Bulk-Assign Trello Cards to Members

trello

I often find myself having a bunch of cards, and needing to assign them to a team member.
This is how I do it:

  • Hover card
  • Click card pencil
  • Click members
  • Click the right person
  • Click outside card twice to return to board

That is five clicks per card, I need to assign to somebody – quite cumbersome.

Is there a better way to assign members?

In contrast, when I need to assign a label, I just hover over it and click a shortcut (number 1 for green for example). It is super fast and very elegant.

Ideally, I would like to have shortcuts for each member, like I do for each label, and just hover+click shortcut.

Best Answer

Until Trello supports better bulk actions, you have a few options.

Keyboard Shortcuts

  1. Hover your mouse over a card
  2. Hit the A key to pop open the assign member dialog
  3. Type the member's name
  4. Hit Esc to close the dialog
  5. Hit J to jump to the next card
  6. Repeat steps 2 to 5

Here's how that works in action

Trello Assign Member Keyboard

You can assign yourself by hovering over a card and hitting Space

Trello Assign Self

Import Cards with Mail Merge

If you know who needs to be assigned to cards in advance, you can import cards into Trello using the native Email to Board functionality.

  1. Copy the email address of the list you want to import cards into from Menu > More > Email-to-board settings
  2. Prepare a spreadsheet with headers for email, title, members and description
  3. Under the email header paste the email address you copied from Trello earlier and fill that down for as many cards are you plan to import
  4. Fill in as many rows on the sheet as you need for the all the tasks you plan to import
  5. Under the members header you only need to enter the @username of the person you want the card assigned to
  6. Export the sheet as a csv and then use your email client's mail merge option to bulk email tasks into Trello

Your prepared spreadsheet would look something like this.

Trello Assign Member Email

Here's an example using Gmail and Google Sheets to bulk import what's in the spreadsheet. You can also use Thunderbird with LibreOffice Calc, or Outlook with Excel, etc.

Multi-select for Trello

If you are using Google Chrome, you can buy a license for Multiselect for Trello a Chrome extension that makes batch actions on Trello easy.

You would

  1. Select a few cards you want to assign someone to
  2. Click the Actions and the Members
  3. Select the member and then Assign

Here's that in action

Trello Assign Member Extension

Related Topic