💍 One single form to rule them all

When an organization starts looking at forms in Asana, that usually opens up a new world for them. I think this is one of the most underused features of Asana, to be honest!

But at one point, managing several forms could be complex. And it is even more complex to keep track of all the forms, where they are, and what is the link to share them.

A solution is to merge several (simple) forms into a new one. The trick? Add a first question in the form, being « What is your request regarding? » and based on the answer from that drop-down, use the branching mechanism to show the appropriate next questions. Then use Rules to move the submission into the right project so the right team is notified.

PS: this idea was initially shared by @lpb on the forum!

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Here are some additional details on how to accomplish that aspect of this tip:

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Thanks a lot Phil for the link!

Forms are such a powerful Asana feature; I concur, @Bastien_Siebman.

Form branching is a Business plan feature so that’s required to use this tip, as I point out here:

I’d combine forms sparingly anyway–sure, if they’re related then branching may be reasonable and natural, but even with the Business plan I think it’s more complicated to do this for otherwise unrelated forms.

Larry

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As all the ASANA experts are gathered here, maybe I find a solution for my actual problems with form branching:

We set up a form as a ticket system for all the inputs and request for all departments of our company. As we realized that the request differ from department to department we want to specify our form.
IT and media have similar requests, business relations and customer support have similiar requests and our product manage department has its special request.

Now I got stuck with two diffrent limitations in ASANA:

  • it is not possible to combine 2 answer possibilities in one branch
  • I can’t use customized fields twice - if I use it in one branch, I can’t select it in another branch

Is there any solution out there?? Do I miss a certain feature?? :face_with_monocle:
Thanks in advance :gift_heart:

Ηι @anon81228582 , if I have understood your scenario correctly, if you use a single-select field in a branch and then add the same field to another branch it will NOT show up in the ‘Available fields’ part of the ‘Connected to’ list. However, if you scroll down to the ‘Already in use’ part of the ‘Connected to’ list you can still select the custom field you want, even if it is in use. Asana will simply have a warning triangle saying that it will essentially overwrite the first entry with the next.

However, this is not necessarily an issue if you use the same single-select field in more than one branch within the same primary question, as long as the path of your form’s branches will lead the submitter to select from this field only once.

If for some reason you cannot do that, then the below example concludes with a workaround…
Say you have a ‘Universe’ single-select field which is connected to the options that each are a branch to a further question related to that ‘universe’
image

If ‘Starwars’ is selected then within its branch you can have the following question that draws from the ‘Jedi’ field for answers on people’s ‘favourite’ choice
image

But if ‘Starwars’ is selected and then you also have a 2nd question within that same branch, you can still use the same (Jedi) choices as you did with the first question, which may make sense, however this will clearly create a problem for your results (as the yellow triangle icon will note).

The form will overwrite the choices for ‘favourite’ with the choices for ‘least favourite’ because you are using the same Single-select field for both answers. To solve this, you can (manually) create a duplicate of the ‘Jedi’ single-select field (with the same options) and rename them both these fields to ‘Favourite Jedi’ and ‘Least Favourite Jedi’ respectively so you can collect the correct answer to each question separately.

Hope that helps! :wink:

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Thanks a lot, @Richard_Sather !!!
That’s the solution I was looking for :clap: :clap: :heart_eyes:
A second thank you for that fantastic description with that perfect examples :ninja: :troll: :man_superhero: :rofl: :rofl:

My mistake was that I used “text fields” instead of the “single-select fields” :woozy_face:

May the (ASANA) force be with you!! :index_pointing_at_the_viewer:

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