How can I import a large list of tasks into Trello

Question

How can I import a large list of tasks (.csv or .txt) into Trello and convert into cards that are part of a list

Answer 1

Most of the solutions I saw here were pretty technical. Here is one that is really easy to do. You could use this Zap to automatically create Trello Cards from Google Docs spreadsheet rows.

The idea is that once you make this Zap, you can paste your CSV into the a Google Doc and run it through into Trello.

I think there is a limit of about 200 items per 10 minutes when importing stuff across, but normally you won't hit that.

Answer 2

I've created and shared a Google Spreadsheet which you can use to import multiple entries. It's geared towards a Scrum product backlog, but you could customise it if you want. Details here: http://www.littlebluemonkey.com/blog/online-scrum-tools-part-3-upload-existing-product-backlog-into-trello/

Answer 3

I wrote a bookmarklet to help with this task. It's very crude and it works for me today, but I've only tested it briefly and only in Chrome. It calls some JavaScript functions in Trello directly so it's extremely likely that it will break when they update the site. Hopefully it works for you, but please don't use it if your data is critical in case it mangles it.

If you want to try it out, you can get the code from here. There's both a readable version, and a version suitable for copying into a bookmarklet. To use:

1. Go here, select the entire contents ("javascript:..." to "...%29%28%29%3B") and copy to the clipboard.
2. Create a new bookmark, call it something like "Trello - Add Many" and paste the contents from step 1 into the URL field for the bookmark.
3. Go to the Trello board you want to add items to and click the bookmark. An overlay should appear that will let you select the list you want to add cards to, and enter a number of new card titles -- one per line.
4. The overlay will disappear when you hit "Submit". If you want to get rid of the overlay without adding any new cards then just refresh the page.

Note: If you're trying to get your tasks out of Google Tasks and into Trello then choose Actions - Print task list in Google Tasks, copy the tasks from the printable view, and paste into the bookmarklet's entry box.

Answer 4

A workaround, for PC users who are really keen to import lots of items into Trello:

If you're on a Windows PC, and you've really got too much text to use a manual copy-and-paste route, then it might be worth your while to have a go with AutoHotKey, which allows you to write scripts that automate PC applications.

The following isn't meant to be a complete description of how to implement it, but instead to just give a flavour of what AutoHotKey could do.

Here is an example sequence of AutoHotKey commands, that adds three items, "Foo", "Bar" and "It works with multi-word items too":

+^!1::
    Send, Foo{ENTER}
    Sleep 20
    Send, Bar{ENTER}
    Sleep 20
    Send, It works with multi-word items too{ENTER}
    Sleep 20
    Send, {ESC}
Return

If you had AutoHotKey installed, then you would use this by:

1. Load this script into AutoHotKey
2. Open up your Trello board, and click "Add Card" in the list you want to add to
3. Hit Ctrl+Shft+Alt+1 to make AutoHotKey "type" the following text

The above example just shows that it's possible to script Trello with AutoHotKey.

In order to use this for your task, you'd also need code to read the lines from your text file. See the documentation for Loop for a way to do that.

(Disclaimer: in FireFox 6.0.2 on Windows, the above commands insert the list items in reverse order: you could obviously work around this by processing the file in reverse order)