Work Week | Trello Goes Overboard
Trello is becoming more like a spreadbase, like Notion, Airtable, or Coda
Trello has announced the availability of a variety of new views, so users are no longer limited to the now-familiar kanban board. Now, those who upgrade to Business Class (14 day free trial) can use timeline, table, calendar, dashboard, and map views.
The table view shows that Trello is heading in a spreadbase direction, offering filters, sorting, and other capabilities like those in Notion, Airtable, and other spreadbase tools.
At present, the table view does not support capabilities you’d expect in a full-up spreadbase, such as adding custom attributes, or a formula language to add values, or creating relationships across tables. But you can see that’s where they are heading.
The timeline view uses data information in cards to display information in swimlanes, where the names on the swimlanes are the lists in the original board:
The cards can be modified by dragging the ends to change start and end dates, and dragged from one list (swimlane) to another.
The calendar view is currently limited to just a month view, and as far as I can tell, you can’t create cards there.
The dashboard view is geared toward managers, to provide visibility into team progress, and highlighting metrics like due dates, task assignment, and so on.
Trello is headed to a much richer user experience with these new views, and also some new forms of cards which are available to all users. Trello describes these new cards this way:
Link cards: With the simple paste of a URL as a card’s title, enjoy a more connected experience across different external tools and platforms including Youtube, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and Jira
Board cards: Connecting projects and cross-functional teams across Trello by simply pasting the URL of a board as a card’s title and it will automatically render a direct visual link to that board
Mirror Cards (coming in a few months): Reflect a card across multiple boards to efficiently keep information aligned and up-to-date without having to switch boards
Mirror cards will solve a problem I have encountered in many work management tools.
Bottom Line
Trello is responding to a rapidly changing work management marketplace, as I described in the recent Prospectus | Work Management. As I wrote then,
Trello is, at present, a more-or-less traditional work management solution, one with a great deal of customization built-in, and a very extensive set of integrations. Trello Tables is a departure, an explicit effort to adopt characteristics of spreadbases, and perhaps the first step to reconfiguring Trello to be a spreadbase, in fact. We can envision that as shown below, where the solid bordered Trello is the situation today, and the dashed Tables represents a possible next phase, where Trello Tables could implement apps that are not work-management-oriented, at all.
We’ll have to see if that proves to be the case.
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