Converting project type from List to Board or Board to List?

There’s a discussion of this but it is inexplicably marked Closed. Switching from Boards to List View (and vice versa) - #153 by Jacob_Mitchell

Perhaps that’s why I can’t comment in it.

What’s the barrier to adding this functionality? It’s a painfully obvious use case. It should have been designed in in the first place.

It should have been designed in in the first place.

This is exactly why this will never be addressed. The application was not developed properly and now for them to change it is a huge overhaul, causing all other integrations and functions to break.

It’s the same for any other obvious feature that does not exist with Asana, take basic notifications for example.

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Basic notifications?

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Okay, so I went and gave a quick look at the discussion Desktop Notifications - #8 by Jeroen_Rommelaars.

Basically you’re talking about desktop notifications — probably via web browser?

I’m super satisfied with Asana’s Inbox. I consider it inspired design. I would personally not enable desktop (via Windows or via browser) notifications for Asana.

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Inbox is great, is just about getting those notifications instantly, so the user is prompted to act.

Funny enough, they have the option to turn on browser notifications for this forum, but not for the Asana app itself.

Anyway I don’t want to get side tracked from an important issue you’ve brought up - hopefully we receive a response.

Yeah. I’m just weighing in on my needs. Browser notifications are valuable.

Funny enough, they have the option to turn on browser notifications for this forum, but not for the Asana app itself.

This forum is Discourse-based, I believe. Not Asana’s product. :slight_smile:

The underlying data model between board and list are different, that makes it difficult to allow the switch. Honestly I prefer having the current boards for the past few months than just wait months to get everything working perfectly. This is 2018, all modern software are developed iteratively :slight_smile: but I understand the frustration!

@Bastien_Siebman Bastien, but why have so many pm Services build this feature? Why uses asana two different data Models for Boards and lists? Wouldn’t it be easier to use the same and just change the look of view? I didn’t understand this, because switching is such a vital function. And why did asanas Support did not mention anything about this, but many many people are asking for? Did you know anything about this?

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Dennis,

Here’s a post I wrote that discusses one big known difference involving Sections:

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They probably had a good reason for doing this, and I’d rather have boards now with this limitation than no boards at all :stuck_out_tongue:
It is a vital function for you, millions of users still use Asana without it, there are (imperfect) workarounds. But I am sure they’ll get on it soon enough.

Many here are far past my understanding of Asana under the hood, but it seems to me the discussed problem is that the option is for tasks to be in a board or list view. The “real” problem from my perspective is that my Projects are stuck in a list view. We are a custom job shop (custom cabinetry) and a board view give me a good overview of the state of jobs in the business. So as it stands now we place each of our jobs as a ‘task’ in the various board views we have (Essentially different departments within our organization)

Because in board view the movable items are ‘tasks’ so much critical work flow pushes down to a sub-task level and is tedious to track and I loose a lot of the task functions (especially the ability to email a task)

With Bridge24 for Asana, List projects can be viewed as Board projects, no need to convert anything, it just works.

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I’ve found another work around to converting board projects to list projects that I haven’t seen mentioned in any threads (sorry if it already exists):

I used the following steps to convert:

  • Export your board project to a csv file
  • Open the csv file in an editor ( I used Excel)
  • Here’s the magic of dealing with the issue of converting columns into sections or parent tasks:
    • Convert “Columns” to Sections:
      • Wherever a value is present in the field titled “Columns”, insert a row above that line, then paste the corresponding value in the columns field into the Name field followed by “:” – This is slightly cumbersome, but if you’re either bit of a wiz with Excel, it’s not too time consuming, although certainly not ideal.
    • Convert “Columns” to Parent Tasks:
      • As with converting to sections, insert a row above a line where the Columns field is populated.
      • Paste the corresponding Column field value into the Name field.
      • For each task that should be a subtask of the corresponding Column value, paste the value into the Parent task field for that row.
  • Save your modified csv file.
  • Create a new project in Asana which will be your new list version of the project.
  • Within Project Actions, go to the menu option “Add Tasks via” and choose csv.
  • Upload the csv file you just created
  • You’ll be given the opportunity to review the csv being imported, if all looks good, click continue.
  • The next screen should give you the opportunity to map the fields in your csv file to new fields in your new list version of your project.
    • Key considerations here:
      • Map the field “Parent Task” to “Subtask Of
      • Your descriptions from your board project do not have a corresponding field for list item descriptions to map to (perhaps this is something Asana could program more easily than an entire conversion process?). However, in the Options below the field mapping, if you check off “Include data in task descriptions” the description field from your board project items will end up in the appropriate list item’s description field, but with all the other fields in your csv file as well. This was the most time consuming part of this process – sanitizing the new description fields manually, one by one – try it, you’ll see what I mean. I think Asana would be able to easily address this by allowing a description fields from a csv file to be mapped to the receiving projects description fields. I am using the free version of Asana as I’m a one man show, perhaps this IS an option in the paid version, I wouldn’t be able to say.

This worked for me. I hope someone else will find this useful while Asana is working on a more automated way to do this.

OMG, too much work, and it does not sync new tasks… :frowning:

Okay so Updated the ASANA Android Mobile App today…

The details of the update where?

"We know what Boards like. We know what Lists want. We know what Boards like…Boards like…Lists!

Yup, this version lets you convert Board projects to Lists and vice versa."

But can’t seem to work out how or do it via the Web Version or see any announcements or blog post on it…

@Cathya and @Edda - Should we all be excited…

Jason.

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Hi @Jason_Woods thank you so much for mentioning me!

Yes! Get excited, this feature has been in the works for SOOO long, and we’re getting ready to launch it soon.

Once I have more details to share I can follow up here, but yes! This is not a false alarm.

Hope this helps!

Kind Regards,

Cathya :sparkles::blush:

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