Custom Fields keeps getting replaced

Abbas_Fadhil

Hello 🙂

I’m trying Trello’s paid features for the first time, and I just activated the 14‑day trial. After spending a good amount of time creating custom fields, setting options, and building multiple states, I was shocked to see my custom fields getting overwritten.

Here’s what happened:

• I created Task #1 with 4 drop‑down lists.

• Then I created Task #2 with 2 drop‑downs containing many categories and sub‑categories.

• I repeated the same process for Task #3.

But when I went back to Task #1, all the custom fields had changed — they were showing the options from Task #3. The same thing happened to Task #2.

Basically, all my work was replaced, and it was extremely disappointing.

So now I’m wondering: Is this happening because I’m on the trial version, or is this how Trello’s custom fields work by design and cannot be separated per task?

Will upgrading to the Standard plan resolve this issue?

Oleksandr

Hi Abbas,

This is not related to the trial version, and upgrading to Standard will not change this behavior.

In Trello, Custom Fields are created for the entire board, not separately for each card. A dropdown field such as “Status” or “Category” has one shared set of options across all cards on that board. Each card can have its own selected value, but the list of available options is shared. If you edit the options of an existing dropdown field while working on Task #3, the same field is updated on Task #1 and Task #2 as well.

Custom Fields work best for information that follows the same structure across cards, for example:

• Status: Planned, In Progress, Done

• Priority: Low, Medium, High

• Category: Design, Development, Marketing

If each task needs its own independent list of steps, categories, or sub-categories, use checklists instead. Checklist items belong to an individual card, so changing a checklist on Task #3 will not replace the checklist items on Task #1. You can also copy an existing checklist when creating a new one.

On paid plans, Advanced Checklists also allow you to assign members and due dates to individual checklist items.

Custom Fields documentation:
https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/using-custom-fields/

Checklists documentation:
https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/adding-checklists-to-cards/

Advanced Checklists documentation:
https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/how-to-use-advanced-checklists-to-set-due-dates/