Ideas to improve Custom Fields feature

How about an Automatic Numbering field? Ideally, you’d be able to set a prefix or suffix, a number length, and a starting number, and then it would automatically create values for every task.

We use Asana for customer issue tracking, and this would be ideal for referencing the tasks outside of Asana.

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Unsure if this has already been mentioned, but please add a header to the top of the column to identify what the custom field is.

I want to add several custom fields that will have similar options, so it would be incredibly helpful to have a column header that says “Field Name 1” “Field Name 2” etc., rather than hovering over each time to remember which field is which.

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I agree with everything above! Custom Fields would unlock so much!

One other ask - we’d love to remove the limit on the number of custom fields you can have per project. Sometimes we need to collect 100s of data points and this limit is pushing our users into other tools.

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The list of 10 that starts this conversation is great! A couple of our biggest needs:

  • More data types for the custom field options, such as true date fields, check boxes
  • Custom fields being available on subtasks
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Agree on the last one, we need more types. Date-time field is important for us

Yes yes yes! To all of these. I would also love to see a feature where you can ‘lock’ custom fields. When I have a task on Project 1 and add the same task to Project 2, I would like the custom fields I entered in Project 1 to remain “locked” so that the users of Project 2 don’t edit them. It would also be extremely helpful to have the custom fields limit removed because the larger reason why we’re putting the same task on multiple projects is to override the custom fields limit. When you put a task on multiple projects you can have all of the custom fields of Project 1, Project 2, Project 3… etc.

It would be very useful to be able to configure a Custom Field to be either optional or mandatory input when creating a task.

This can be achieved in a different way, by building a custom solution outside of Asana and this then calls the Asana API to create tasks but it’s a significant effort to enforce what is a basic feature lacking in the Asana tool.

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It would be great if you can display some of the custom fields in the “My Tasks” view.

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There are a ton of great suggestions regarding custom fields. I think this is a variation on the “custom fields by section” request.

We would like the ability to option to add custom fields at the task level without applying the field to the entire project. There are some custom fields that are useful in many projects, but not necessarily for every task in that project.

We work around this by adding tasks to multi-home projects but it would be nice if it were simply an option within the action menu of a task.

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Already been commented but custom feilds that tag a user and date would be amazing, especially a user. We have workflows for product process on one team in Asana. When a product shot has come in, the Creative team need to then apply their magic. Rather than having to create subtasks saying ‘With creative’ so that we can assign them and notify our creative bod, being able to select the ‘Creative’ user account from the custom field would be much more intuitive for many of our users!

Also, for drop-down lists:

  1. Filter the list as user types into the field.
  2. Option to add new values to the list just by typing them into the field.

Yes please SUM value fields!! Take a look at Monday.com for this. They have a great sum, avg, min, max feature for fields with numbers. Still here with ASANA because it offers SO MUCH MORE than Monday.com. BUT would be an amazing feature to see and make number columns in custom fields that MORE VALUABLE :slight_smile:

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I’m with Thomas on this one. Having the ability to use functions within custom fields would be great. Right now, I’m using Google Sheets to do weighted averages and then putting that data into an Asana custom field for prioritization. Not the most efficient way, but currently only workaround I have. I was using Workfront for quite some time at another company and agreed, this isn’t meant to fulfill that level of functionality (completely different demographic), but basic interaction/referencing between custom fields would be a great addition.

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+1 on functions. Even if it’s simple math at first. Any type of estimation usually involves calculations. If you have something like the 3 point estimation system (worst case, best case, likely case) then you can calculate the standard deviation of that, average the whole project and get some insights into how confident you are.

In general, being able to do actions based on column values would be great. For instance, your bug-template. While good, it seems kind of half-assed and more an attempt to make a “problem” fix into the world of Asana, rather than making features in asana that fix a problem. It would be amazing if you could have sections in a list, and the actual content of that list be based on a filter (such as all tasks with the priority of High). It is kind a ruins the whole purpose of having a section with high priority bugs, if you can change the priority and the task doesn’t move.

The same goes with completed tasks, vs incomplete. Or in progress tasks. I get you can use swim-lanes for this, but the overview the lists provide at pretty substantial. Further the general abstraction over these types of features would lift the value proposition of asana greatly, ESPECIALLY for software development teams.

We switched from Airtable because of Asana’s Inbox, a better way to see all the notifications and updates on tasks.

However, I’m really disappointed to find that Custom Fields aren’t integrated throughout all screens and workflows. It’s surprising that Asana doesn’t have a built-in Progress/Priority field, so we have to create custom fields for them (that’s fine) - but when viewing My Tasks, or doing a search/report, we can’t then sort/group by a custom field, meaning I can’t group/sort tasks by priority, or progress.

The My Tasks view should be the most-used view for every user, yet it seems primitive compared to some other sections.

Project views allow you to show/hide custom fields from the List view, and then Sort by any custom field. These two features should be available throughout the tool, especially in My Tasks, and in Reports/Search Results.

At present, I’ve got a hundred tasks assigned to me, and I can’t find a way to see which of them are highest priority, and which of them are in progress - I must be missing something, but that seems crazy!

Jep, Multi-select option for custom fields would be great additional to text, number and dropdown.

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Custom fields are quite basic, it would be great if more logic could be added:

  • Links, paste a link and Asana auto grabs the title of the page I linked to to use as display text (think GitHub Pull Requests as a use case, and Google Docs links as a UX example)
    • Maybe these could be attachments, user attaches a PR or asset from a DAM system as tasks are completed
  • Checkboxes
  • Logic: JavaScript or other scripting language to auto-update fields
  • Required fields
  • Templates (think HR/IT tickets)
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Hey @David_W_Keith; I’ve gone ahead and merged your thread with Ideas to improve Custom Fields feature - #38 by Claude1 to avoid having duplicates; hope that’s ok :wink:

We are evaluating Asana right now. The top three custom field enhancements that we would like to see are:

  1. Functions
  2. Custom fields in sub tasks
  3. A broad range of field types to include Date and also Location (google map address)

@Claude1 I’m also considering Airtable because of this. Can you elaborate why you switched to Asana? @Thomas_Membury Asana seems much more robust to me than Monday-dot-com, but I’m also considering Monday purely for these issues (primarily the date and function ability). Would love more of your thoughts on Monday?

@hvy_weight Monday.com is coming along and is rapidly developing their columns and platform. I have always loved Asana, but for high level overviews, KPIs (functions in columns), the display of multiple columns for information and just using the platform to track goals, it seems far superior and their focus.

Asana still dominates in the details of the tasks itself, but like many of my clients who have tried and moved on from the platform, it caused more issues with time spent on Asana vs actually being productive. It can become too cluttered.

That said, I am excited to see where Asana goes as they venture into the Project Management realm as per their next way forward video they released a while back.

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