Best practices for providing feedback on PDF's while having overview in Asana

Dear community,

Does anyone have any tips, tricks or best practices around how to provide feedback on PDF files in Asana?

The PDF’s are stored in OneDrive. We want to be able to link a given PDF to a task. In this task there are subtasks for each department that needs to provide feedback on the PDF and ultimately approve the PDF for the next round of feedback and approval.

We want to make sure that the same file is used through the rounds of feedback and approvals.

Best we can get so far is to comment in Asana with a location of the PDF and then manually follow that location and open in acrobat which is super cumbersome.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!
Erik

1 Like

One crazy (but maybe not so bad idea) would be to export the PDF as images, upload images in a task, and then use Proofing to provide feedback. Provide actionable design feedback with Proofing from Asana

That requires a Business tier though.

Or you can find another tool online to share a PDF and allow annotations?

4 Likes

Funny, I just recommended the same thing to a client a couple days ago!

Larry

3 Likes

Proofing is a very basic tool, honestly. It has major limitations that make it not very useful if your team needs to work on images often. The fact that it creates subtasks makes it very easy for contributors to keep sub-tasking ad infinitum. For example, Image-v1 gets a comment and subtask is created. Designer goes to subtask, adds one more comment and uploads a Image-v2 in the subtask. Then approver goes to sub-sub-task, adds another comment creates a sub-sub-subtask and things spiral out of control rapidly.

None of the best practice for Proofing give any suggestion on how to deal with an actual real-life workflows. The tool is cumbersome and counter-intuitive to use for less than trivial reviews.

There are other limitations, like with large images I don’t see a way to zoom into parts of it (at least on Firefox)