Is there a Today field?

Hi everyone, it’s my first week in the forum and please forgive the basic question…how do you create a field to calculate the number of days between a due date and today’s date? Thanks!

1 Like

Hi @anon93796111 , welcome to the forum :wave:

This is currently not available on the task level. You can enable the Time remaining field in Portfolios (available for Business and Enterprise plans). This field will show you the time remaining until the project’s end date from today (as long as the project has an end date set.

On the task level, we should expect that Asana will soon release an update to the Formula field to support a ‘Today’ function to calculate values against due date, creation date etc.

1 Like

I enabled this field and noticed that it says “1 week” for a project due Oct 31st. Does it not calculcate on days? (ex 1 week, 2 days)?

Hi @Chantelle_Drury , I take it you are referring to the ‘Time remaining’ field in Portfolios which I mentioned above. Once your project is due less than a week, the native ‘Time remaining’ field will display 6 days, 5 days, etc.

Unfortunately, currently, this native field cannot be formatted to hours or days and there is no workaround using Formulas until a Today function is added, hopefully soon!

Yes that is the field I’m referring to, thank you. The time remaining field doesn’t seem to be calculating correctly:

I’m not understanding why the column field says “No data”, and why the projects with a due date of Oct 31 just say “1 week”, which isn’t correct.

image

Hi @Chantelle_Drury , I’ve been able to recreate what you are seeing. There seems to be some bug or unexpected behaviour when changing the due date, specifically when removing the start date and re-inputting it, which gives the ‘No data’ value.

I managed to overcome this by clearing the Date field entirely and reinserting the due date of the project.

Can you try that and see if it works for you too?

Thanks Richard! I was able to correct all of them but the Items with the Oct 31 due dates. Is it not possible to be more accurate than just 1 week? This is less than 2 weeks, so I would think it would show 1 week, xx days. Is that not how it works? Thanks again.

image

@Chantelle_Drury , I understand your frustration. It would be ideal if the value was more granular such as in weeks AND days left. You can actually achieve a more accurate value for the duration of the project because that is based on start and end date of the project which are already available as inputs for a formula. Check out my post here, see the last basic formula in section 2.

Unfortunately, in order to achieve what you need for Time remaining, we would need a ‘Today’ function in order to create a formula field (as I explained above), which would logically provide a more accurate value, similar to the formula for a project’s duration, in my post.

Hopefully it won’t be too long for Asana to follow up with such an update to formulas. I will make sure to post back here when that happens to let you know, and I’ll provide you with the relevant formula too. :wink:

1 Like

@Chantelle_Drury and @Richard_Sather,

Please vote for my old request here:

Thanks,

Larry

1 Like

Thanks @lpb , I remember this one!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Hi everyone! Just to let you know that the TODAY function is gradually rolling out!

3 Likes

Hi Richard. Is there any way to know when our account might get the today function if it doesn’t already have it?

Hi @Danelle_Duncan , once it’s available in your Asana, you should see it listed in your list of Inputs, as per below:

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.