Before you import your CSV, take the time to quickly consider and adjust these things in your spreadsheet.
Responsibility: Your column that contains the name of the teammate responsible for the task will be mapped to the assignee field. Note that this needs to be their work email address.
Dates: You can track both due dates and start dates in Asana. In your spreadsheet separate the dates into two columns. Start dates are an Asana Premium feature and if you are not on the premium version your start date column will appear in the description. Please note that dates import as month, date, year format. Date columns will need to be re-formatted before import.
Other Information: In addition to task name, assignee, or due dates, additional columns can be mapped to custom fields (see sub-bullet.) Otherwise additional column information will be listed from top to bottom in the task description field in the order of your columns.
Plus: Custom fields help you categorize and track priorities; you can also sort or search by field. Some good uses for custom fields are priority, project stage, team and estimated time. Custom fields are an Asana Premium feature.
1.Login or sign up for Asana
2. Create a project by clicking the + button in the top bar or select an existing project.
3. Select the project header drop down menu next to your project ‘s name, then Add Tasks via, then choose CSV.
4. Browse for your file or drag into the importer.
5. If your spreadsheet has a header row, click the Use first row as column names checkbox.
6. Map your columns to Task, Task Assignee, and Task Due Date. If you have custom fields you can select and map these now.
7. Start your import!
Once you have imported a spreadsheet into a project, any additional spreadsheet imports to the project will add to, not replace the information you have in the project.
What do you think? Let us know if you have questions.
In general, I like the design, especially the fact that you can map the columns in the CSV to the fields in the board. The one thing that is missing, IMHO, is that the tasks are always imported into the first column. This should be an option as the first column may or may not be the desired location.
Hi @Elyse_Sims yes! There are additional options for premium users but with the free version you will be able to map tasks, due date and assignee into a project.
So far I realy like it and think it has great potential for our team.
All our Programmes are in MS Project and I’m experimenting with the CSV Import tool. But I’m struggling to get the results I’m hoping for. Is there a how to video or detailed user guide.
My testing reveals a subtask from an Asana export is imported as a task on the same level as parent, so yes, not available at the moment.
Concerning your request about premier and free user, I can’t seem to see it. Can you share it in a dedicated thread if it does not relate to CSV Importer?
There are a couple of other observations around subtasks.
We would use these on almost all projects to simplify the list/Board.
It would be great to be able to import task with subtasks into the systems as I’ve said.
It would also be great if the Board entry showed the existence of subtasks with some sort of emoji/gif. At present if you create them you don’t know from the UI if the task has subtasks or not.
In task list it seems that the project title is not shown as it is for parent tasks. Am i missing a setting here?
Hi @Keith_Davidson - Happy to help! I’ve reached out to my colleague who is more familiar with the importer than I am. I’ll circle back with you as soon as I have more info
Agreed on what you said. Also “Subtasks don’t seem to inherit the colour of the parent task in calendar view. Again is that a setting issue?” I think this issue has been raised in the Community before.
Hi @Keith_Davidson we’ve noted your feedback on being able to import tasks with subtasks from CSV files. How do you currently format subtasks in your CSV file?
Can you clarify if your questions related to a board subtask showing a gif/emoji and subtasks not inheriting the colour of the parent task in calendar view are related to the CSV importer?
Re formatting I’ve not Reid as the CSV Importer UI appears to have no method to assign an imported task as a sub task. One of your colleagues Bastien has confirmed this is the case.
In relation to the Board emoji is not related to import (as you cant import a sub task). The sub tasks I used for this were manually created using the UI. The colour change was performed before I set up the sub tasks.
@Maimoona_Block , having some experience in this with my PDF Output that I gave the community, I think the only way you are going to accomplish this is to have subtasks mapped to a Parent Task that already exists, or the import file will need to make sure it is structured to create the Parent Task, followed by a separate line for the subtasks with that line of the CSV file containing the existing or Parent Task. My guess is that it will need to be mapped though as to easy to to misspell etc.
I’m just doing a dummy project right now - this is all great except:
Tags are a vital part of how we use Asana, so that we can see tasks as colour coded blocks in our calendar. Please can you add the facility to import tags in the CSV as well?
