Duplicate/Copy Forms between Projects

We produce several podcast/vidcasts, and in trying to streamline potential guest submissions from our team and outside consultants/listeners, we are experimenting with using forms for those submissions. We’ve created a very detailed form that we like that will work well for us, but am quite surprised that I can’t duplicate that form to use in other projects. I understand I can make a project a template and include the form, but that’s unhelpful for all of the other projects that are already created in Asana that I’d like to use a duplicate/similar form. Starting from scratch every time is rather a waste of time when the wheel’s already been created on another project.

I’m still not certain Asana is a useful tool for this kind of submission to add to a database. This might be better served using Airtable. But if we do discover that the potential guest submission form IS useful in Asana, I would love to be able create duplicates of a form for use in other projects.

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Hi @anon63027503, thanks for providing this feedback!

You do have the option to duplicate forms when creating a project from a template or when duplicating a project containing a form. So, in this case, I suggest you create a template project with the form you would like to use and just use this template going forward when creating projects.

I hope this helps! :slight_smile:

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That would help for future projects. But I currently have quite a few projects that have been set up and received a great deal of customizing for each project’s needs. So all of those forms have to be created from scratch.

The huge flaw I see in the programmer’s thinking about “just create a template and use that in the future if you want to replicate something like forms”, is that it requires users to have a crystal ball to know many factors that may not be clear at the start of a project set up on Asana. Forms being a perfect example of that. We didn’t know that we needed or would find use in a form when setting up multiple projects. Nor would we have known at that point what pertinent info might be useful in such a form.

Without a crystal ball, user must make adjustments as we go. And there’s no way it would ever make sense to throw out a full Asana project that has been customized and refined over time, just to save time in starting over fully with a template that has something like a form in it. That would make zero sense.

It also forces the user, when creating a template, to spend a LOT of wattage on trying to foresee every contingency and scenario that may or may not come up before implementing a template’s use, simply because it’s a one shot deal. Get it wrong, or fail to see into the future, and something like a form has to be custom created for every project utilizing that template - even if it’s the exact same thing being implemented on all projects. But I suppose that is another issue altogether: projects created with templates will not update with new implementations on the template once they’ve been initially created.

I finally found a workaround in Airtable for that scenario - a simple copy and past of a field from one project to another will recreate the entire column’s specifics in the new project. It’s not a perfect, but I do wish Asana at least had something like that - copy and paste the form from one existing project and into another.

Anyway, I simply want the programmers to remember that we do not have crystal balls when creating templates. Often we’ll discover something incredibly useful in one project’s Asana setup that would be useful in other existing projects. And it does seem a silly waste of time to recreate the wheel again every time something like that happens. In our business, which is made up of a very long term projects, we spend a lot of time duplicating new Asana fields, forms, rules, etc. between our many projects. And the “use the template to create a new project” solution may not really be a useful solution until a year or two out when we have completed current projects and begin moving on to new ones.

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