When you’re working through sprints with your project team, task lists can quickly become long and unwieldy, and important items can get lost in the shuffle if you’re organizing dozens of tasks with a traditional spreadsheet layout.
Adding a Kanban view to your workbook turns each row into a “card” in a column on a corkboard-style layout. Kanban views make it simple to see the distribution of items across different categories, and prominently feature images and information from the worksheet’s primary column so you can quickly identify and focus on specific project tasks.
With Spreadsheet.com’s Kanban views, you can transform your sprint task list into a Kanban board in just a few clicks. In this guide, we’ll take a look at Spreadsheet.com’s Sprint Planning template and explore how to use Kanban view features to turn a workbook into an indispensable sprint management tool. Take a look at our sprint planning workbook and follow along, or create a copy to experiment with on your own.
Once you’ve assembled a sprint task list in a Sheet view…
…you can transform that list into a Kanban board by adding a Kanban view to your workbook from the Views sidebar.
Once you name and create your new Kanban view, you’ll be prompted to select a column by which the Kanban board will be stacked. Kanban views can be stacked by columns with the Select, User, or Icon set data types.
When you select a column to stack by, all of the rows with shared values in that column will appear in the same stack. Kanban views also include an “Uncategorized” stack on the left side of the view to hold any rows that do not have a value in the “stacked by” column.
In our sprint planning workbook, we want each sprint to have its own stack in our Kanban view, so we’ve selected Column D - Sprint, a Select column, as the column to stack our Kanban view by.
Or, we could create a Kanban view to manage tasks based on their status and stack it by Column E - Status.
Spreadsheet.com lets you create an unlimited number of Views for each worksheet, so you can create as many Kanban boards as you need. And because Views all use the same underlying data, changing information about a task in one will be reflected in all of the others.
If your task list uses row hierarchies to organize tasks into parent and child tasks, you can configure your Kanban view to display some or all levels of the hierarchies via the Levels dialog. You might want to create one Kanban view that shows all tasks regardless of their level in the hierarchy, and another that only displays Level 1 tasks (parent rows) so you can focus on big picture items.
Take a look at the image above. This Kanban view is configured to only show Level 1 tasks, hiding any child or grandchild rows that exist in row hierarchies. Compared to the previous image, “Bug Fix 3” has been removed from the “To Do” stack, and “Bug Fix 2” has been removed from the “Pending Review” stack.
Like other types of Views in Spreadsheet.com, Kanban views support Filtering and Sorting, so you can be even more deliberate with which rows are displayed on your Kanban board. Filter out tasks that are completed or on hold to create a Kanban view that only displays tasks in progress, or create another that only shows tasks that have been flagged as high priority. You can create separate Kanban views for different teams or task owners to easily break down individual workloads.
By clicking Configure cards in the Kanban view toolbar, you can choose which pieces of information are included on each Kanban card. From the dropdown menu at the top of the dialog, you can choose an Attachment column used to give Kanban cards their header images. For our Kanban view, we’ve selected Column C - Files. You can also opt to not include header images at all.
The Configure cards dialog also lets you choose which columns’ information appears on each Kanban card. In our Kanban view, we’ve selected important information like the task’s priority (Column A - Priority), sprint (Column D - Sprint), and workload (Column J - Workload), while ignoring other information like start and end dates.
Different Kanban views can have different pieces of information displayed on their cards so you can choose which information is relevant to each board’s audience.
Moving a Kanban card between two stacks is as easy as dragging-and-dropping. When you move a Kanban card from one stack to another, the data in that record’s “Stacked by” column will automatically update to reflect its new location.
Here, we’re moving a newly-completed task from the “In Progress” stack to the “Completed” stack.
Ready to get started with Spreadsheet.com and start making your own Kanban views? Check out our Template Gallery to find other project management templates, as well as templates for product development, construction management, finance, and more.
Or, start from scratch with a blank workbook and add a new Kanban view as you build out your data.