Fixing Inability to Import Subtasks Caused by Error In or Unrecognized Parent Task

It took a bit of time to realize that I had misspelled a parent task in the “Subtask Of” field, which was causing utter failure to import subtasks because the “Make Changes” page wouldn’t let me assign “Subtask Of” as that type of information.

However, when I scrolled down to the place were one could set the field to be a “Subtask Of” field type, Asana popped up a bubble and told me I had an error on a specific line (plus others). Once I corrected the misspelling, the import was successful.

Basically, the story is that if you have a bad parent task listed in your Subtask Of field, Asana will reject the whole column (converting it to play text) with just this one bubble warning.

It would be nice if this could be flagged a bit more visibly (as in, “Hey, we see you have a Subtask Of field, but we can’t use it because there’s an error on line XXX…”), but at the very least I thought I’d share the problem and discovery so that maybe others would find it, too, and avoid the angst.

Usually with the CSV importer, once you upload the file you can go to “Make changes” and there you can see the actual mapping that will happen. And you’ll see you can’t select “Subtask” for that column and if you hover over the column you’ll see why.

Am I missing something here? Is this what you already tried?

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Hi @Jim_McLaughlin! Adding to what Bastien mentioned, you can find more details about how to organize the data in your spreadsheet and map your csv file:

Let us know if you still experience any issues!

That’s exactly what I did. This was not a problem, but a solution shared. Sorry for any confusion.

Thanks. I was doing everything right, but made an error in doing so. My bad, but the notification isn’t part of that guidance so I didn’t know to look for it. A note in the guide that errors in naming parent tasks will cause a problem, but the “Make Changes” selection will show them for assistance in finding them, might help others.

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