Option for Personal Custom Fields not available?

English Forum Tips and Tricks
1

Hi there,

I was not sure if I should directly post to the Product Feedback Page, but maybe what I want to do is possible already after all.

I love the integration of custom-fields. However, I find that I can only share the same custom fields across projects if I make them available to the company’s library. I want to avoid that tough, as of right now, despite having several hundred users on our companies Asana, only very few custom fields have been shared inside the library and I would quickly flood them with my own personal fields. I also don’t believe that my personal custom fields would be of benefit to the majority of our company. As such, I would much rather have a library of my own personal custom-fields.
I am aware that for other companies that have a set of global/ in-house workflows rather than individuals working on their own projects, this functionality is less useful. However, in our case, where you have a multitude of groups that are entirely independent from each other (e.g. research groups or departments with entirely unrelated settings) , this seems like a must-have and I am surprised I cannot find a way to easily define personal custom fields.

Another, likely related aspect is that when forming a Portfolio consisting of several projects where I have manually set up one specific custom field with the exact same value sets, I cannot select those fields to show up on the Portfolios Task list. I find this insanely counterintuitive. The same applies for the other way around, where a custom-field that was defined in the Portfolios Task list does not get carried over the its associated projects.

So, i there a way to achieve this and I have simply not yet found it or does Asana actually not offer this functionality as of yet?

2

Hi @CynS, welcome to the Asana Forum! :wave:

As it stands, you can create a custom fields at the project level, which will be only accessible in the project, or you can add a custom field to your Organization library. If you do so, everyone in your Organization will be able to add it to other projects.

If you want to create a custom field, which is not visible for your organization, you can add it to the project only and not to the organization library.

We are planning some improvements to custom field permissions and will be posting all details in the News category. Make sure to follow this category to get notified! :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Hi @CynS in addition to what Emily shared, you can approach this in a different way.
Why not create the field, lock it so that no one ca make changes to it, and add it to Org library.

Remember, when people add custom fields, they can search for what they need. You can add a description to state this custom field can change without pre-announcement or something to that effect.

This will allow you to use the custom field in your project and your portfolio as well.

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Hi @CynS,

Chiming in here too. Another thing I’ve seen organizations do is to add the departnent name to the custom field (I would recommend at the end) to make sure the department is using the field relevant to their work.

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Ah yes, that’s a good idea!