Bulk-assign cards to members in Trello

Question

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.

Answer 1

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

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

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.

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

Answer 2

Try hovering the card with the cursor and then hit 'Space' on your keyboard to assign yourself or 'a' to open a dialog to select a member. Saves at least opening the card and closing it again.

I have not yet found a native bulk action for that.

Answer 3

I found a trick using a rule. I was, in fact, interested in adding myself to every card added to a certain list. So I added a rule:

"when a card is added into the list "My List" join the card"

(you can also do "add member @... to the card" if you want to add another member)

This will assign you to any new task on that list.

Now, the trick is that you can also reuse this rule for existing tasks: just move them to another list, then back to where they were. That makes 2 drag-and-drops per card (if you want to preserve the original card order, it may require a little dexterity though).

You can also press the keys <> or ,. to move the card under the cursor to the left/right quickly, but be careful, if you press twice without moving the cursor, it will move the same card. So you need to move the cursor a little before pressing <> or ,. again.

Alternatively, create the rule on a new list, and move all the cards to that new list. Then delete the old list, and rename the new list like the old list. That makes 1 drag-and-drop per card. Or 1 key press + small cursor motion if using <> or ,..

Note that there is a small lag before the rule applies, so you won't see the member icon appear immediately. But it will eventually.

If you do not want to keep adding members to new tasks, remember to delete the rule!