I hope this is the correct forum area to post this.
I have a project where I’m saving all of my templates as tasks (with subtasks). When I need a project, I just convert the task into a project. Works well.
When I go back to my templates project, the original task is marked as “Closed and converted to the project: name of project”. But, on the right hand site there’s a Reopen Task button:
The problem: when I click on the Reopen Task Button, the task becomes active again. BUT ALL OF THE SUBTASKS AND ATTACHMENTS ORIGINALLY CONTAINED IN IT ARE GONE!
Is this an intended behavior or is it a bug?
I can think of a workaround: duplicating the task before converting it to a project. But at some point, some team member will forget to duplicate beforehand, and we would’ve lost our template. And converting back, from project to task, is not possible.
Let me do some digging into this, I’ll get back to you as soon as I have more info. In the meantime, what about storing all your Templates into a Team? This way you could build your template into a project and avoid having to convert your task into project before being able to create your new project.
That could be one workaround, and I’m considering. The problem with that solution is that, if you have hundreds of templates, they will all be cluttered in one column (on the sidebar), and it wouldn’t be possible to categorize them. I guess you could use a project name as a section, like so:
This way you can have thousands of templates, all categorized, using only ONE project space on the sidebar. And they would be all accessible at a glance, easy to reorder, categorize, filter, tag, etc.
What do you think?
If you can think of any disadvantages to this, please let me know. I already found one: the loss of subtasks when converting these tasks to projects.
You could store all your Templates in a Team that you keep collapsed in your sidebar and reference each project in your Master Template Board Project to easily access them. You will just need to open a card and click on your project link
You could store all your Templates in a Team that you keep collapsed in your sidebar and reference each project in your Master Template Board Project to easily access them.
Oooooh! Nice one! Very clever!
I might try that! Although I must say that having the actual projects in one place, rather than using a “proxy” board to accessing them, seems more practical. The proxy board is an additional step, when our goal is to have the least steps to accomplish a goal (efficiency). But still, having this as an additional option is great, and something I haven’t thought of.
I’ll keep you posted as I experiment with this. If you come up with other ideas, please share!
One question @Marie, what purpose does the Custom Templates option offer, other than making a template available to all the members?
And even that feature is not very useful since usually projects are targeted to specific teams. I mean, I wouldn’t want the design team to have access to an Accounting template. Is there any use for Custom Templates that you can think of?
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond with such a great idea and such nice images (I didn’t know you could have custom backgrounds for boards )
Great news @Eric5; let me know how this works for you! Hopefully, we will implement a better solution in the future! If you know exactly how you’d like to have your templates organized in Asana, I would highly encourage you to create a thread in our #productfeedback category to allow other users with similar needs, to vote for your feature request!
Regarding custom Templates: they will be automatically available from your dropdown menu when creating a new project (see example attached). Note that not everyone will automatically have access to this template, but only people who belong to the Team in which your template is nested!
Could you describe this a little more? We are a small team in Asana (total of 5) so right now our Templates are accessible to our whole team. How do we collapse parts of the sidebar?
So what you could do is create a brand new Team (providing you work in an Organization. This solution won’t work with Workspaces). You would then add all your colleagues to this Team and nest all your Templates in it. In your sidebar, you can either collapse or open your Teams, so this new Team won’t take too much room in your sidebar. See GIF here:
In the example above, I recommended Eric to reference (=copy project link) each template into is master Board template; so every template can be open from this project (as opposed to open them from the sidebar Team).
Hope that makes sense, but please let me know if you need me to clarify anything!
Thanks Marie. We are in a Workspace so I’m not familiar with the Organization views. We would love for more offices at our organization to adopt Asana. Hopefully in the future we can move up to organization level.
Hi @bobi.robson, welcome to the forum!
I still didn’t get an answer if this is a glitch ( @Marie ? )
The workaround I found is to duplicate the task, and converting the duplicate to a project. This way you retain the original task intact, with all its subtasks.
Hi @Eric5 and so sorry for the delay in responding to you!
I’m able to reproduce the issue you’re describing but I’m unsure whether it is a bug or an expected behaviour, in which case I’d like to learn more. I’ll keep you posted as soon as I have an update!
Hi @Eric5, and thanks for your patience, I just heard back from our engineers on this question. You’re correct, as it stands subtasks and their attachements aren’t recreated when reopening a task that was converted into a project. This is unfortunately an expected behaviour and it is directly linked to the fact subtasks aren’t linked to their parent task project unless you manually add them to it. We’re planning to do some work on subtasks in the coming months, so hopefully we can fix this behaviour as part of this work, I’ll make sure to update this thread when I have more updates!
)