Trello Markdown Simplified: 3 Critical Aspects

Trello is well-known as a Kanban-style, Web-based, Project Management application developed by Atlassian. It allows you to bring the power of a visual perspective to your team, helping them better organize their tasks and enhance productivity. The Trello Markdown helps teams stay abreast of goals, projects, and sprints with a clear visual layout. You can also flexibly drag-and-drop due dates to make adjustments on the go while keeping tasks aligned and synced every step of the way.

This blog talks about the different aspects of Trello Markdown syntax and the support Trello provides for it. It also gives a brief introduction to Trello eliciting its features, benefits, and use cases.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Trello
• Understanding Trello Markdown
  1. Horizontal Line
  2. Block Quotes / Indent Text
  3. Code Block
  4. Headers
  5. Bullet and Numbered Lists
• Understanding Trello Markdown Tables
• Conclusion

Introduction to Trello

Trello has etched a name for itself in the market as a robust Collaboration Tool that can help you organize your projects in the form of boards. Trello lets you know who’s working on what, what stage a task is in, and what’s being worked on, all in a single glance.

Irrespective of whether you and your team are starting something new or attempting to get more organized with your existing work, Trello can adapt to any project seamlessly. This can help you standardize and simplify your team’s work process in an intuitive way.

Here are a few key benefits of Trello that make it an indispensable tool:

• Simplified Editing: Trello focuses on keeping your Project Management hassle-free, which is why it makes sure you can edit task lists inline, using the simplest possible drag-and-drop mechanism. These lists are customizable, hence, you can exclusively follow metrics useful to you, and use the automated notifications to stay on track with all alterations and changes.  
• Reasonable Timeframes: You can make use of Trello’s Calendar Power-up to prioritize tasks with a shorter deadline, assign operations last-minute, and show them depending on their status. You can also trigger the iCal feed from your current calendar app, and import tasks that have already been assigned. 
• Well-Organized Card and Board System: Trello offers a user-friendly Workflow Organization method, evident from their unique Card and Board system for comprehensive views. There is minimal risk for confusion with a board assigned for each project, and a card assigned for each task. This is because all assignments are in order and can be easily tracked with specific performance lists. 
• Integrations: Trello is compatible with various public developer APIs that allow you to connect with every third-party extension, plugin, app, or system.
• Robust Security: Trello is designed to comply with the highest security standards. It uses a bank-level encryption mechanism to ensure that your data will never fall into the wrong hands. As an admin, you will be allowed to set permissions and decide if boards are private, accessed only by authorized individuals. 
• Searchable Database: Trello ensures that all relevant discussions and corporate data will be stored in the system for further usage. Apart from this, it also ensures that it will be backed up against eventual failure or breach. There are various searching filters and labels available to help you locate the desired file in no time flat. 
• Collaboration: By using Trello, you can allow your entire team to participate in important discussions such as one-to-one chat sessions or group meetings. You can also comment on individual assignments and tasks. With Trello, you can also share files of all formats, notes, and diatribes. It further allows you to upload files straight from your Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox account. 

Understanding Trello Markdown

Markdown can be used to add formatting to the text. Trello Markdown is a modified version of the Markdown syntax. With Trello Markdown, you can easily add links, italics, paragraphs,  bold, lists, headers, code blocks, and images to blocks of texts. You can add Trello Markdown to your cards as a part of the card’s checklists, descriptions, and comments. It can also be added to your Trello bio.

You can use the following text to get a template on your Trello Board:

This will give you the following result:

Now that you have a brief idea of Trello Markdown Tables, you can take a look at the Trello Markdown syntax for comments and card descriptions:

1. Horizontal Line
2. Block Quotes / Indent Text
3. Code Block
4. Headers
5. Bullet and Numbered Lists

1) Horizontal Line

To create a horizontal line you can use a line with at least 3 hyphens across the entire description or comment. However, for card descriptions, you need to include an extra line break after any text before the line of hyphens. This prevents the hyphens from being interpreted as header syntax in the Trello Markdown syntax.

2) Block Quotes / Indent Text

You can indent text by including a “>” in front of every line in the text that you wish to quote or indent in the Trello Markdown syntax. Follow the example given below for more clarity:

3) Code Block 

You can include a formatted code by enclosing it up in three backticks (“`) at the beginning and end of the block. Formatted code can also be included by starting a line with four spaces in the Trello Markdown syntax. For the Markdown to take effect, the triple backticks need to be on a separate line. The triple backticks need to have a blank line before and after the code block in the Trello Markdown syntax.

4) Headers 

There are various ways to mark headers in the Trello Markdown syntax. For e.g, text in #Single Hashes# will be interpreted as an `<h1>` HTML tag. Text in ##Double Hashes## will be interpreted as an `<h2>` HTML tag. For headers, a line of hyphens below the text can also be interpreted as a <h2> tag. 

5) Bullet and Numbered Lists

To create a list, simply preface a series of lines with numbers or hyphens in the Trello Markdown syntax. You can format the lists only by starting a new paragraph (by leaving a blank line before the list). To create nested bullets, add a space before the bullet mark. To indent within a numbered or bulleted list, you can start the new line with a space. An ordered list is automatically created in Trello for any line that begins with a numbered format, even if the number isn’t 1. To preserve your formatting, just put a ‘’ before the period. For instance, 28. March.

Apart from this you also have escaping Trello markdown and embedded images that work only with card descriptions.

Understanding Trello Markdown Tables

You can create Trello Markdown Tables in comments and card descriptions. The Trello Cards Optimizer (TCO) is a handy chrome extension that allows you to create tables using Markdown. The Markdown syntax used by TCO is based on the extended syntax used by various Markdown processors.

• When you paste text in a comment or a card description, TCO will look for any formatting in the text, for e.g, when copying and pasting from Microsoft Excel or a tab-delimited table format. 
• All formatted tables are automatically transferred to TCO’s table Markdown format.  
• If you paste plain text and TCO detects a tab-delimited format, it gives you the option to convert the text automatically to TCO’s table Markdown format.
• If you don’t want this then TCO will convert each tab to 4 spaces. TCO will also insert 4 spaces when you press the TAB key.
• The TCO Table Markdown format is as follows:

The minimal table consists of a column definition row, header row, and 2 content rows with a minimum of 2 columns, separated as shown above. The TCO extension also allows you to control the alignment, and increase the cell span along with the width of a cell.  

Conclusion

This blog talks about the different aspects of Markdown Trello syntax and the support Trello provides for it. It also gives a brief introduction to Trello eliciting its features, benefits, and use cases.

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