Count archived Trello cards?
Asked by Andrew Young:

My team would like to track development work progress. One metric of great interest, however imperfect, is to get a count of all archived cards. Is there a way to do this? I've Googled for it but found no working solution.

If it's not possible to easily count Archived cards, is there a way to bulk move all archived cards to a new Trello List that I name: "ARCHIVED"? Right now, the alternative is to go through each archived card, one-by-one, and send them back to the board then move them back to the "ARCHIVED" list.

Open to better ideas than the ones I've proposed.


Answers:
author: Andrew Young
body: In my opinion, the best way to do this is to download/export the Trello board data as a CSV file then copy-paste that data into a GSheet that feeds a Google Studio report (or is consumed by some other analytics tool).

The CSV export has a column, "Archived," that takes on the values "TRUE" or "FALSE."

comments: author: Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows
body: This is definitely an option if you don't mind using a different platform! My suggestion would be to _sync_ the data to GSheets rather than manually exporting it on a regular basis. With any manual work, it opens up room for error, it's time-consuming, and the information in your sheet is not dynamic. So let's say a card gets archived, but it turns out it's not fully complete and you un-archive it - you'll need to remember each time to also manually update your sheet. This might be ok if you're working with a small data set and it's just you using the board, but if things start to scale, you might want to use [Unito](https://unito.io/integrations/google-sheets-trello/) to dynamically sync data from Trello to GSheets.


author: Andrew Young
body: Yes, agree 100% about manual work. Not sure my org would be interested in Unito / might think it's over-engineering but thank you for raising that interesting possibility!


author: Robin Warren _Blue Cat Reports_
body: If you are trying progress maybe you want to look at some reporting options

- Blue Cat Reports (general purpose reporting) <https://trello.com/power-ups/5d9c90aa18965066fcd44730/reports-by-blue-cat>

- Corrello (Agile teams reporting) <https://trello.com/power-ups/568c2b6c7d2758a55ac48c98/agilescrum-kanban-dashboards-charts-corrello>

Or have a look at our guide to the reporting options in Trello <https://www.bluecatreports.com/trello-reporting/>

Hope that helps :)

Robin


author: Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows
body: [@Andrew Young](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4800373) [Dashcards](https://trello.com/power-ups/6048e897c73d032a983e2a7c/dashcards) would be able to count cards for you, but it doesn't look like you can filter on archived cards, only open cards. What could be a good option is to send cards to an "Archive" board instead and use dashcards on that board.  

![dashcards card counter.PNG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/187341i9535913C0A6662DA/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "dashcards card counter.PNG")  

Butler could then move cards automatically to their correct list, e.g.  

*when a card is archived, move the card to the top of list "Done {monthname} {year}" on board "Archive", and unarchive the card* (the trigger could be when a card button is selected, when a done label is added, etc.)  
Depending on how you report on things, the lists could be monthly like shown above, or weekly, quarterly, etc.  

Butler won't apply retroactively, so it may take a bit of time to set up initially.  

comments: author: Andrew Young
body: "What could be a good option is to send cards to an "Archive" board instead and use dashcards on that board."

Did you mean an Archive Trello list, or were you accurate in saying a Trello board?


author: Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows
body: [@Andrew Young](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4800373) yes, the suggestion was to have a secondary archived board to keep a record of completed cards without cluttering your main board. Alternatively, you could have the completed lists on your main board if you need to see the open and archived cards all on one board.


author: Andrew Young
body: Gotcha. Interesting idea, thank you for sharing.


author: milynnus
body: [@Andrew Young](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4800373)

I do that to clean out my development boards. While it looks at the open cards now, it can be modified to look at closed cards. It moves all the cards to a new list (boardname)...move the move the list to a archive board, move empty list excluding some that I want to keep to a trash board....etc.

All this via a program but you can always trigger it from a card button.

At the end, there will be some programming need because all the Trello automation works on open cards.