How many people use the “Files” summary option under project. I am glad that Asana is moving towards a place to see centralized attachments but without the ability to filter or sort it just does not help much. I would like to be able to filter by: Date Added, File Type, Who posted etc. In essence it would be nice to attach some of the advanced search to the file view. Maybe I am missing something?
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Agreed, some sorting/filtering would be great!
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Thanks for the great suggestion, @JCarl and @mjanofsky. We can capture this request and pass it along to the team. To do so, it would be great to learn more about how you are using attachments and when the filtered view/report on attachments would be helpful for the team. Let us know and we’ll share your experience with the team.
I use attachments all the time throughout several organizations, all the way from keeping financial statements to financial research documents etc. The file view takes up a considerably amount of visual space. I wish there were the same options as Windows File Manager first
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I would like to be able to filter by: Date Added, File Type, Who posted etc. In addition because Files is available in My Tasks I think it would be helpful to add the Team(organization) or Workspace (individual) and Project in the event you participate in multiple teams across multiple projects and are viewing in My Tasks.
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Awesome! We use files to track assets received from a client during their onboarding process (e.g. branding materials and things like that)
In addition to this thread I posted on a request to allow drag and drop between tasks. I want to give more thoughts on this because as we think about Asana more creatively I imagine it expands the target audience so here I go.
Suppose you are in a firm that does merger and acquisition analysis and you are charged with a complete financial analysis of a particular target company. You set up a Project, Sections, Tasks and Subtasks to complete your task. During the process you get a lot of emails from outside your organization in the form of PDF’s, Excel Spreadsheets etc. You know all this detail applies to tasks that you have already set up and you want to make attachments to tasks. Asana justifiably so limits creating a forwarding address to your general Asana x@mail.asana.com or a project address or a project conversation or a team conversation. You have a task set up Obtain last 3 Years SEC 10Q filings. So someone sends those to you not on your system and you don’t want to take the time to save them to your computer, go to the task and Attach from Computer. Instead, you merely forward them to the project that initially creates a task, but you already have a task created or a subtask. So with drag and drop, you just drag the attachment to the task or subtask that you already have created and you are done. Very quick and eliminates etc. If there is any commentary in the body of the email that is pertinent, you can copy and paste it as a comment or description in the task or subtask you already set up. I think this could apply to many types of organizations. CPA firms come to mind (my career in another life). They could have a set of steps set up to compile, review or audit a financial statement and need the same type of drag and drop. I realize there is specialty workpaper software that already does this but Asana has the potential to do the same thing more collaboratively. I truly believe if users can illustrate solutions that don’t immediately come to mind, it can expand the Asana user base. I think one of the marketing shortfalls is most documentation shows simple outlines and does not do justice to the potential of large creative use. So again drag and dropping of files from forwarded emails to project addresses has a lot of application in my humble opinion.
Thanks
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Thank you for these comprehensive ideas! You all will definitely have new and interesting ideas and we are communicating as a team about the best way to gather this information. Please keep this creative thinking coming!
One final plug for drag and drop or move attachments. I just read an older review of Asana by someone irritated that there was not attachments at a project level versus task because people get irritated when a task is marked completed and suddenly an important attachment disappears. My workaround has been to create a task called Permanent Documents. This still requires a re-loading of attachments. So Drag and Drop or Move Attachment would solve this right before somebody marks a task complete that has an attachment that should be in a “permanent” task for future use.
The file sorting mechanism is one of the areas where Basecamp > Asana right now just FYI; I’m not super familiar with Basecamp anymore since it’s been a while since I used it, plus there is Basecamp 3-- but it would behoove the Asana team to see how Basecamp does it and just copy that or make it better. You would get a lot of Basecamp users to switch probably, that was a main challenge I had when forcing people to come to my way of doing things, this was a big piece that they would always complain about.
@jallensantos I like the Permanent Documents “workaround.” From my experience, creating these personal tricks/workarounds has been super helpful for me to customize the experience to my needs. I love Asana and I love combining it with other tools when that can help me maximize my productivity. In fact, right now I have a pen and paper (!) by my side to help me take notes and jot little things down I want to remember and will toss in a short time.
- How come I can’t Drop a FILE directly into a PROJECT?
- It must be attached to a TASK or a CONVERSATION
- WHAT if a PROJECT just has files because the FILES belong in the PROJECT?
- Also, from what I remember, there is not a very good sorting mechanism for the “FILES” Object
- Should be able to sort FILES by: date uploaded, date last modified;
- Additionally there should be a way to TRACK different versions of the same “FILE”
- EXAMPLE-- a LOGO design project, you can upload v.1, v.2. v.3 and it tracks the updates within the same FILE object rather than creating 3 more FILES
- I believe this is how Basecamp’s FILE mechansim works
- I’m sure you may have a good reason for not sorting files how I request
- But I can imagine I’m not the only one with this BIG PAIN point
Hi there,
I use Asana to keep track of construction work.
I use Projects, Sections, Tasks, Subtasks, Subsubtasks in order to cut down work to each elementary invoice task.
To each invoice-able task I ask my employees to attach at least one picture.
When I go to the files section of the project in Asana, the tasks all appear disordered. Is there any way I could apply a filter by Task-Subtask directly from that interface ?
Is there any way to export - dowload a document having the files c:/Project/Task/Subtask/Picture ?
Otherwise, does anyone have an inbetween solutions?
Thanks
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Hi @Arnaud_Harixcalde - At this time there is not a sort feature directly from the files view or the export you describe. However, there are some workarounds and conventions you could create to make finding your files easier. I’d recommend using a naming convention for tasks with files if you’re going to need to search for them often. Alternatively, because Asana is a work tracking tool rather than a file storage tool, we do recommend that you use one of our file storage integrations such as Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox. Hope this helps!
Hello,
Can someone please tell me how to delete a file from the file list in a project. The file was put there by attaching it to a conversation. However, I do not see how to delete it.
I have looked in Help and in the FAQs, so I am hoping someone in this community can help.
I hovered over the file name as instructed in Help, but only got the option to open the attachment.
I am just getting started, so perhaps I have overlooked something?
Thanks in advance for your assistance!
Gloria
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Great question, @Gloria_Mwase.
If you click into the task under the file name, it will take you into the task where the file is attached (screenshot below)
Then on the task, you can click the “x” next to the file attachment (screenshot below)
Does that work?
Attachments in emails forwarded to Asana automatically go to FILES. However, this includes signature elements, which fill FILES with unnecessary items. In addition to the sorting feature requested, it would also be helpful to have a way to delete files from the FILES view.
Thanks!
And a related question - is it possible to forward an email to Asana without the attachments, like a switch in the email subject or something?
Are you talking about all attachments or just the signature attachments.
- If you are talking about regular attachments, just delete them before you send to Asana.
- If you are talking about signatures, I remember reading about a character or something you could put in the body text of an email that would ignore all the content of the email below the insertion of the character. I can’t find it, but I wonder if it would work.
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Here it is from Asana Support
You are totally right, we can insert something in the body of the email that truncates all content below.
In fact, you simply need to add two line breaks and /end in the message before sending it to Asana like so anything after this line will no longer appear once the task is created in Asana.
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Hi James
I just tried your fix and it did indeed remove text below the /end, however all the signature gifs and jpegs were still sent to Asana as file attachments?