Mark Sections as Complete (in new spreadsheet List view)

This is a huge issue for us as well! It’s really disrupted our workflow and makes projects confusing that there are several sections with no tasks at all. Please add the functionality to complete or archive sections!! I hope we see a response on this soon. I’ve reviewed several threads on this issue and haven’t seen many responses from Asana.

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No update yet, sigh…
My weekly tasks organized in sections are now piled up. Any estimate when will the feature be available?

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Hello all !
I am pretty new to Asana and maybe “lucky” we were not using Asana before this feature was taken off as it obviously bothers many of you :slight_smile: . Correct me if I am wrong but it seems that you all need to mark the whole section completed therefore marking all tasks within it completed as well.

If that is the case I can recommend additional workarounds that I haven’t seen / might have missed in this thread.
(They are both manual but might ease the pain)

1. Option
You can create section that will be named as “Completed Sections” and simply move the tasks into it. Then you create rule that will mark all the tasks within this section as Completed or give it any Status that you choose to have there. (Done/Finished/Yippyyaay etc…) This will save time to click each and every task and mark them completed

2. Option
If you don’t want to use rules or can’t you can simply select all tasks within the section (one by one) or (select first one hold SHIFT and select last one) and mark them completed in this way.

I know this doesn’t bring “one click solution” but I dont see a different options.

Thanks Antoine for your hacks! Ill be using c). I wonder how many votes it takes for Asana to take this seriously.

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Hi @Marie I have the same Adia question.

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Hi @Adia_S and @Reynier_Matos_Padill,

You can learn more about how we handle feature requests and feedback in the following post: How we’re listening to your product feedback

We’re still iterating on Sections and the new List view; our team is aware of this issue and will keep it in mind for future updates. On my end, I’ll make sure to update this thread as soon as I have more info!

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Just commenting in here that we’ve got this issue as well.

We use Asana pretty extensively for Agenda items and so would really like to leave tasks as belonging to the section (section being the date of the meeting), and so being able to complete the tasks and the section to have them removed (or be able to be viewed in ‘Show completed’)

At the moment I have to shift the tasks to a Completed section and then mark complete so I can delete the section. Downside is I can’t easily find which items belonged to a section.

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Yes! We definitely want this at Okta!

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Sorry to miss this question Meredith - I realize I might sound like a mod at times, but I’m just an Asana user like you. :grinning: Believe me, if I had the slightest ability to address the work queue and architectural decisions of the Asana devs, I would.

On the bright side, they are now at their most active in the nearly 3 years I have been on this tool and have rolled out some truly helpful improvements. On the dark side, it sometimes seems like 1 step forward, 1 step to the side, fall off the curb.

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I’m guessing it’s tough to read through this whole thread, but these suggestions, although appreciated, do not really work with many of the use cases.

As one example: we use Sections as titles for recurring meetings, then the Tasks under that Section are the agenda items for the meeting.
Section: Staff Meeting 1/27/2020
Task: Talk about this or that
Task: Make decision on this or that
Section: Staff Meeting 2/3/2020
Task: Talk about this or that
Task: Make decision on this or that

Moving those Completed Agenda Items into one big section (“Completed Section”) would strip them of being tied to a specific meeting.

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@Joel_Charles: one way I’ve adjusted to this new world is to have one section for ‘weekly status meetings’ and I’ve started creating milestones for the specific weeks, with the tasks below the milestones. It still looks like the tasks belong to the particular week, but they stay in the one section.

Not perfect, by any means, but it sort of works.

You do end up having to make the task names more specific (e.g. Jan 27: do this thing; Feb 3: do that thing).

Just want to add my voice to this. I’ve messaged support several times about this. They basically keep saying “there’s no plans to fix this.” So adding my vote and voice.

It’s so frustrating to have the sections stack up now, even though we’re using the same processes as we did before. Horrible UX especially for anyone who used List view before the update. I kinda like the update, all except this. I’m really baffled why they didn’t account for this in the update. I get that sections are the same as column headers now. But make a way for it to work for us long time users who have been using it forever… And really anyone who doesn’t want section headers to stack up in their projects (duh!).

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I should have also added that there are a number of people who’ve expressed their frustration with this as well, in one of the other forums: How to complete a section? - #24 by Tevya

Thanks Marie! Agree with everyone on this thread that this is really important to bring back. Right now, we have a pile of empty sections within our projects because we don’t want to delete the completed tasks so we can report on them later. Looking forward to hearing how this will be resolved.

This is a really good point, sections should also be searchable.

A proposed workaround I would have for this, and those who also use similar workflows, would be to create new projects at intervals, e.g. every quarter or month. Then you can archive older projects (if you don’t want them to show up in search) and your current project would only ever have a few collapsed sections cluttering up your view.

So in your case if you did it quarterly, project Staff Meetings 2020 Q1 would have at most 12 sections in it.

And for @Leonarce’s screenshot all of that could be in an archived project 2019, with him currently working on project January 2020 or 2020 Quarter 1 (for example).

Who knows, having to ‘workaround’ it like this while we wait for this request to be picked up and implemented, may end up being more beneficial than just completing sections, as now the tasks in the archived projects won’t clutter the search results, but you can still come back to them if you need them. (Or if you want them to be found in search, just don’t archive the projects.)

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Any update on ability to mark Sections complete, @Marie? Would love this to make it into a sprint sometime soon. I’ve upvoted this thread already so cannot do it again. This used to be easy with the old “:” approach and now they start to clutter “working” projects that are used to capture the day-to-day tasks of running business. Thanks for input!

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Yeah, this is a big problem. As mentioned, tasks often don’t include section info so it’s almost impossible to review things later and know what’s what. Structurally completed tasks should remain within the section but hidden. Showing completed would reveal them in their section. When a section is then marked complete, the entire section would move to a completed area at the bottom of the project sections which could be expanded as needed.

What is the thinking around current functionality with empty sections? Doesn’t make any sense.

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Yeah, this is getting pretty annoying pretty fast. I HAVE to use sections because many of my colleagues use the app, and they don’t see subtasks. So the only way to organize tasks easily for our editorial list is by sections. But only after a week this is pretty unwieldy! , and I can’t even delete the sections without deleting the tasks, or breaking the connection between the section name and the tasks.

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Yeah, this new update is pretty terrible. I need to be able to complete, hide or archive sections with no active tasks, otherwise the task list just ends up full of empty sections. But of course, new tasks may need to be added to previously completed sections. It used to be possible, no idea how this got through QA. Please please please fix!

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ASANA! Why are you ignoring this request? There are multiple threads concerning this issue. Please listen to your paying customers and fix this frustrating issue you have created.

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