Custom fields only within specific sections

I wondered if anyone else would find this useful (sorry my search did not come up with the same request if it’s already been made).

I’d love for custom fields to have the option to be shown or hidden based on the section that particular task is in. This helps do multiple custom fields that are not relevant to all tasks within a project, without gumming up the display outside of the specific tasks that they are relevant to.

1 Like

Hi Matt and welcome to the forum! Great suggestion. I agree that there are certain custom fields that might pertain to tasks within certain sections and adding numerous custom fields to a project can clutter up the view. I don’t believe this suggestion has been made before. Now that the new sections (Sections are dead! Long live sections!) has just rolled out this month, this would be a great additional feature in the future.

Katie

3 Likes

Current situation:
In a project, we have several sections that need different custom fields. So we have the following situation:
In some sections, the tasks are full of empty custom fields and it is hard to see which are relevant.
In some sections, the tasks are very long because of answered custom fields that are not relevant at all.

Suggestion:
Let the customer decide, to which section(s) the custom field belongs.

Value:
Better UI, better Overview, faster editing of the task

1 Like

Duplicate of https://forum.asana.com/t/custom-fields-only-within-specific-sections/40612

Welcome to the Forum @Jessi1 and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

Since there is already an existing thread regarding this topic, I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to avoid duplications. I hope it’s OK.

Have a great week!

Absolutely agree. Also, if redesigning this, it would be great if a secion-title could have a field associated. E.g. to show the overall status of that section.

Upvoting a couple ideas here:

  1. Also have a need to have different custom fields depending which section the task is in.
  2. Agree with @Jens1 – custom fields for section titles would be huge. Currently using a milestone task at the top of each section, but that feels messy.

Greetings Asana Team~

Would it be possible to add an option to allow custom fields per the section of the project, instead of having those fields define all sections within the project? It would be nice to have the ability to have 1 project with many sections that can be individually defined by their columns. This would create for a more organized project list in Asana as a whole, as we have many ‘Projects’ that are realistically one project, however we had to break them apart to get the column definition/structure right.

Thank you in advance for any feedback/time on this matter!

Thanks for your feedback, @Julia_Endress! We already have a thread on this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged tour post with Custom fields only within specific sections to consolidate feedback.

My projects tend to be organized by sections which contain tasks that require different custom fields. For example, a trip project may have a section on what to pack, expenses, and people to interact with. For the expenses section I might like to show a custom field to indicate the amount. For people I might like to include a URL to their homepage. I only want to see the custom fields that are relevant for each section, and these custom fields may be inherited anyway from different projects.

If this section-level filtering of visible custom fields exists, I would love to know how to use it. If not, I’d like to suggest it as a new option.

Thanks!
Jeremy Levy

Hello @Jeremy_Levy,
currently this is not possible. However I have found an existing feedback request thread so I have merged your post. Don‘t forget to also upvote at the top.

1 Like

Yes please - love this idea!

Adding another vote in for this (I also actually voted above)! Sometimes a task is multi-homed to several other projects and it would be very helpful if we could emulate the same section in all projects to show only relevant info in that section. As someone mentioned above, in a “People” section I don’t need to see the “$$” field. In the “Expenses” section, I don’t need to see a “Link to their homepage” field, and so forth.

Not sure how this would work, but it certainly feels like a good idea to explore! Tasks that inherit a whole project’s worth of custom fields start to get SUPER cluttered, especially when there’s nothing in most of the fields (because only one or two apply) and you have to scroll down to get to the actual useful information (description, comments, etc.).