We would love to be able to move entire Sections (i.e. the Section and all the Tasks under that Section) from one Project to another Project. This could be either a MOVE option or a COPY option. The absolute best would be to have the option to do either a MOVE or a COPY.
I think the methods that would be easiest for Users would be:
Click and drag an entire Section into the side-bar and drop it into a different Project (have a “Move or Copy” pop-up)
Have a menu pop-up on a Section that has an option to Move or Copy to another Project
Currently you can’t really “select” a Section, which means you can’t multi-select Sections and move them together, even within its own Project. You can drag it within a Project but that’s it.
Current Work-Around: Go into the destination Project and create Sections that correspond with the origination Project. Return to the Origination Project and multi-select all of the individual Tasks in that Section. On the side-care you can select where those Tasks live, allowing you to select the destination Project/Section. Then you can remove the origination Project. This simulates a “Move Section” action.
Use Case: We have various Projects with Sections that are beneficial for a new Project that might emerge, and it would be easiest to copy over the whole Section. Example: part of an overall Project might be a Section for “Conduct User Training” with a bunch of Tasks under it. But doing training ends up being a part of a ton of Projects we have so it would be so convenient to just take that Section from another Project and copy it over into a new Project where we know we’ll need to do “User Training.”
Another feature that I think would be even more valuable would be to allow the copying of a section to another project so that the two projects mirror each other, including with the addition of new tasks in the future. Thus, after coping a section from one project to another, if I add a task to that section in one project it automatically adds to both projects. As it stands, I have to manually make sure that the tasks remain the same between the two projects, which it quite a pain.
This is probably a good illustration of why development is so challenging - because I understand what you’re describing, but for us that would actually cause major issues. So in one use case it makes sense, but in another it causes problems.
If I’m understanding your request, you would want to copy a Section from one Project to another, and potentially another, and another… and then adding a Task in one Section in the original Project would add it in all the others.
But let’s say I have a Section called “Website Stuff” and every time our Marketing department has a marketing campaign, we create a new Project and then copy the Section “Website Stuff” into that Project. That Section would have the basic “template” Tasks but there would be lot of specific things that would come up, and we would only want it added to that Project (campaign), under the Website Stuff Section. It would tie things together in a very unwieldy way for us.
Could it be made optional so that tasks could be tied permanently to the section header or allowed to be separate? That way only the tasks that you wanted cloned would be cloned.
The ability to move entire sections from one project to another would be extraordinarily useful. And it seems obvious. I’m a new user, and it never occurred to me you would not be able to. Since the “board” layout presents each section like a Trello “list,” and the underlying attraction of this format is the drag and drop functionality, it seemed a fair assumption that whole visual “section” structure could be moved to another project.
I’m a little bit stuck now, unless anyone has a suggestion: As a new user, my goal with Asana is to take an enormous number of totally unorganized tasks and create a project structure that works. So I created an excel document of hundreds of these tasks, and running down the list could assign each of them a “section” in the excel document. I then exported the CSV to Asana. My thought was I would then have all these visual columns (sections) aggregated in one project and could see how best to group different ones into their projects, moving them around fluidly. But no, and I’m crying a bit inside.
Any workaround ideas? I’ve been editing things in Asana, so I cant go back to the original excel doc, but I suppose I could export this Asana project, reorder it in excel, and then export each “section” of tasks back into new projects in Asana. Other thoughts?
And slightly off topic: any idea why Asana basically seems to ignore the existence of sections, in general? I’m finding difficulty with searches, and with creating them.
Projects evolve and I expect my task manager to be able to keep up with that.
Sections are a huge part of Asana.
What was once “Recurring Content” with a few sections as it’s own project, now needs to be split into multiple projects within the team because it’s grown. Fantastic, but I can’t do that in Asana without retyping or dragging each individual task that was in that original section.
We have 3 separate projects, Customer Feedback, In Development, and Past Releases.
We use Customer Feedback to prioritize our development effort, and we move all the feedback that will be incorporated in the next release cycle into a single column.
We would love to be able to easily move this column from the Customer Feedback project to the In Development project.
Once in In Development we move the tasks through Currently Implementing, Ready to Push to Staging, Ready to Test, and Ready to Release columns.
After a release it would be great to move the Ready to Release column to the Past Releases project, where we then add the release date to the column name so we can track when we released certain features.
The ability to easily move a column from one project to another would clean up our projects, help us stay organized, and save us many hours every week.
I’m always a little hesitant to respond to threads in Product Feedback with workarounds because I feel it sometimes muddies the water for people looking for votes and are already aware of workarounds. If you’re interested in a fairly easy way to do this using Advanced Search, let me know.
Thanks for your feedback @Steve_Johnson and welcome to the Forum!
As it stands, we don’t have an option allowing you to easily move a column from one project to another, however, I can see how useful it would be for you and your team. We will definitely take your feedback on board for future improvements; thanks again for sharing your feedback with us and for taking the time to provide us with context too!
As @RyanE mentioned, there is a workaround (see below) you can use, but I hope we can simplify this process in the future!
Workaround:
Project A: Project where tasks are currently located
Project B: Project where you want to move your tasks
Open project B and create a new column
Open the Advanced Search and run a Search for all tasks nested in project A column (you can easily filter tasks by adding Project A in the “Project” field and select the relevant columns in the Project drop-down menu)
Open the project field and add these tasks to Project B (make sure to use the drop down menu to select the column you created in Step 1
While you have the project field open, remove Project A from the Project field, this way your task will appear in Project B but not in Project A anymore!
absolutely critical in may operations. My project templates are really big… so if I could copy sections let’s say from a template, we could re-engineer and start with smaller template and build up based onthe master template. Also as a potential, if we could copy multi-selected tasks to another project, not just a single one, that may solve the problem half way. Thanks
I joined Asana in December. I’m astounded that this feature (can we even call it a feature? seems like just a basic function?) isn’t included. I’m not a developer so I could be wrong, but if Trello can implement it for boards, cards, and lists, it seems like it’s probably not impossible.
I am new to Asana and I am very surprised that I cannot move entire sections and their associated tasks from one project to another. The lack of this basic function adds extra time and tedium to my day and devalues the app. I am also surprised to see that this thread has been active for several years without a resolution. Hoping this issue will be fixed in the near future.
Hello, I am new to Asana also. I am think more along the lines of archiving a section of the project. For instance an ongoing content planning project. If each section is a week, I would like to move completed week to an “archive” project.
We are having the same issue. A section in 1 project (project A) was created in the wrong project. It now has 30 completed tasks. We just need to move it to another project (project B) where it was supposed to live - but I can’t figure out a way to do that.
I can close the said SECTION in project A and then drag to the LEFT into my list of teams/projects but I can’t get it into the 2nd project B. This should be easy to do. Just like you can relocate an individual TASK to a a different project - you should be able to relocate a section to a different project. Otherwise we will have to manually reassign every single task. Busy work.
We’re new to Asana, and in the hope that more requests to be able to copy/move sections will make it more likely to be implemented, count me in as also needing this functionality. The workaround outlined previously (copying section tasks, pasting to a new project, and deleting original section) is prone to error and creates unwanted busy work (as @Tabatha_Parker mentioned).
In our service business we have dozens of short term jobs that are usually completed within a week. Creating full blown projects for each one would be overkill, so we have one “Jobs” project and each job gets its own section. Once a job (section) is finished it needs to be archived somehow. Moving it to another project (i.e. “Completed Jobs”) seems simplest, but if there was a way to mark sections (vs tasks) as complete that would work too, as we could filter out completed sections. Thanks for your consideration!
