Allow to have different columns in a same project depending on which view (Board or List) you're looking at

[Collin_Vine]

Our team is making use of the new List to Board switching feature for a lot of projects in our company (OKRs) and individual teams.

We want to edit how columns are generated in Board view, and have different columns than the Sections in the list view.

For example, in our team OKRs, we have a list View that uses Sections to organize OKRs by team. In the Board view, we would want to setup a common kanban workflow (todo, doing, done) to track the status of tasks.

In the current implementation, the tasks are just in columns labeled by Teams as they are in list view, and this is useless for us. It’s impossible to create a kanban workflow like this.

What we’d want is to be able to customize how the Board view is created. Ideally, we’d select a custom field to view the Board by. For example, have a Custom Field for “status” and generate Board Columns based off of that. Status could be “on hold”, “todo”, “doing”, done", etc.

This is a feature request to enable different views between List and Board, and to enable it to be easier for Boards to be turned into kanban workflows.

[Marie]

Thanks for reaching out and sharing your feedback with us. So if I’m getting this right, you’d like to have different sections depending on which view (Board or List) you’re looking at? I don’t believe this is technically possible, but please let me know if I have misunderstood you!

If you can feel free to share some screenshot to illustrate your current set up, it might help us better understand what you’re looking for! Thanks!

[Collin_Vine]

That’s right.

A good example of a product doing this well is Airtable. You’re able to generate kanban views based on a specific column, in their case.

I’d like to be able to generate a board view based off of a custom field, and not share columns between List and Board views.

[Marie]

Thanks for the additional info. i’ve gone ahead and edited the title of this thread so it better reflects your feedback! As far as I’m aware, I don’t think this is part of our near-term plans but I’ll be sure to keep you updated as soon as I have a rely!

[Vince_Mustachio]

It’s a good idea and a reasonable use case. A list view for logical grouping and a board view for Kanban. In the mean time consider the following work around.

Have all Tasks belong to 2 Projects. One Project organizes the Tasks by team and the other Project organizes the Tasks on a Kanban board.

[Tim_Jasper]

I strongly concur @Collin_Vine. I’m not convinced by the new board/list switching. I think the best scenario for List view was to retain the old section functionality. For boards using a custom field for the column names would have made more sense and allowed easy syncing of task status across projects.

Rules have just been released so I’m hopeful this will alleviate this issue. Also flowasana is very helpful and relevant.

[OSTMOST]

@Marie @Collin_Vine one of the big strength of Asana is the multihoming of tasks in different projects. So you just have to set up a new project where you manage your kanban workflow and select this as a second project for your tasks in the team okr project. The design of making the sections the same in list and board view is a great feature for so many other usecases that I am happy that they decide to use this design for it. And be happy that you can use it since july we do not have the feature until now and I am waiting every day

[Marie]

I agree you @OSTMOST and as I mentioned previously I don’t believe this is technically feasible, but it is important everyone can share their thoughts in the Forum, so keeping this thread open

Our team is making great progress with the migration, they’re now ahead of schedule, so it shouldn’t be too long until this new feature is available to everyone

[Fabian_Konig]

Also a HUGE +1 from me. The new board <> list switching is great. But since we’re now unable to “complete” a section things get really messy.

Besides being able to hide sections from the board view, it should be possible to mark sections (and thus also board columns) as “complete”. They should follow the setting displaying only open, only closed or all tasks.

Thanks & Regars
Fabian

[Pavel_Parshin]

Hi!

With the recent update, there are same sections in Board and List view. It seems that it is becoming inconvenient for us – sections in list view are more likely to be used as separators for different “blocks” of work, while columns in boards - as statuses of work (to-do - in progress - done).

Is it possible somehow to differentiate these, or are you going to change it in further updates?
Now list / board views logically duplicate each other and since that – boards make no sense for us.

[JustinF]

Came here to make this exact suggestion. I would love the ability to have statuses represent the columns in the board view, whilst maintaining the sections in the list view.

Currently it is just a different way of visualising the same information that does not feel very valuable.

[Natalia]

Welcome to the Forum @Pavel_Parshin and @JustinF

Thank you for taking time to share your feedback wit us! I’m sorry to hear this new update hasn’t brought any value to your workflow.

There is an existing thread regarding this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to consolidate feedback. And while I don’t think we are planning to change it in the near future, I’ll make sure to update this thread if I hear anything on my end!

Thank you again for your feedback! I hope you have a great week!

[Holland_Phillips]

I agree! To me, the Kanban board should be able to function almost like an Excel pivot table where the columns can change according to the selected field.

For instance, in this sample project, I’d like the option to “pivot” the columns in the project’s Board view to segment the data according to assignee or status or project size. This would allow me to see the data in a variety of different ways, and would be be a way to determine an individual’s workload.

[Barak_Bruerd]

In my organization we typically subdivided tasks into sections that represent categories of work or phases or objectives. And then use Fields to set priorities and process states (eg: do, doing, done, hold, review, approve). While we love boards and their visual application, they are not as useful because they essentially turn a horizontal list into a vertical list that’s organized exactly the same same way - by sections.

A much more useful approach to boards would be the ability to toggle column view between Sections and Fields. So in Board view I could set the columns to match Process states. Thus my list view would break out actives by objectives, and when I switch to board view I’d see those activities on a board organized by whats in the backlog, up next, doing, waiting approval, and done. Or I could toggle it by a Priority field, or any other field. And back to column by section.

This would give us a much more versatile and powerful board for managing tasks that would make it less redundant to the list view. Also - see horizontal swim lane feature request for a similar implementation of this idea that would further enhance the board view.

[Bastien_Siebman]

I believe this is an existing requested feature, cc @moderators they will reroute your message!

[Natalia]

Thank you @Barak_Bruerd for sharing your feedback with us! And for letting us know how useful this feature would be for your Organization!

I’m merging your post with the existing thread we have on this topic. Please don’t forget to upvote it!

Thank you @Bastien_Siebman for flagging it! Have a nice Friday!

[Just]

Hi, I second Barak’s and Collin’s impression:
Being able to pivot the board for different fields would bring a lot of value instead of having the board view simply turn the vertical list into a horizontal column list. The board as is, doesn’t really seem to serve a purpose other than giving me a different view.

If we were allowed to change the columns to be organized by different fields (and allow us to set this as default or save it somehow), we could start to monitor progress by using the “task progress” field, organize for “who has too much to do” my pivoting to the “assignee” field, or similar elements that would bring proper value to whatever we want to do (which might totally depend on the team using Asana).

In the end, the sections from the list view might just be another field as well and this type of re-sorting could be extended to the list view as well, but I don’t want to propose too many changes at the same time.

[Dhruv_Agarwal]

definitely need this please fix this issue so we can select which column the board view populates the stages with!

[Tim_Jasper]

Strongly agree @Collin_Vine . This could be achieved by this idea

Link board column and section names to user selected field or custom field

This would allow users to set (and change as required) standard workflows across multiple projects as they see fit without the need to use multiple unnecessary rules every time a new project is created. In my opinion this is how sections / board columns should have been implemented in the first place. The flexibility and ease of use would have been amazing.

[Brian_Carmichall]

Strongly agree. Only using sections as the board headings is a little strange. Sections in a list or GANTT (Timeline) indicate blocks of work; phases like: Concept Design, Design Development, etc. Those are logical phases of work. The whole purpose of Kanban is to see task by progress: To Do, In Progress, Stuck, Complete, etc. The board view is currently just the list view. Not usable at all. Disappointing because what I was looking for was something that managed in GANTT and Kanban views. My bad, I just assumed that boards meant Kanban. In this case board just means the list view sideways. Please consider adding the ability to categorize the board by any field or even a selection of fields. Simple database stuff.