Using Trello from within Microsoft Outlook 2010

Gareth Saunders
Thursday 4 October 2012
Trello board
Trello board

If you’ve been following this blog for a while then you’ll know that almost a year ago we moved our Agile board to Trello. It has been a great success.

Last year the University also moved both our email and meeting scheduling software to Microsoft Exchange. I’ve been a fan of Outlook since about 2000, first synchronizing it with  my Psion PDAs and then with a Windows Mobile smartphone. I do pretty much all my planning in Outlook. Or at least I did, until I discovered Trello.

So my question was: how can I use Trello within Outlook? Then I remembered Outlook’s little-used shortcuts feature.

  1. Open up a Trello page in your browser. It doesn’t really matter which browser. I’m using Google Chrome 23 beta for speed.

  2. Now drag a bookmark onto your desktop from the address bar .

Browser shortcut on desktop
Browser shortcut from Trello page on PC desktop.
  1. Next, open up Microsoft Outlook and click on the Shortcuts icon in the left-hand navigation pane; it has a shortcut key of Ctrl+7.
Shortcuts sits beneath Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Folder List
Shortcuts sits beneath Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Folder List
  1. Now drag the icon from your desktop onto the label “Shortcuts”. It won’t work unless you drop it right on the word “Shortcuts”.

  2. Next, right-click the new icon (which will by default show the URL) and select “Rename Shortcut” from the context-menu, to give it a more user-friendly name.

Adding a shortcut to the Outlook shortcuts list.
Drag the shortcut onto the Shortcuts label, then right-click to rename it.
  1. Click on the new shortcut link. Now you have Trello displaying within Microsoft Outlook. You can have as many shortcuts as you like, to as many boards as you like but remember you can always change boards within Trello too.

As far as I can see (using findmebyIP.com) it’s using the Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 engine to render the page, so obviously if FogCreek Software stop supporting IE7 in Trello then this top tip will stop working.

Trello being displaying within Outlook 2010
Trello being displaying within Outlook 2010

Update

If you want to take the Outlook/Trello integration even further you can now use Emello, which allows you to send emails directly to lists within your Trello boards. I’ve not used the service myself, but it certainly looks useful should you require that functionality, and the website looks slick and professional.

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