Introducing Formula Custom Fields!

Hi everyone :wave:

Today, we’re excited to announce our newest custom field, Formula!

When tracking information in Asana, custom fields give you the flexibility to track all different types of data in a standard way. With the Formula custom field, you can perform calculations directly in Asana, making it easier to manage your data and significantly enhancing your productivity.

This new custom field leverages the add, subtract, multiply, and divide operators alongside data from numeric custom fields, tasks due date, creation date, completion date, and start date – so you can perform a wide range of calculations within Asana and gather powerful insights about your work such as creating budgets, analyzing sales figures, calculating capacity, and many more scenarios.

Like any other custom field, you can add Formula fields from the “Customize” menu on the right side of any project.

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In the example below, an Event manager calculated the difference between their budget and actual spending to determine team resources. You can see they created the “Difference” formula custom field using two number custom fields: “Budget” minus (-) “Spend.”

Please note this first version of Formulas supports workload and reporting. We plan to launch additional functionalities as well as portfolio and bundle support soon! :dizzy:

Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions. We can’t wait to hear what use cases you will solve with this new feature!

Please note this update is available to all Business and Enterprise customers.

29 Likes

This is great to get off the ground finally! Note, I feel when using DATES in formulas that the differences should be in DAYS by default, NOT hours (OR user selectable). For example, using turn around time for shipments, I wouldn’t do this in hours since common carriers like UPS are typically measured in days.

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English version of the guide, just in case :wink:

Totally agree! Also would be nice to use today’s date in the calculation.

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PLEASE do not forget about your Premium customers - we are important as well as your Business and Enterprise customers! I’ve not seen any new features for Premium users in a long time. :cry:

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Thank you for the feedback @Richard_Parke I understand your point. However, we continue to add value to all our plans, including the Premium tier. Recently, we launched due date auto-shifting in List, Board and Calendar views and Rule functionality for HubSpot + Asana Integration.

And while we plan to continue developing Enterprise tier features to respond to specific needs and expectations from Enterprise customers, we also continue to support all other Asana users. :slight_smile:

Great feature! Although currently only 2 fields can be added/subtracted/… . Any plans to increase the number of fields? We have a project sheet that groups budget from multiple stakeholders, so summation across these would be very helpful !

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I think if you compared the number of features you are pushing to your higher plan customers, it greatly outweighs the lower plans. Another suggestion would be to allow customers to pay for a selection of the features they need. Most of the features in the higher plans we’ll never use, but there are a few that are critical. Calculated fields seems like a common enough need (looking at the forums) I’d think you’d push that out to everyone. There’s no reason to buy into a bunch of features that won’t be used. Great business plan, but doesn’t serve the customer well. Thanks for your consideration.

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A very welcome change that we would very much like to use! But unfortunately we are “only” a premium corporate customer and lately we don’t feel so valued :cry: Most of the exciting changes only apply to Business and Enterprise customers.

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thank you! love this feature, been anticipating it for a while. however, would love some more functions like auto-numbering and concatenation. hopefully there’s a plan to continue development of formulas. thanks!

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Agreed. We’re a nonprofit that can’t justify the upgrade from Premium to Business since most of the features don’t apply, but the Formula field would be hugely valuable.

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I think they need to rename their Premium package to “Basic”

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Hello everyone. Thank you for spending time to give us feedback!
We don’t have any plan to change the tier, however, your suggestions are very appreciated. I am sure to pass all your comments to the product team :slight_smile:

@maxime6 As we plan a more advanced version near future, Please stay tuned!

When I saw formula custom fields, I was ecstatic! My team and I have wanted this for quite some time; however, we are only Premium tier. I may have missed it, but you might want to indicate on your training page that this is only for the Business and Enterprise tiers. Is there any plan to release this to other tiers down the road? Our team manages budgets for projects/clients, and it would be a game-changer to manage the budgets in Asana with dynamic formulated fields!

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Hi @Jessica_Clark Thank you for your feedback. I just passed your request to add the plan to the Asana Guide to the team. If there is any update, I will comment here :slight_smile:

I am afraid not, but I will pass all your comments to the product team, including pricing.

Hi @Jessica_Clark, The team added the Asana tier to the Asana Guide content :slight_smile: Thank you for your feedback!

1 Like

This feature launch has stopped the “text” fields from working in all projects.

I can no longer add new lines, or even spaces.

The first few words were added before yesterday. The highlighted section is something I tried to add today. The spaces between the words do not work.

Screenshot 2023-06-14 103600

It would be great to enable date arithmetics, i.e. calculate date that is {custom # field} days away from some date. In my case I’d like to have “normal duration” field in the task and “formula field” that would calculate recommended due date for convenience, but I am getting Both fields must be the same type. error.

Both addition and subtraction operations are sensible here. Additionally unit that {#field} usually is measured in is days.

Yet another date arithmetic case is “static” shift of dates, thus one side of formula can be static number to be entered in formula itself. At the moment we have no such possibility yet.

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Hi everyone! I wanted to update you that Formula is supported on Mobile now :slight_smile:

Users can see the Formula custom fields from both Android and iOS apps.
Formula custom fields are only to view on mobile. Users can not edit them from the mobile apps!

Formula custom field values appear in the project grid view

Formula custom field values appear on the task detail

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Hi, is there an option to calculate ‘Days left’ to complete a task using the formula field (or other workarounds), which means the "Due date (minus) the Current date?