Formula Field - Be able to add two formula fields together or add more than two fields

[Danielle-GenD]

I know this has only just been released but would love to add up to 4 fields rather than 2, or add two formula fields together.

The use case I am think of is agile wsjf calculations.

[JD_Jones]

…Or have formulas that can do if then else clauses on non numeric fields.

[Bastien_Siebman]

This is coming with the advanced editor soon.

[Cat_van_Wijk]

Hey Bastien, how soon?

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Richard_Sather can you point to the right announcement or share some insights please?

[Richard_Sather]

There is no public announcement at this stage apart from this:

Introducing Formula Custom Fields!

Hi @Myrian_Rigal Not at this launch. But we are preparing to release the advanced version of Formula Custom Field soon with additional functionalities. Stay tuned!

My feeling is that the advanced formula editor should be available to all in a matter of weeks, not months.

[Richard_Sather]

Hi everyone, just closing the loop on this one… the Advanced Editor was released last month which does allow adding more than two fields into a formula. It does not however, allow you to add a formula field within a formula field.

Formula custom field with Advanced Editor

Hi Asana community! I’m Richard, an Asana Forum Leader and Asana Solutions Partner, here to share Asana’s latest update Earlier this month, Asana launched Formula custom fields . Today, I’m thrilled to announce you can now create more complex formulas with the new Formula custom field Advanced Editor! With this update, you can: Create formulas using keyboard input Point and click to build formulas Use more than one operator (+, - , x, /) Use #s (eg. field + field + field + 2) Use For…

[Larysa_Vyshnia]

Greetings! New advamced formula feature is cool. But there’s a problem - if I want to use the result of another formula in a new one - I cannot do this.
So the use case is this:

1. I have a formula calculating days needed to fulfill the task ( made with advance formula feature, something like like estimated time * risk factor value/Ideal effort value, as example)
2. Now I want this result (number of days) to be used as a variable to cound the date using AddDate function. It would give me and end date of a task completion (planned)
   But I cannot do that because I cannot use the result of another formula as a variable for a new one.
   are there any ways to use the results of other formulas in calculationr OR is there plans to add this option?

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Larysa_Vyshnia , welcome back
You can achieve what you want by simply creating a NEW formula field and copy pasting your formula from your step 1 and then followed by whatever add-on calculation you need to get the value you describe in Step 2.
It may help to place brackets around step 1 so your new formula field would look like this:
(formula of step 1) +, -, * or / (add on of step 2)

I could be more descriptive if you could provide a few screenshots but hopefully you’ve understood what I mean!

You can also have a look at various other examples of using the advanced formulas here.

[Larysa_Vyshnia]

Oh! Can you help me putting this together -I’m probably doing something wrong because it says that formula is invalid
So i want to calculate a deadline from the following
[[$DATEADD_FUNCTION]]([[here is a start date field]]), ([[$MULTIPLY_FUNCTION]]([[Effort (number field)], [[risk coefficient,(number field)]]) / 6 / [[Team size, (number field)]])

where basically i need to add the expression ([[$MULTIPLY_FUNCTION]]([[Effort (number field)], [[rist coefficient,(number field)]]) / 6 / [[Team size, (number field)]] to a start date using AddDate function
So basically now I use formula #1 [[$MULTIPLY_FUNCTION]]([[Effort (number field)], [[risk coefficient,(number field)]]) / 6 / [[Team size, (number field)]] to calculate the duration of the task
And the result of this formula I manualy add to a separate number field in order to use it in a formula #2 that calculated a deadline from a start date and duration,
I want to combine it in one formula that uses Add date funtion and adds the result of formula #1 to a start date.
i hope it makes sense to you

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Larysa_Vyshnia ,

For the DateAdd function to work, everything needs to be contained within the brackets, so that the resulting formula is also a date field. So for your first function start date + Days, you need to contain that within a second DateAdd function so this is what your formula should look like:

or this:

However, the formula does not seems to give the result that you may want. Try these out and play around with them, otherwise you may want to wait until formulas within formulas get eventually supported - hopefully in the near future

[Larysa_Vyshnia]

Nope) Does not work. And this #days I want to be replaced with the result of the next formula.
I need to add that result as a number of days. So I don’t wanna use this Days field. If I put 1 or 0 instead it shows empty result.
Anyway, thanks for trying. We will have to wait for the support.

[Brenda_Carey]

Is there a way to simply add 5 columns together? It still won’t let me do more than 2?

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Brenda_Carey , are you switching to the Advanced formula editor?
If your 5 columns are all number fields, you can simply insert these fields into the advanced formula editor while placing a + between them.