Moving existing data to a new custom field

English Forum Tips and Tricks
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I made the mistake of creating a new custom field (Notes) in each of my project instead of using the Notes field in the library. This means when I export data across projects I get multiple Notes columns. I’d like to fix this without having to manually move all the data from one field to another in all my projects. Is there a way to “switch out” the field to make this all work?

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Hi @Mark_Rubin, thanks for reaching out!

Unfortunately, It’s currently not possible to move data from one field to the other in Asana. @Phil_Seeman, @lpb or @Bastien_Siebman, do you know any workaround for this? :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance for your help!

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So the only way to do this may be to add the library-available customer field to each project and copy the data from one field to the other one by one?

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@Mark_Rubin,

So I understand what you’re doing, what do you mean by “when I export data across projects”?

Assuming your answer doesn’t suggest any other idea, all I can think of now is:

  • doing manually as you just wrote, or
  • perhaps exporting/importing to a new project using CSV and re-mapping directly into the correct custom field, assuming you can fully recreate the project this way (you’ll lose comments and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting), or
  • maybe there’s a way to remap with a somewhat complex Zapier recipe.

Larry

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Hi @Mark_Rubin,

A variant of what @lpb suggested would be to use Unito - it lets you sync two projects, so you would create a new project for each existing one, tell it to sync from the existing project to the new one. When you set up a sync it lets you map fields so that’s where you could map the custom field to the new library-based one.

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Exporting data across projects is actually where this all started. I want to be able to see everything my team has due across all our projects - like My Tasks but for each person on my team. To do this we do a search of all tasks on all projects and export it. This is where we noticed each project had it’s own “Notes” field, and others.

Given all your suggestions I think the easiest thing is going to be to:

  1. Make sure we use Library fields for common data going forward
  2. Maybe manually move the data for some of our most important projects
  3. Use Excel “concatenate” to “fix” the problem for now

As projects end #1 above will make sure this issue becomes less impacting.

This is my first topic and I appreciate all the support so quickly. If you have any ideas about my initial issue, the My Tasks for others, please let me know or I can open a new topic.

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Unless you need to for some other reason, I’d eliminate the step of exporting. In your saved advanced search report, refine it to Add Filter > Add Custom Field for the library Notes field, and sort the results by Assignee.

If you need more flexibility, consider (disclaimer: I’m the creator):

Larry

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Thank you so much for your help here @lpb and @Phil_Seeman :star:

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I’ve installed Asana2Go and I’ll try it out as a non-export solution. With it’s filtering and access to custom fields I’ll probably not need to use Excel. Thanks, Larry.

1 Like