Boards

A board shows the same records as any other list screen, but instead of stacking them in rows it sorts them into vertical columns — one column per value of a single field, most often a status. You move work along by dragging a card from one column to the next.

If your application lets you switch layouts, this one is listed in the layout menu as "Kanban", with a small board icon divided into three columns.

What A Board Is

Three ideas explain almost everything about a board:

• A card is a record. Each card on the board is one record — one task, one order, one job application. Opening the card opens that record.
• A column is one value of one field. The board picks a single field on the record — a Status, a Stage, a Pipeline step, an assigned team — and gives every possible value of that field its own column. A card sits in the column matching its current value.
• Moving a card changes that field. Dragging a card from one column into another writes the new value onto the record. It is a real edit, not a display trick.

Example A "Tasks" list is shown as a board grouped by the Status field. There are four columns: To do, In progress, Blocked and Done. The task "Renew the office insurance" currently has Status = To do, so its card sits in the To do column. Drag it into In progress and the record's Status field now reads "In progress" — for you, for your colleagues, and everywhere else the task appears.

When A Board Is The Right Tool

A board is worth using when:

• the records move through a small number of named stages, and the stage is the thing you care about most
• you want to see how the work is distributed — twelve things in progress and two in review tells you something a table does not
• changing the stage is the most common edit you make, and you would rather drag than open a form

A table is the better tool when:

• you need to read or compare many fields at once
• you need to sort by a value, or select several records and run something on all of them
• you need to export to a spreadsheet
• there are hundreds or thousands of records, or many possible values of the grouping field
• you need the right-click menu for per-record actions such as renaming, deleting or running a custom action

Sorting, multi-record selection, export and the right-click menu are all unavailable on a board. See Tables and Selecting Records And Bulk Actions for what a table adds. If your administrator has placed the layout switcher on the screen, you can move between the two layouts — but switching clears any filters, grouping or sorting you set up by hand on the screen. A saved view keeps its own. See List Screens and Saved Views And Queries.

Reading The Board

The Board Strip

The columns sit side by side in a strip that scrolls sideways. How many columns you see at once depends on the width of your screen: one on a phone, two on a small tablet, and up to five on a wide monitor. A board shown inside a pop-up window is narrower still and shows at most two columns at a time.

Each column also scrolls on its own. A column is roughly as tall as your screen; when it holds more cards than fit, the cards inside that one column scroll while the column header stays put.

While the data is still loading you see a gray placeholder board — four empty-looking columns with blank card shapes. That is not real data, and no column of it is empty in a meaningful sense. Wait for the real cards to appear.

The Column Header

Every column header carries:

• The column name — the value it represents. When the columns come from another kind of record (a Statuses list, for example), the name is that record's own title, so renaming "In review" to "With the client" renames the column for everyone.
• A number next to the name — how many records belong in that column. Read the What The Number Means section before you trust it.
• A small plus button on the right, in some applications — it creates a new record already set to this column's value.

Reading A Card

A card has a heading and a short body.

• The heading is the record's title, shown as a link. Clicking it opens the record in a pop-up window over the board.
• The body is one line per field that the view is currently showing, in the order those fields are listed. The title is not repeated there — it is already the heading. Each line may be preceded by a short bold label, if the field has one.
• Values that carry a color show as a filled colored chip rather than as plain text. Fields that your administrator has marked as chip-like show inline as small gray chips instead of taking a whole line.
• If your administrator has switched on inline tagging for this screen, the card also shows its tags at the bottom, plus a button to manage them if you are allowed to change that record's tags. Tags are covered in Tags And Folders.

Two cards in the same column can show different lines. A field that is hidden for a particular record — because a rule hides it in that situation, or because you are not allowed to see it — is skipped on that card only.

What Decides What Is On A Card

The fields shown on a card are the same set of fields a table would show as columns. If the screen offers the column-picking control in its filter bar, you can change them yourself, and the cards redraw with the new set. See Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.

Keep the set short. A card is a small box; six or seven lines already make the board hard to scan, and the more fields a card carries, the slower a large board is to load.

Column Colors

If the thing that defines a column has a color — for example a Statuses list where "Blocked" is set to red — the whole column, header and body, is tinted with that color, and the text switches to whatever reads best against it. The tint is adjusted automatically in dark mode. Cards themselves are not tinted on a board.

Opening A Record From A Board

Click the card heading. The record opens in a pop-up window over the board; close it and the board is still there, in the same scroll position. See Pop-Up Windows for how stacked pop-ups behave.

There is no other way into a record from a board. Boards have no right-click menu, so per-record commands — delete, rename, custom actions — have to be reached from inside the record, or from a table view of the same list.

Moving A Card: The One Thing To Understand

Dragging a card to another column changes that field on the record straight away. There is no confirmation question, no Save button, and no undo. The change is saved for everyone the moment you let go.

This is the single most important fact about boards. A drag is not a private arrangement of your own screen — it is the same edit you would have made by opening the record, changing the field and saving.

How To Drag

1. Point at the card's heading — the heading is the grab handle. The rest of the card is not draggable.
2. Press and hold, then move. The card you are dragging lifts and tilts slightly, the original fades, and a dotted outline shows where it will land.
3. Move over the target column. The dotted outline follows your position and the cards below it move aside.
4. Let go.

Dragging works with a mouse and with touch, so you can move cards on a tablet.

Because the heading is both the link and the grab handle, a short click opens the record and a press-and-move drags it. If a card opens when you meant to move it, close the pop-up and try again with a slightly longer press before moving.

Worked Example

Example Petra is looking at the Tasks board grouped by Status. She has finished "Renew the office insurance", which is sitting in the In progress column.

She grabs the card by its heading and drops it into Done.

What happens, in this order:

1. The card appears in the Done column, at the position where she dropped it.
2. The task record's Status field is set to "Done" and saved. Nobody is asked to confirm.
3. The Done column's number goes up by one and the In progress column's number goes down by one.
4. Nothing else appears on screen. There is no "saved" message.

Petra's colleague Jan, who has the same board open in his own browser, still sees the card in In progress. Boards do not update themselves when someone else makes a change. Jan sees the move only after he refreshes the list.

If the task was moved by mistake, there is no undo. Petra has to drag it back to In progress, which is a second real edit, or open the record and set the Status field back by hand.

Anything That Watches That Field Also Fires

Because a drag is a real edit, everything your administrator has attached to that field runs as well. Setting a task to Done may send a notification, stamp a completion date, close a parent record, or lock the record from further editing. None of that is announced on the board.

Example On a Job applications board, dragging a candidate from "Interview" to "Rejected" sends the rejection email your administrator configured. Dragging the card back does not unsend it.

If you are not certain what a stage change triggers, open the record and change the field there the first few times, where a form and its messages give you more feedback.

Reordering Inside A Column

You can also drag a card up or down inside its own column. That does not change the board field — the card stays in the same column — but it does save a manual order for the cards in that column.

That order is stored on the records themselves, not on your screen, so your colleagues see it too. Where a list has no sort order of its own, the same manual order is the order the records appear in elsewhere in the application. Rearranging a board column to suit yourself can therefore quietly change the order somebody else sees on a different screen.

When You Are Not Allowed To Make The Change

Boards do not check in advance whether you may move a card. Every card looks draggable to everyone, including people who have read-only access. Nothing on the board tells you afterwards whether the change went through.

A move can be refused for several reasons:

• you are not allowed to edit this kind of record at all
• you are allowed to edit the record type, but not this particular record or this particular field
• a rule refuses the change — a required field is missing, a validation rule fails, or an automation blocks the move

In every one of those cases the result on screen is the same: the card stays where you dropped it, no message appears, and the record was not changed. That is the dangerous part — a refused move looks identical to a successful one. The only way to find out is to refresh the list; the card snaps back to its real column.

Example On an Orders board, an administrator has set a rule that an order cannot reach "Shipped" until a tracking number has been filled in. Tomas drags order 2025-0184 from "Packed" to "Shipped". The card lands in Shipped and looks settled. Nothing tells him the move was refused. When he refreshes the board a minute later, the card is back in "Packed".

The safe habit: after moving a card that matters, use the refresh control in the filter bar and check that the card is still where you put it.

Moving Several Cards Quickly

Move one card at a time and let each drop finish. If you start a second drag before the previous one has finished saving, the second card moves on screen but the change is never sent. The card looks moved and is not.

If you have several cards to move, pause briefly between them, and refresh at the end to confirm all of them landed.

There Is No Multi-Card Drag

Boards have no checkboxes and no selection. You cannot pick five cards and move them together. If you need to change a field on many records at once, use a table layout of the same list and its selection and actions — see Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

Where The Columns Come From

The board takes its columns from the first grouping on the list. A grouping is the "group these records by this field" setting that also produces collapsible group headings on tables and cards; on a board, that same grouping becomes the columns.

Which field it is was decided when the screen was set up. If the filter bar offers a grouping control, you may be able to change it yourself, and the board rebuilds around the new field — but most boards are meant to be read with the grouping they came with.

Two practical consequences:

• If the grouping is removed, the board disappears. Instead of columns you get the message "No active boards." even though records matched. Add the grouping back to get the columns back.
• Only the first grouping makes columns. A second grouping does not create a second row of columns; it subdivides inside each column, which is rarely readable. Boards are best with exactly one grouping.

Column Order

The order of the columns is not something you set on the board, and it never follows the number of cards. Where the columns come from a list of choices that your administrator keeps in a deliberate order — a Statuses list arranged To do → In progress → In review → Done — the board reads left to right in that order. Where they come from an ordinary list of records, expect alphabetical order instead. Where they come from a fixed set of options typed into the field, the order can be whatever order the records came back in.

If a column is in the wrong place, nothing on the board will move it — ask your administrator.

Empty Columns

A column with no cards in it is still a column. It shows its header, its number, and nothing else. This is deliberate: an empty "In review" column tells you that nothing is waiting for review, and it gives you somewhere to drop a card.

This depends a little on how the choices are stored. When the columns come from another kind of record — a Statuses list, a Pipeline stages list — every choice gets a column whether or not anything is in it. When the columns come from a fixed list of options typed into the field itself, only values that at least one record actually uses appear, so an unused stage has no column and you cannot drag anything into it.

The "(none)" Column

Records where the board field is empty are collected into their own column, labeled "(none)", at the left-hand end of the strip. It only appears when at least one record actually has the field empty.

Treat it as a to-sort pile. Dragging a card out of "(none)" fills the field in; dragging a card into "(none)" clears the field.

Example A Support tickets board grouped by Assigned team shows a "(none)" column holding every ticket that has not been routed yet. The morning routine is to empty that column by dragging each ticket onto the team that should handle it.

Records That Are Not On The Board At All

A record can be missing from the board, or turn up somewhere you did not expect, even though it matches the list's filters:

• The column is hidden. Your administrator can limit a board to a chosen set of columns. Records whose value is one of the hidden ones are not moved somewhere else — they are not shown at all. This is the usual reason a board's numbers do not add up to the total you see on the same list in a table layout.
• The value is no longer a valid choice. If a record still carries a stage that has since been removed from the list of choices, it gets a column of its own at the right-hand end of the strip.
• The list is very large. A board is built for a handful of columns and a moderate number of records. On a very large list, some columns can come up with fewer cards than they should — or with none — before you have used Load more at all. If your board has dozens of columns, or the list runs to thousands of records, it is the wrong tool for that field — use a table grouped by it instead.

If a record you expect is missing, check it in a table view of the same list before concluding it has been deleted. Why Your Screen Differs walks through the other reasons rows go missing.

Adding A Card To A Column

Most boards give you two ways to create a record already set to a column's value:

• the plus button in the column header, when the columns come from another kind of record and you are allowed to create those records
• the full-width plus button under the last card in a column

Either one opens the normal create form in a pop-up window, with the board field pre-filled with that column's value. Fill in the rest and save; the new card appears at the bottom of that column.

The button under the cards is shown to everyone, whether or not you are allowed to create records of this kind. If you are not, the form still opens; the refusal only arrives when you try to save it, as a message strip saying the record could not be created. See Roles, Groups And Permissions.

Adding A New Column

When the columns come from another kind of record, and you are allowed to create those records, a dark rounded plus button sits at the far right of the strip, past the last column. It creates a new record of that kind — in other words, a new column. On a Tasks board grouped by Status, it creates a new Status.

That is a change to the way the whole application works, not a change to your own screen. Everyone who uses that field sees the new choice. Use it only if adding stages is genuinely part of your job.

If the columns come from a fixed list of options, neither this button nor the column-header plus button appears at all.

Seeing More Cards: Per-Column Paging

A board does not load every card at once. Each column loads its own first batch of twenty cards, independently of the others.

The "Load More" Button

When a column has more cards than were loaded, a full-width Load more button appears at the bottom of that column, marked with three dots. Clicking it adds the next batch of twenty to that column only — the other columns are untouched, and the rest of the board does not reload.

Keep clicking until the button disappears; when it goes, that column is fully loaded.

Example A Deals board has three columns. "New" shows twenty cards with a Load more button, "Negotiating" shows nine with no button, "Won" shows twenty with a Load more button. That does not mean New and Won have twenty each — it means they have at least twenty each, and Negotiating has exactly nine.

Two things follow from per-column paging:

• A column can hold far more than you see. Never read a board as a complete picture without checking whether any column still has a Load more button.
• Any change to the filters resets it. Adding, removing or editing a filter redraws the whole board, and every column goes back to its first batch. Anything you loaded with Load more has to be loaded again.

There is no page-size control on a board, and no page numbers — the batch size is fixed and the pagination controls you see on tables and cards are not available here.

What The Number Means

The number in a column header is the total number of records in that column, not the number of cards currently loaded. A column showing twenty cards with a header reading 63 has 43 more waiting behind Load more.

That number is worked out once, when the board is drawn. After that your browser only nudges it as you work:

• Moving a card adds one to the column it lands in and takes one off the column it came from.
• Deleting a record takes one off its column.
• Creating a record does not update the number at all — the new card appears, the number does not move.

So the longer a board stays open, the more the numbers can drift from reality. If a count matters — you are reporting it, or comparing it against something — refresh the screen first. On boards whose columns come from a fixed list of options typed into the field, rather than from another kind of record, the number reads 0 on every column, including columns that clearly hold cards. Count the cards in that case, or ask your administrator.

Getting Around A Wide Board

• Sideways: scroll the board strip horizontally. On a trackpad, a two-finger sideways swipe over the strip works; with a mouse, use the horizontal scrollbar that appears under the strip.
• Down a column: scroll with the pointer over that column. Only that column moves.
• Back to the board: boards normally carry a small link with a downward arrow in the header area, labeled "Scroll to boards", unless your administrator has moved or removed it. On a long page — a board sitting under a filter bar with many active filters, or below other content — it jumps the page down so the board strip sits at the top of your screen. Use it after you have been working in the filters and want the columns back in view.

Scroll position is not remembered. Reloading the screen puts you back at the left-hand end of the strip and at the top of every column.

Filtering A Board

The filter bar works the same on a board as anywhere else, and it sits above the columns. Adding a filter narrows what is on the board; the columns stay, and cards drop out of them.

Everything about writing filter conditions is in Filtering Your Data, and saving a filter combination for reuse is in Saved Views And Queries. Two things are specific to boards:

• Filtering resets per-column paging. As described above, each column returns to its first batch.
• Filtering usually does not remove columns. Where the columns come from another kind of record, a filter that leaves a column with no matching records leaves an empty column, not a missing one. This is useful — you can see at a glance that nothing in the filtered set has reached that stage. Where the columns come from a fixed list of options typed into the field, a column that is left with nothing in it disappears instead.

If the filters leave nothing at all, the board is replaced by the screen's "no data" message, with a button to clear the filters again.

Per-Column Totals

If your administrator has added calculations to the list — a sum, an average, a count — a board shows them per column, as small chips at the top of the column's card area, with "All" as the tooltip. On a board those figures cover all the records in that column, not only the cards you have loaded, so they stay correct whether or not you have used Load more.

Example A Deals board grouped by Stage carries a calculation summing the Value field. Each column shows the total value of the deals in that stage — including the ones still behind Load more — so the board doubles as a pipeline value summary.

Calculations are covered in Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.

There Is No Selection And No Right-Click Menu

Boards have neither. There are no checkboxes on cards, there is no select-all control, and right-clicking a card gives you the browser's own menu rather than the application's. This is not a setting your administrator can turn on for boards — it is how the layout works.

Anything that depends on picking records — running an action on several of them at once, exporting to a spreadsheet, the per-record command menu — has to be done from a table layout of the same list.

Other Things A Board Does Not Have

The add-record button in the top right of the screen, the filter bar, the tag cloud and the calculation results are all available on boards as usual, if your administrator has placed them.

How A Board Reacts To Changes

A board does not refresh itself, and it does not show you what other people are doing. Within your own browser tab, though, it does keep itself roughly in step:

• Creating a record of this kind — from the column plus button, from the add button, or from anywhere else on the page — adds its card to the bottom of the matching column. The column's number is not updated. On boards whose columns come from a fixed list of options typed into the field, the new card may not appear until you refresh.
• Editing a record so that its board field changes moves the existing card to the top of the new column. Individual values on the card are updated in place.
• Deleting a record removes its card and reduces that column's number by one.

Everything else — a colleague moving a card, an overnight process changing statuses, a record that now matches your filters — appears only when you refresh. Use the refresh control in the filter bar; it re-runs the whole list with the same filters and rebuilds every column.

Tips And Gotchas

• Treat every drop as a save. There is no confirmation and no undo. On boards where a stage change has consequences — sending mail, locking a record, starting a billing run — slow down.
• A refused move looks like a successful one. If it matters, refresh and check that the card stayed put.
• Refresh before you read numbers off the board. Column counts drift while the board is open, and creating a record does not update them at all.
• Check for Load more before you conclude a column is short. Twenty cards and a Load more button means "at least twenty".
• Dragging inside a column changes an order other people see. It is a saved order on the records, not a personal arrangement.
• Do not drag two cards in quick succession. Let each drop finish saving; a second drag started too soon moves the card on screen without saving it.
• Keep the card fields few. Cards are small, and every extra field slows a large board down.
• A board with dozens of columns is the wrong tool. Group by that field in a table instead.
• The columns are shared, the layout choice may not be. If your application lets you switch layouts, your choice is remembered for your current browsing session only — colleagues still see the screen's configured layout.
• Placeholder columns are not empty columns. While the board is loading you see gray card shapes in four columns. Wait for the real cards.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

• "Group the board by a different field" — for example by assignee instead of by status.
• "Change the order of the columns" — you cannot set it from the board itself.
• "Add / rename / retire a stage."
• "Hide the columns we never use" — for example old stages that only historical records still carry.
• "Show these fields on the cards, not those" — if the screen does not let you pick fields yourself.
• "Give the stages colors" so the columns are distinguishable at a glance.
• "Put the layout switcher on this screen" so we can move between the board and a table.
• "Let us tag records straight from the cards."
• "Stop the board from letting people drag into without " — or the reverse, if a rule is refusing moves silently and nobody can tell why.
• "Why does the board show fewer records than the table?" — usually hidden columns.

Related Chapters

• List Screens
• Tables
• Filtering Your Data
• Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations
• Selecting Records And Bulk Actions