One of the most common questions I receive is, "Scott, what are the very best power-ups that I should be using with Trello?"
Well, one of the first questions that I ask in response is, "What exactly are you trying to do?"
And for many of you, you want to have some advanced reporting. For many of you, you want to be able to sync cards between different boards. And for many of you, you want to create sub-tasks or dependencies.
Well, often in the past, I've had to recommend several different power-ups to use, but today, I'm sharing with you one of the power-ups that I am recommending on almost a daily basis, and that is Placker, or more specifically, Projects by Placker.
In fact, Placker, I think, is perhaps the best all-in-one power-up.
So, let's dive in, and let me show you the features of Placker.
So, in today's example, I've got three different boards, creatively named TEST Board 1, TEST Board 2, and TEST Board 3.
And as you may notice, I have the exact same list across all three of these boards. You can envision these as maybe different teams or different departments or maybe just different people, right? They're all working on their own separate To-Do list.
But one of the things that we are often asked for, or wanting to do within Trello, is to be able to see things at a higher level. You know, you manage more than just one board. I'm almost assured of that.
How can you see multiple boards at a higher level?
Walkthrough
Well, by installing the Placker power-up, you can do just that. You can see here in the top right-hand corner, I've got three links to go directly to Placker Board, Placker Gantt, or the Placker Track view.
Let me just open up this Placker tab here, and I want to show you what things look like. Now, at first glance, you may say that this looks pretty much identical to TEST Board 1. It's the same cards, we have the labels, you can even see my face, which cards I'm assigned to here, but just wait for it because it gets so much better than this.
Yes, you could start managing your projects here within Placker. If I click on any one of these cards and I go over here to this preview pane on the right, I can change dates, I can add a checklist, I can do almost everything that I would regularly do within the Trello interface. But here's where things get really, really neat.
In the top left-hand corner, you see something that says Select Boards. Right now, I'm just viewing TEST Board 1, but what if I'd like to see how all of these boards are performing in a more concise view? Well, I'm gonna select this option, and I'm going to add TEST Board 2 and TEST Board 3. I'm gonna say Load Selected Boards, and now, what you will see is that I've got all three boards right here on the same page, right? So, I don't have to switch between tabs. I've got all three of my boards viewed in front of me.
But I think it gets better even yet, because you will notice that there is a combined boards setting. Remember, each of these boards has the exact same lists, To-Do, In Progress, and Complete. I'm gonna select Combine Boards, and look at this. Now, I've got everything in a concise, user-friendly single board. I've got all three of these boards condensed into one.
So, I can manage and move my cards around, I can change things here across three boards, but just in a single view. I love this, and many of my clients love it as well. That's why more and more of them are starting to use Placker.
Now, it gets better. On the right-hand side, you can see we can actually view this information in a few different layouts. So if I go over here and I just want to, you know, list it by member, I can select this option here, and I can quickly see just all of the things that are assigned to me right here, and the left-hand list is just all the things that are unassigned.
I can go down to, well, let's list it by label. Let's just filter everything else out by label. Of course, you can search and filter and do something similar within Trello, but not in this manner, right? Not by separate lists, not in the way that things are laid out here within Placker.
So, this feature alone, this ability to combine boards—let's go back to that default view for just a moment—I think is worth the subscription price to Placker alone, and I have more and more of my clients that are using it just for that reason.
Gantt View
But, let's keep moving on. Here, let's go to the Gantt view. And I know a lot of you prefer, or at least enjoy, having a Gantt view of your projects.
Now, this is just a sample project, so it may not make sense, all of the different tasks that I have laid out here, but you can see each one of these icons here or durations represent a task within Trello.
The great thing is, whatever you do here, it syncs automatically back to your original Trello board. Now, just for simplicity's sake, I'm actually going to remove two of these boards, just so I can go back and make sure that I'm interacting with the right tasks over here. So, I'm gonna remove those other two boards. We've just got TEST Board 1 here working, and let's look at Task 4.
Here, it's about to start, it's about to be finished around February 14th. Let's say there's a delay or something like that. So, Task 4, let's go back and make sure that it's synced up here. Task 4, February 14th, there you see it. But let's say I prefer this view, and I say, I really need to push that out. There's other things going on. I'm just gonna drag this out about a week from now. It's gonna be due right over here along the 22nd.
If I go back, Task 4, look at that. It's changed it automatically. February 22nd. An instant sync between the Gantt chart and my view here. Let's go one step further and say, you know, it's actually gonna take longer. It's gonna take more than a day. Let's set a duration, because that's what a Gantt chart is all about, right? Start time and end time.
Now, you're probably saying, well, you haven't changed the end time, Scott, so isn't it gonna just look the same within Trello? Well, you're right, it's gonna still show February 22nd as the due date here, but if I click on the card, you're gonna see something special under the covers, and that is the start date is February 15th, and we still have our due date of the 22nd. It even tells me the duration, one week and one day.
I can edit that either here if I want to, or I can edit that here within the Placker interface. For those who are wanting start dates and end dates, Placker can do that for you as well.
Now, just before we go back to the normal Trello view, I wanna show you some other enhancements, some other features that Placker adds to the Trello interface. I don't want to miss out on the Track view. So, Track is the third view here within Placker, and here you have so many different ways of viewing and looking at your cards.
For example, here we've got sort of a summary of the end dates here, where they are in this workflow, when they are due, and which ones are overdue. If I click on this, I'm gonna see exactly which of those two cards are overdue. If I click on it again, just like we saw before, I can go in here and edit almost everything that I would normally see in Trello. In fact, more and more often, I find that clients are using Placker as a day-to-day tool.
They're going less and less within the Trello interface and more and more here within Placker, because there's just so much power. There are so many different views and graphs. This is just a sample of some of the graphs you can see here. Here, you see all of the different widgets, and there's even a Card burndown, for example, if you want to see where you should estimate and where you should track.
There are too many to cover in just today's video. But you can have a lot of fun just looking at the different graphs and the different ways that you can view your data here within Placker.
But I do want to jump back to Trello to show you some of the other things that get added here within the Trello interface. So, here, under Power-Ups, you will notice that Placker actually adds a few additional buttons, including mirroring and adding a dependency. So, in this case, mirroring, you can think of as syncing with another card.
I want to give this card sort of a unique name here. Let's just go Task 423 just so we can see this show up in a different board. So, Task 423 here, as we see within the Trello TEST 1 Board, does not appear in TEST Board 2 or TEST Board 3.
So, I want to open this up, select Mirror, because let's say I do want to sync this with my second board. I just need to select that board. I can select the list and where I want it to be, and I'm gonna say, Add Mirror. It may take just a few seconds, not very long, though, and you can see there's even a little link here, saying that I can show that card. I can click here and go directly to it. I can edit the mirror as well.
I'm not gonna click either of those. I just want to go directly over to board number two. Boom, there it is, Task 423. I've got a sync between those two. So, no matter what I do, either on this side on this board, or within my original Trello one board, I'm going to get a true sync between the two. You don't need to use another power-up just for syncing capability. You can do that here within Placker as well.
The other great thing is that you can also have it sync movements. So, if I move this from In Progress to Complete, another nice thing you'll see here is that it's gonna automatically check it off, because I've told Placker when anything moves to Complete, I want you to say that it's checked off.
Now, I haven't done anything. I haven't even visited Trello board number two. I'm gonna click on it, and guess what's in my Complete list. That's right, Task 423. If I move this all the way back to To-Do here in TEST Board number two, it's gonna uncheck it, right? We're not complete anymore, we're still in the To-Do phase.
Let's go back to TEST Board number one. Look what's waiting for me. A true sync with this card across multiple boards. The last one, which I'm not gonna get into in as great of detail, is the Add dependency. So, if you need to complete a particular card before something else, you can do so.
For example, here you see that this card actually has a dependency. Task number one needs to be finished before task number two. That seems to only make sense, right, one before two.
But let's see what that looks like on a different card. Task number six, I don't think has a dependency, so let's say I'm gonna click on Add a dependency. It can either be a predecessor or a successor. Let's say, well, let's add a predecessor in this case, and let's say task number five. Gotta do task number five before we accomplish task number six, so you can see that here. You can see that identified here within the Trello card. It's also identified within the Placker interface as well.
So, whether you want to create a true sync, create dependencies, or sub-tasks, or like I mentioned before, I think just combining boards, selecting multiple boards and seeing them in a single view, is one of the best features of Placker.
I would encourage you to check it out for yourself. They do have a free trial so you can test out all of the features I've shown you here to see if Placker is the right solution for you. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I look forward to your questions about Placker or about any other Trello power-ups.
Don't forget to leave me a comment down below and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
