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Trello provides six color codes for cards. I can change the name of those labels, but I don't seem to be able to add more.

I would like to label cards by "service area", and it happens we have twelve of those. (Maybe that's too many service areas, but that's the setup we have, and while it might need changing, changing it to fit a new tool isn't the right approach.)

Is there a way to add additional labels? Is there a different tagging mechanism which would suit the purpose better?

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    Well, you could use multiple flags as a binary representation. That way you can separate 16 different service areas using only four flags ;-p (hope this made you smile, and that somebody else might be able to give you a serious answer as well ;-))
    – Julian
    Sep 20, 2011 at 13:23
  • And that would be 64 for six bits. Jan 21, 2014 at 0:46
  • It would still be useful to have both labels and tags. We use the labels to colour code tasks in priority order, and adding tags would make them easy to filter by eg. goal as well, as you can then have eg. 3 bigger tasks relating to achieving a goal.
    – user61281
    Feb 21, 2014 at 9:41

3 Answers 3

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As of November 21 2014, Trello allows you to add unlimited labels:

http://blog.trello.com/introducing-unlimited-labels/

Creating labels in Trello

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No, Trello only supports 6 colored labels.

We didn't want to have too many, because we didn't want to overload people, and it can be difficult to find lots of colors that are easy to differentiate.

You could attempt to solve the problem by naming your cards with prefixes that represent the different service areas.

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    Any chance for leaving those six as the default but letting me add others for a specific board? Using a prefix makes more overload.....
    – mattdm
    Sep 20, 2011 at 14:46
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    @Daniel LeCheminant - it would be great to have full support for tags on a task (just like asana :) )
    – leora
    Oct 19, 2011 at 18:19
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    It is strange that I can add lists and add cards, but I can't add tags. One of the very few things that I've found disappointing about Trello! Mar 16, 2013 at 11:48
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    I think it's a significant restriction - labels are essentially stand-ins for tags, and having only six available tags is arbitrary and restrictive. I don't see colour selection as being the real issue - for my purposes it's not about the colours but about the distinct labels and the ability to filter on them.
    – davidA
    Jan 20, 2014 at 22:59
  • I suppose an additional way to go would be to split your collection of tasks into multiple boards. Since you get 6 labels per board, if you can factor your collection of tasks within a board into multiple distinct groups you could move them into multiple boards. I agree though, not ideal. Feb 8, 2014 at 5:58
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One could use hashtags (#mytag) in the card title to tag cards. Plus for Trello Chrome Extension will nicely display them.

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  • Intriguing idea, +1. Does vanilla Trello do anything with hashtags? Jul 11, 2014 at 13:30
  • This Chrome extension seems to work fairly well, though it uses {tag} syntax instead of #tag. Jul 11, 2014 at 14:14

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