Love using your product as our daily workspace. It’s been a few years now, and with our growing amount of content we’re starting to have a hard time with the limited search options. It’s hard to find any information from you about plans to update the Search function so hoping for a response here. Here are our specific issues/requests:
Wildcard search - Any plans to implement? We have several categories of tasks with different prefixes like TT, MS, and SP. We’d like to be able to find all tasks that begin with SP, e.g. searching for SP.xxxx would bring up a task like SP.0123.
Search only task titles - is there any way to only search titles? Currently a keyword search will bring up any task that includes that word in the title OR description.
Quotes - This is the most challenging one for us on a daily basis - a search for a phrase in quotations marks “like this” will search all of our tasks for the words “like” and “this” separately. There seems to be no concept of a phrase search. Additionally we’ve noticed that periods are treated as spaces, and unfortunately our entire numbering system for the past few years has been based around periods, e.g. MS.0123 or SP.0123. We are looking at options where we would need to write a custom script in order to update every single task we’ve ever created so they are more easily searchable. Worried that an update like this will mess up our digital “paper trails.”
Task links not searchable - I’ve already reported this issue with a screencast and was told it would be forwarded to the dev team. Wondering if there’s any update here. We started using the task linking as soon as it became available, and too late realized that if a task is linked, the text is NOT searchable using a keyword search. Now as a work-around we include a plain text task number in front of the link, but we certainly lost some paper trail during the couple months that we didn’t find that bug.
Yes, the wildcard search is absolutely MUST HAVE… I was wery disappointed when I noticed (one year after using asana!) it could’n find just a part of the word…
Please, this is someting what this type of sw should have. Thanks in advanced
I agree with all four requests! Search is why gmail is so amazing. We love asana - but high quality search including wildcards and quote support would definitely make it SO MUCH BETTER.
Please let me know if there is a feature by which we can search the content within a attachment of the tasks also. Generally we have Word files or pdf files as attachments and It would be really useful if asana consider the content within attachments also which using the search function.
Dear Asana developers, any updates on this?
Project management without normal search algorithms is impossible, please fix this. We need wildcards and we hope it’s just a temporary “bug” - not a “feature”
Hi Will, it works for me on the search previews, but not if I hit enter to search a partial word. However, since the search preview work so well, I rarely have to complete a search. Does that make sense?
How can the the search functionality in a project management app be so lacking & yet this task only has 11 votes!?
I love Asana but the limited search capabilities drive me crazy sometimes & I agree the improvements listed in this request would be GREATLY appreciated. Please.
Wow - the lack of functionality that is SO EXTREMELY FUNDAMENTAL is astounding. Hello, Asana: why is there no way to search for “tele*” and have Asana find:
telephone,
telecom,
telecommunications, and
telematics, etc.
We committed a lot of time and energy to loading in data for what could be considered a “wiki” - based on Asana’s keyword search capability - and with Advanced Search, the ability to find things “buried” in Descriptions, Conversations, etc. Didn’t even dawn on me to test something so simple - but low and behold - a search for “tele” returns nothing. Even more maddening is that typing “tele” in the basic search box returns SOME items, but not all, and only where the string “tele” appears in the task name itself.
This is functionality that exists in the most basic of programs - why not here??
With over 1000 projects it is almost impossible to find anything wothout a good search function. In my opinion the lack of a good search function even is a good reason to look for an alternative because the tool thereby loses half its usefulness.
@Jennifer_Orr, any luck with partial words? I am new to Asana and I have the same problem.
I was looking for something and I thought it was not there until I have placed the complete word.
Hi George, I think someone from Asana could give you a better answer. Perhaps @Marie? In the meantime, you can use partial word searches but use the suggested results to find what you’re looking for, rather than hitting enter. I get different results on the suggested results vs. the results when I complete the search.
You’re completely right, our results preview supports partial word search, however the list of results itself doesn’t. I’m confident this is something we will fix in the future, but I don’t have any precise update to share at the moment. I’ll make sure to update this thread as soon as I do though!
