Clickthrough versus advanced search

There are a lot of things my partner and I agree on when it comes to Asana. How to use the advanced search is not one them.

Julien considers the search is good to find things you can’t find anymore. You are going to say" duh" because that seems obvious.

What I believe on the other hand is that it is equally important when used to see a subset of tasks within a project.

Here’s the example we were arguing about. For a training, I created a project with a list of candidates for a job. And to teach people how to find the right candidate, I used the search: all incomplete tasks, where the candidate is available with at least 3 years of experience. To me that is a perfect use case for the search.

For Julien, he never thought about the search for a second, and he believes such a result should be given in the project dashboard, and the user should use clickthrough on the chart to see the data.

I disagree because that’s using a “hack”, a dashboard is useful when you care about the aggregated result, and you should not clutter a dashboard with “shortcuts” like this.

So which team are you on? :crossed_swords::upside_down_face:

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I think both have a bit of usefulness but to take @Bastien_Siebman side, there are things you can do in advanced search you cannot do in reports.
For example: give me all the tasks that are upcoming/overdue and not blocked.

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This is a very good post. I see the usability of both scenarios.
I can see myself with Julien on this because I am working already on something and I am in the right dashboard, why do you want me to leave the space and go to the search bar.

I can also see myself on your side especially if you are setting up a training for a group of asana users. I think to train them to use the search feature with all its glory is a good foundation. But to let them know that they can use the dashboard as well is like the icing on the cake.

So all in all, I will take the side of whoever will treat me for cake an coffee :coffee::cake::rofl: so who is it going to be @Bastien_Siebman or @Julien_RENAUD ???

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Well well that is a tricky question.

In general what I often face some struggles with, is showing my team mates the power of the advanced search.

I agree with both ideas, but it really depends on what you are trying to achieve.

However let me add one point: We have a bunch of external parties such as designers, etc that we work with and in some projects they are added to no graphs are set up or required so in this case they always gotta use advances search anyway (because as a guest user they also cannot set up graphs)

Now for the specific example of the job post and candidates:
We also have several HR projects for different positions and one main HR projects were all tasks are multi homes into.
Now we also use a lot of custom fields for info such as: languages spoken, position applied for, email, phone number and a bunch of other things from form submissions to allow us advanced filtering.

Now here is the thing: atm dashboards have a limit of graphs + creating a graph for every single thing we need would be a lot of work and ger confusing (yes there could be one graph that you edit whenever you need a different filtering but that is not ideal at all)

Having said all that we use a mix of both.
When we need some quick overview on candidates that we have in the pipeline for graphs set up we use those, however whenever we need to go into a lot more detailed filtering we use advanced search.

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Thanks for chiming in!