How to transition from Tags to Custom Fields

English Forum Tips and Tricks
1

I met with Asana support and they said they are transitioning away from Tags. However we have a lot of reporting that depends on them. Is this true? If it is how do we leverage fields to use them instead of tag. For instance we use them to sort what is a design task vs. what is a social medial or web publishing task. Thank you.

2

Hi @Charlene_Freestone , Depending on how you use tags (specifically how many you use and how they’re organized), you could consider using one global custom field (single- or multi-select) for each category of task with each tag corresponding to tag. In your example, you’d have a “Content type” single-select field with Design, Social, and Web options.

To actually transition those tasks, you’ll either need to go project by project and bulk update (go to list view, filter for that tag, then bulk select and set the custom field value) or leverage the API/3rd party to bulk update based on your conditions.

3

You can create a single-select custom field called “Type”, and set the option names as “Design”, “Social Media”, and “Web”. Be sure to add the field to your org’s field library (this will save you headaches down the road). You can do a small trial, adding this field as above, and implementing it in 1 or 2 projects. If you have just a few projects, with fairly short task lists, you can “migrate” your data manually…i.e. just type, like this:

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You’ll see that a custom field has a lot more functionality - for Sort, Filter, Rules, etc. - than a Tag.

If you have a lot of data that needs migrating, you may need to find an IT solution for that.

4

@Charlene_Freestone,

Tags have been downplayed in favor of Custom Fields ever since those were introduced (after Tags).

What was the specific info from Support? Because if tags are working for you, you may not need to make a change.

If you do want to make a change, it Advanced search can help you to find and group tags by value to make the transition easier, but you need to learn the ins and outs of custom fields (and advanced searches), or get help (some of us are Asana Partners).

Thanks,

Larry

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