Color Folders that I want to include with this Trello card. I’m going to select it. Here, you can see it has brought over the folder name, Color Folders, along with the five folders within it.
Now, I am just one click away from any of these folders. For example, if I want to access my Sales folder, I can click on it, and immediately I'm brought to the details of that sales folder. Maybe I want to jump into my Marketing folder. Perfect! I don’t happen to have anything in this sample Marketing folder, but I'm one click away from accessing the contents of this folder.
Removing Files or Folders
Now, if you want to remove any of these items here, you can see in the top right-hand corner that if I want to remove this attached folder, I can select that option. Now we are back to just the files that we attached earlier. The same thing applies here; if we come over to the three dots, we can select Delete if we want to remove any of these items as well.
As always, I would love to hear from you! Do you have any further questions about how to use Google Drive with Trello? If so, 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.
