From Asana Support
"That’s a great question and you’re right, it is not possible to work collaboratively on a document, although I can certainly understand how this could improve Asana! For now, you can only attach hard copies of files from different sources. The file would then need to be downloaded and worked on separately.
To be completely honest, we don’t have any immediate changes for this planned in the near term."
It seems to me that live linking to live docs in Sharepoint or Drop Box, or for Mac people, iCloud, would be an incredible benefit. If you agree please reply and add your clamorous agreement!
Also the Technology behind Drop Box is not rocket science, I would think Asana could “roll their own” collaborative editing feature, or license the the service offered form another party and incorporate it in Asana it .
Hi @Oliver_Reid, I’d like to understand your feedback better.
We use sharepoint online a lot. Generally if we collaborating in a document, we use built in comments and review functionality in Word. People will sometimes post their comments in Asana proper making it cumbersome to consolidate everyone’s thoughts.
I’ve tried to solve this issue by asking my team to create specific tasks for what they want people to do in a document (e.g., review comments, review document, write a section, etc.) and post links to the documents in the Asana task description. I also ask that they post comments on the document itself within the document to keep them centralized.
My main issue with all this has to do more with Microsoft creating such horrible links for our documents.
So I’m wondering if you can give me more details on what you’d like to see.
I think I like where you’re going with this as I find getting my teammates to consistently use Asana to generate collaborative documentation tasks difficult at times, but I’ve never seen a way to improve that with Asana itself that would simplify the overall issue if consistency.
Ideally I would like to see the ability to open, edit and replace a document that is stored on mainstream cloud document sharing services like Sharepoint, Drop Box, Box, or iCloud.
Failing or in addition that I would like to see Asana include its own collaborative document editing feature. This is not, to my mind, very complicated. For example I have simple a FTP client that let’s you do that with files in a cloud FTP repository. (One would need a check out/check in feature of course)
Refining an IT spec. document is an obvious use. But a tasks such refining a corporate mission statement, or marketing material, are obvious applications where “groupthink” is needed.
Currently I handle the open/edit functionality by pasting the link to the document in question in the Asana task description. Using the links in task descriptions is what allowed me to get our team away from what used to be my biggest pain point when we first started using Asana: Thinking it could be a document review management tool. People were writing documents in the task description and then people were stomping all over their changes, or they’d upload word documents to a task and everyone would download them for review and edits creating a mess of copies and versions, etc. Now if I see a word doc attached to an Asana task, I upload it to sharepoint, delete the document, and put the link back in.
It sounds like we may be looking for slightly different things. It sounds like you’re just wanting the documents to be more holistically integrated with Asana. For myself, I wouldn’t mind some quality of life things that allow my document links to be managed (I’ve voted for some other suggestions to all Tasks to have a links section) as well as pull a thumbnail or something into the task like attaching an image does. This is a task I’ve voted for:
Thanks for explaining more, I hope I haven’t distracted you too much.
Hi, I figured out how to “attach” a link to a document in Sharepoint.
In the Sharepoint folder click on the document you want to link to in Sharepoint.
Under the “New+” menu, choose “Link”
In the task, choose the Attachments menu => Your Computer
Locate the URL link in your File Manager
The URL is linked to the task
When you click on the link, it downloads the link to your computer, then you can click on the link and open it up in the Sharepoint application.
It’s messy, but it works, and you can see the URL under the Files menu for the project.
We would find in-asana document editing to be very helpful for things like product specs or campaign briefs. Linking out to an external document is a clunky experience and fractures conversation on a given topic and we’d prefer to build workflows around as few tools as possible (in this example Asana would replace Google Docs—we’d write, review, & modify project plans directly in Asana as well as manage the end-to-end project).
I would find that collaboratively editing a task would be just as good for us. At this point if 2 people are editing the same task then one’s edits gets overwritten by the other. Is there any plan to address that?
I too am struggling with how best to employ Asana to completely help with our document review work. I use a “View/Edit” SHARE link to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint once i’ve uploaded the file to OneDrive. I put this link in the task description and that part all works great.
When I assign this review to my colleague and he completes that task, it “falls off” the list because it’s completed and my filter is set to “show uncompleted.” That’s fine, I can change that. But that’s not the problem.
The problem is that I want to own the task - since I made the request and have the responsibility - but I need him to do his part.
Now that I’m typing this out, it sounds like the better approach would be to create a TASK (assigned to me) to complete the creation of the document, and then create a SUBTASK assigned to my colleague for him to do his review, and then be able to “check it off” as completed. He can the leave comments at the TASK level which I would easily see.
This is quite a critical use case for my organisation. We can’t integrate with the existing options e.g. Google docs, onedrive/sharepoint due to security concerns. Will be ideal if we can just upload a doc on Asana and it enables collaborative real-time edit on Asana platform itself.
This might have been stated already, but we currently do this by editing the description of a task. We generally make sure we don’t have multiple people working on the same task description to avoid conflicts. But even still, they always continue to happen.
Linking to Google Drive would be fine if we didn’t have generally 10 documents per month constituting various announcements and social media posts.
This feature would mean a lot to our organization.
Thank you!
It would be very helpful to be able to collaborate on a document within ASANA. Each question in the document would be a task in ASANA for different internal teams to work on. At the end we would have a completed document
I am looking for a solution to take the custom field data for existing tasks in a project and create + populate a word document for each of those tasks.
Has anyone had experience doing this before? Wondering if it would first be a connection to a spreadsheet then the use Zapier or Integromat to create a document/update a document for each line and its corresponding data?
We see a similar issue and I wonder if anyone has found a solution. Our team uses word documents and PPT alot and they make comments directly on these. So they feel that using asana is double the work. Any ideas for helping individuals adopt asana when they have to use word documents and are used to using these documents to share with leadership, so they don’t see the value in tracking what they know they have to do in the document already.