How do you prevent Asana documents from becoming outdated?

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How do you make sure that attachments in Asana stay up to date?

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Can you elaborate? Up to date with what?

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@anon25370204 if I understand your question correctly, I would say to take advantage of the cloud storage options for attachments (e.g. Box, Google Drive, etc). As long as the file link doesn’t change the attachment will always be the current version of the file.

When you upload files from your computer, you run the risk of that file being outdated if it isn’t replaced in Asana. That goes with any platform that accepts static file uploads. :wink:

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Hello Bastien,

Thank you for your follow up question.

If I attach a living document, like a Google Sheets document, to a task in Asana, how do we make sure that the latest version on that document is always referenced?

Let’s say we are using a Google Sheets document to track some company metrics. This Sheet is updated weekly with the latest metrics. I attach this Sheet to a task in Asana in March.
When someone opens this task in August and opens the attached Sheet in August, are they opening the latest (August) version of this Sheet or are they referencing the version that was attached back in March?

Than you,

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Thanks Jerod,

So best practices for living documents is to attach a link to the document but don’t attach the document?

This will ensure that the latest version of the living document is always referenced.

Much appreciated,

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@anon25370204 yes, you can note the link in the Task Description or a Custom Field. However, Asana supports attachments to cloud-based storage. See the image below. If you select any of the options aside from “Your Computer” the file will remain the latest version of the file within the cloud environment. It essentially works the same as providing a link, but happens to place the file reference in the attachment section.

Below you can see:

  • Supported attachment types
  • An example of where I put a Google Sheet link (reads: Common Questions) in the Task Description
  • An example of where an attached Google Drive file sits within the Task Details
  • An example of how to place a web address into a Custom Field

image
image857Ă—962 40.1 KB

Hope this makes things clear! :wink:

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@anon25370204,

Just in case it wasn’t clear, @LEGGO offers three alternatives which, to save space, he showed all at once in a single task:

But you would only pick one of the three alternatives to use at a time in a task. In fact, you might want to settle on one of the three alternatives to use as a convention organization-wide for all cloud-based storage references in Asana.

Larry

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Great point, @lpb. I should have been more explicit that I was showing the various avenues, but selecting a convention is key to successfully scale. Thank you! :pray:

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Thank you @LEGGO and @lpb.

Much appreciated,

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