Sort search results by alphabetic order

Outline your use case.
Some of our tasks are named consistently like: {client} - {project ID} - {task number} - {title}

Frame the feature request in context of how your team is using Asana
The tasks are sorted by alphabetic order in projects so we can find the tasks quickly and intuitively.
However, when we want to filter the tasks with keywords, the order is messed up.
Neither of the given sort options doesn’t work well: by assignee, by project, by dates, and by likes.

Help us understand the impact this is having on your team
If the search results are sorted by alphabetic order, we can quickly narrow down the relevant area and only look at the tasks in that area.
If the tasks are not sorted, we need to go all the way from the top to the bottom to see if each task has certain client name, project ID, etc. in the task name. It’s really time consuming.

List any workarounds you may have employed

  • We search by the client name, project ID, etc. whenever possible, but we can’t do that when we are doing “search with keywords”.
  • Another solution would be to split the search fields for task title, task description, comments, etc., like we do when we search for emails in Gmail. But it will be harder to implement it than sorting search results, and I like Asana’s powerful “search keywords in everywhere”.

I think it’s not very difficult to implement the sort by name feature, because it’s already available in projects. We might not be able paginate the results so it might take some time to return large results, but that’s totally fine for me.
Thank you for your consideration in advance :slight_smile:

Wow this is a great and detailed feedback request! Thank you so much for sharing some workarounds as well @ShunS! I’ve sent this to our team internally. Thanks again!

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I have an issue with the sorting as well which I think would be improved with this change. After searching, if an item is in multiple projects, it shows in the search list for each project. (see example picture). I believe allowing me to sort the search alphabetically instead of by project would remove this and turn the result into more of a true to-do list.

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Is there a way to sort search results alphabetically?

Hey @Vanessa_Evans,

I recommend to upvote this post: Sort search results by alphabetic order :slight_smile:

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This is a question i get asked A LOT internally.
The only Reason i could imagine why this isn’t possible is that some searches have a lot of Results and sorting those could be a pain for the system?

Still, a much needed Feature!

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In projects view one can sort alphabetically but not in search results.

I have a client who has 10+ projects. Each project has a section “To clarify” and tasks within this section start with the name of the person that I need to talk.
I saved a search to see all my tasks that need clarification. I need alphabetical sorting to quickly see with whom I need to discuss what.

So please add alphabetical sorting in search results :pray:

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As a work around for now, you can create a Clarification project, then add a rule in all the other projects that will add the task to your new project whenever the task is added to the To Clarify section.

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crazy that something seemingly so obvious is not possible and takes years to implement. Why can you sort on relevance, assignee, project, due date, last modified, creation time, completion date and like, BUT NOT ON TASK NAME! :woozy_face:

how to sort Asana search results, e.g. projects, alphabetically?

is there any external tool to do that?