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.
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.
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 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?
They probably had a good reason for doing this, and I’d rather have boards now with this limitation than no boards at all
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)
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.