To be clear at all I did not plan to import To Do tasks to Trello. The plan was completely different, but it worked out as it came out. But let’s start from the beginning. Some time ago I saw that in my Microsoft 365 subscription appeared an application that is called Project Moca, aka Spaces. You can read more about here and here.
Unfortunately, looking for information on the Internet, I did not find much of it. I was playing with the tool itself, I discovered that now it has huge shortcomings. There’s no full integration with To Do or Outlook, because what we get now is not usable, at least from my point of view. For example, I would expect that every task I add to To Do will automatically appear in Project Moca.
So, wanting not wanting I had to look at Trello
Why Trello? You know that I am huge fan of Getting Things Done aka GTD.
So, it has somehow been made up for some time that I have a lot of different tasks where simple solutions like To Do that are absolutely sufficient in most cases begin to fail. To be clear. I’m not abandoning To Do, it’s the perfect tool for me to collect tasks. But now I need something more.
I need a tool that gives you the ability to visualize the view of different projects and managing them in a more systematic way. And that’s how I became interested in Trello. And everything would be great if it weren’t for the problems with importing tasks from To Do to Trello. If you check it, you will out that there’s nothing. All those power-ups have a lot of connections, but not to Microsoft products.
What do I need to import To Do tasks to Trello?
You need Microsoft 365, and actually Microsoft 365 family will work great for you. What is important here. I checked official documents from Microsoft and there’s no word about Power Automate. But It seems that it’s included, at least basic version which is enough for us to do import. And this is another reason to get a family license. And I almost forgot, there’s one more thing! A few days ago, during Ingnite Microsoft announced that Power Automate Desktop will be available for free. So many good stuffs for us 🙂 .
So How to import To Do tasks to Trello?
It’s not too complicated.
- First go to your outlook web site and from app launcher start Power Automate.
- From the left menu select Create and then pick Instant Cloud Flow
3. Skip all suggested settings and just create your flow.
4. Now from standard operation find Outlook tasks and pick up “List all tasks“. What’s important. Do not pick preview version. It’s doesn’t work for me as expected.
5. And finally, from Control pick “Apply to each” action.
6. Output is a “body” from a previous step. And then we do followings inside of “Apply to each”:
- Get tasks details with “Id”
- Depends on your needs decide which tasks should be imported. In decide to import to do tasks to Trello only when they are marked as not completed
- If the task is not completed, I will create a task in selected board and selected parent list. In my case Card Name will be equal to To Do task subject
- When you are ready run the flow
Depends on your To Do size it could take few minutes to import To do tasks to Trello.
