Honestly, there’s no lack of third party Trello extensions for Chrome. If you already use Trello to organize your work or your life, you already know of the plethora of extensions available to simplify adding tasks to boards and adding extra features like time tracking to complex report generation.
But in all this time there has never been an official Trello Chrome extension. Well, now there is.
The new official Trello extension is quite a simple one – nothing fancy. It only does two things, but if you’re like me and use Trello to manage your work life, you’ll find it to be useful.
Quickly Open Trello Boards
Once the extension is installed you’ll be able to launch any of your Trello boards really quickly. To some (including myself), this feature might alone be worth installing the extension. This is how it works.
1. Use the keyboard shortcut on your Windows PC (Ctrl + L) or Mac (Cmd + L) to highlight the omnibox (URL bar).
2. Press the “t” key and then the “Tab” key.
3. The omnibox will now switch to a Trello search bar.
Start entering the name of the board, and before you’ve hit a couple of letters, the board will show up as the first option. Press “Enter” and the board link will open up.
Richest Way to Add Cards
There was already a bookmarklet, but the extension is by far the richest way to add links and cards to a board.
1. Click the Trello extension icon, and a drop-down will show up.
2. From here you can select the board and the list from the drop-down and specify the title for the card.
3. Alternatively, you can also include the current link in the board by checking the box at the bottom. Doing this automatically fills the title with the that of the webpage.
The best part is that if you include the link, the Trello card will be automatically populated with the header image (if the link has one), the link itself and a short description.
For me, personally, this is really helpful because I’m always adding app pages as article ideas.
Long Ways to Go
Of course, not everything is perfect in the newly released Trello extension. The first thing is that it’s not very feature rich. The second is that it’s not that smart. It won’t remember your favorite board and list, so you’ll have to select them every single time you add a new card from the extension.
But I’m just happy that there’s an official Trello extension that exists. And if this is just the start, I’m really excited for all the future features and improvements that I’m sure are coming.
The extension is going to be a part of my daily workflow, no question about that. But if you need something more, check out Boards for Trello or just search on Chrome Web Store for “Trello.” You’ll be scrolling for a long time.
