Due dates and the Calendar function

- [Instructor] Throughout this course you'll most likely hear me say at least a time or two that this is one of my favorite features, but I can definitively say that the Trello calendar power-up is most likely my favorite feature of the entire app. In this lesson I'm going to demonstrate first how you can set due dates for your cards. And then I'm going to show you how adding those due dates integrates with the calendar power-up so you have a much cleaner and more efficient way to plan your projects visually instead of using lists. In my opinion, the way to maximize efficiency and ensure that you're getting important work done, is to transform your calendar into your to-do list.

And the first step is assigning a due date. So we're going to go back into our first card that we started with in previous lessons, and you can see that this is under the add menu right here on the right. So add, due date, and now a calendar is going to pop up, and I can choose any day and any time, and for now I'm just going to put the date that's right here and I'm going to hit save. So what this does is this adds a default due date for this card and right now it's saying that the due date is tomorrow at 12 p.m.

You'll see that as I close the card I now have a visual representation of this on the outside of the card as well, saying that my due date is March 21st. Well great, how is that really useful if I'm going to have 150 cards on a board and 10 lists and I have a whole bunch of random due dates. Well here's why due dates are important. First of all, if you have a due date on your card you're going to receive notifications when something is due soon. And that of course is helpful as well, but ultimately the reason that you're going to want a due date is so you can create a calendar and have a visual representation of all of your tasks.

So what we're gong to do is enable our very first power-up. I'm going to go much deeper into power-ups in later lessons, but for now let me show you how the power-up menu works and where to enable your calendar power-up. You're going to go to show menu. And what you're going to want to do is go down to power-ups. So I click on power-ups and you'll be brought to this giant dashboard of all of these various power-ups. Now if you have taken previous Trello courses with me this is going to look different because this is constantly changing and evolving and Trello is always adding new power-ups.

This used to be a list of just a few options. Now it's an entire dashboard of all of these different categories. So the calendar power-up is generally in the main menu as one of the top picks for Trello and it's right here. But in case you don't see it in the very top menu, you go under board utilities and you find the calendar power-up which is right here. And all you have to do is click enable. So you're going to see that you were being told that this board has reached its power-ups limit. If you want to have more than one power-up enabled at any given time, you are going to have to upgrade to Trello business class, which is the paid version of Trello.

So what we're going to do for the sake of this course is just demonstrate the power-ups one at a time, and for now we're going to use the calendar as our free power-up. So I'm going to dismiss this. I'm going to close the power-ups window, and you'll notice that I now have this option up here that says calendar. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to click on calendar. And you will see that I now have a visual representation of where that due date belongs. And there are two ways that you can view your calendar. You can view it in month view and you can also view it in week view, and you can see when you're in week view you actually have more information about your card as far as the number of checklists, the number of attachments, whether or not you're watching it and whether or not there are comments.

When I go back to month view it's just going to be the name of the card because there's not enough space for all that information. So what's really cool about this is I close the calendar. If I go ahead and I add a due date to a second card, so let's just add the 22nd for example and I hit save. So we now have two due dates on our calendar. We open it up visually and they're both here. But rather than having to go into each individual card and constantly change the due date as they're updated, I can move the cards and the dude dates dynamically change.

So let's say that I want to reverse the order of these. I just click and drag them no different than if I were moving cards between lists. I close this and now you can see that the due date has automatically and dynamically updated. The last feature that I want to show you in the calendar power-up is the ability to add new cards directly to your calendar. So let's say that you are looking at your calender here and you're seeing that oh you know what, this is out of order. So I want your first card obviously to be first, your second card to be second.

I of course want to assign a due date to your third card. So once again, due date, let's make that Friday. And we save it. We go back to our calendar. Perfect. Your first card, your second card, and your third card are all due in the correct order. But guess what, I have a fourth card that I need to add to this calendar. I don't want to have to close the calendar, go back and manually add a card. So I can do it right from the calendar power-up. So I just click on the date where I want to add it. I choose add card. And I'm going to say your fourth card, you probably didn't see that coming, and I want to make sure that I choose the right list, so it's going to stay in list number one.

I'll choose position number four so everything stays in chronological order. I'll hit add. I close this up and now without leaving my calendar power-up at all I have all four of my cards and all four of them have chronological due dates.