Connecting Excel or Google Sheets to a Trello board
You can connect a Google Sheet to a Trello board so the board follows the sheet instead of copying it once. Paste the sheet link, share it so anyone with the link can view, and each sync creates cards for new rows, updates changed ones and archives deleted ones. Cards edited by hand survive untouched.
Import once, or stay connected
These are two different jobs and it is worth knowing which one you have.
An import copies the spreadsheet into Trello one time. After that the two have nothing to do with each other. Change the sheet and the board does not know. This is the right choice when the spreadsheet was a staging area and the board is about to become the real home of the work.
Connecting is for the other case, where the spreadsheet is the thing your team genuinely keeps up to date. A planning sheet a department owns, a roster, a schedule somebody maintains because that is where they already work. Here you do not want a copy that immediately goes stale. You want the board to follow.
If you are not sure which you have, ask who will edit the spreadsheet next week. If the honest answer is nobody, import it once.
What you need
A Google Sheet, or a file in a GitHub repository. Both can be read directly by a browser, which is what makes this work without a server in the middle.
The sheet has to be shared so that anyone with the link can view it. This is the step people miss. Your board reads the sheet as an anonymous visitor, not as you, so a private sheet is refused even though it opens perfectly in your own browser. View only is enough. Nobody needs edit access.
Dropbox, OneDrive and SharePoint do not work. None of them lets another site read a file from a browser, and no amount of link fiddling changes that. Move the file to Google Sheets or GitHub.
Connecting a sheet
Open the Power-Up on the board, expand Or keep this board in sync with a Google Sheet, and paste the link straight from your address bar. The ordinary /edit link is fine. It is converted into a CSV export link for you, and the tab you were looking at is the tab that syncs, so a workbook with four tabs connects to the one you meant.
Match the columns as you would for an import, tick Keep this board in sync, and save. The first sync creates the cards.
What each sync does
| In the sheet | On the board |
|---|---|
| A new row | A new card |
| A changed row | That card is updated |
| A deleted row | That card is archived, not deleted |
| An unchanged row | Nothing at all |
Archiving rather than deleting is deliberate. A row removed by accident costs you a trip to the archive, not the card's comments and history.
What it will not touch
Sync owns the fields it wrote and leaves everything else alone. Comments people added, attachments, card position, members added in Trello, and any card that did not come from the sheet are all untouched.
The one that matters most: a card somebody edited by hand survives, as long as the row behind it has not changed since the last sync. Rewrite a card's description in Trello and sync again, and your wording stays. Change that row in the sheet and the sheet wins, because at that point you have two people asserting different things and the sheet is the one you declared the source.
This is why sync is safe to leave on. The usual fear is that an automatic process will quietly undo somebody's work overnight, and that is the case this rule exists to prevent.
When it syncs
When you open the Power-Up and ask it to. There is no background job, nothing runs while the board is closed, and nothing happens without a click. Opening a connected board reads the sheet and shows you what changed before writing anything.
That is a deliberate trade. Keeping a server that polls your spreadsheet would mean holding your Trello token, and this Power-Up holds nothing: your file is read in your browser and the cards go straight to Trello.
Disconnecting
Unsubscribe and the board stops following the sheet. The cards stay exactly where they are. Nothing is removed, because deleting somebody's board when they unsubscribe would be indefensible.
Try it
Kanban Importer is free. The step by step version of the above is in keeping a board in sync, and if you only need a one time copy, getting a spreadsheet into Trello covers the five things that usually go wrong.
Need something like this built around your own workflow? That is custom app development.