Thank you @ShunS. That works. Also thank you for liking my idea. We agree. Maybe because we both come from cultures with a taste for simple design. I am Danish, and I see that you are Japanese.
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I don’t think the two choices in this poll accurately capture the trade-offs we have in front of us. It’s easy to deal with the board/list problem - create things in lists first, then multi-home them to boards if a board is more helpful. We can tell by the color showing on a task in boards if it’s not correctly multi-homed. This might not be intuitive to new or casual users of Asana, but it works well and people can learn it quickly once they realize the difference in functionality between boards and lists.
However, when it comes to the section/task problem, there is no work-around with tab-n. There is just double work. If I want to convert a section to a task, I can’t even “duplicate” the task: the duplicate “task” is still a section. God forbid I have a section with subtasks that I want to make a task or that I’m copying a list from excel or word or the Internet with headings already in it. In the past it took a quick colon or deletion of a colon to convert a task to a section, to convert a section to a task, or to make copied lists clean and tidy. Now it takes many, many minutes of tab-n-ing and dragging and dropping. It is crazy-making. This is not at all about muscle memory or shortcuts. It is about functionality and time.
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I couldn’t agree more. I used to be very enthousiastic about asana. I have a lot invested so it’s hard for me to change. But if you read this and don’t have asana, don’t get it. They don’t listen to the customers.
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This is so painful, it’s unclear if Asana understands what made it fast to use (the iOS version is proof of this).
TAB + N doesn’t use the text on the current line as the title, so you have to either re-type, or copy/paste which are all additional steps.
Many of us are creating tasks from client emails, or formatting/re-formatting existing tasks so the colon was a genius idea; in one step you could make any task a section. No key combos, no copy/paste, no re-typing, no additional steps.
The purity of this product is disappearing fast, so silly and such a shame.
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Spend less time managing tasks and more time doing them. TAB+N illustrates a worrying trend; that Asana has forgotten what made it so great. If a feature change adds extra steps, it should be questioned severely.
Yes, everything is ‘design by committee’ these days but sometimes a company needs to take a leadership role, understand core fundamentals and stick to its guns.
Why add extra steps to task management? Efficiency used to be a selling point.
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@Asana - Please do you have an update on this? My entire team was just coming around to your software, but this change breaks it. Most people voted to keep the ‘:’ sections over being able to toggle board/list view.
What is the status?
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While I appreciate the effort to add the functionality of boards to list view, there must be some way to integrate the TAB+N command more seamlessly into the existing interface. There is now a disconnect between the content you are writing and the ability to change the case of the writing to section. Having to copy and paste what you already wrote to a new section line is ultimately a huge block in the previously seamless flow of the interface. It needs to be better integrated, otherwise it feels like you are busy managing the interface rather than the other way around.
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Hi @Destini_Wooden;
We haven’t planned to switch back to the “:” shortcut, but we’re still looking into how can improve the “Tab+N” shortcut to address issues outlined in this thread. I will make sure to share more updates as soon as I have some.
Many of us spend our days pasting client emails into Asana and formatting them into tasks, or reformatting tasks created by others to make them more readable.
TAB+N is OK if you’re creating tasks from scratch but in daily use it’s painful because:
TAB+N doesn’t convert text to a section, it creates a new section which requires you to either re-type text, or copy/paste. Both are unneeded extra steps.
You can’t convert a section back to a task. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe things have changed, maybe you need to reformat to make things more readable?
Spend lest time managing tasks and more time doing them. TAB+N illustrates a worrying trend; that Asana has forgotten what made it so great. If a feature change adds extra steps, it should be questioned severely.
Yes, everything is ‘design by committee’ these days but sometimes a company needs to take a leadership role, understand core fundamentals and stick to its guns.
Why add extra steps to task management? Efficiency used to be a selling point.
3 Likes
As a long time Asana user, I really don’t like this change. I’ve tried to get used to it but I forget it every time and when I do, I am greeted with a tooltip which doesn’t help: I click Tab+N but it creates a new section under the task I types.
I think the colon section feature added this “wow” effect to Asana, so natural ease of use, something that we could show new Asana users and say, see how easy it is to use it. Now it’s gone and requires everyone to be a power user to get along. I understand why it was technically challenging to maintain, but for the users the feature was really important.
Please reconsider bringing it back!
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Our team can no longer create project categories / headers by typing a colon [ : ] after the text. Doing so used to create a bold and underlined category. This feature has disappeared. Please respond. Thanks.
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Hi @Travis_Shank, welcome to the Community Forum! Since we already have a post on this topic, I have gone ahead and merged them. Please let me know if you have any questions 
It looks like a lot of users were copying and pasting text lists into new/blank projects to create nicely formatted projects with sections and tasks. The colon enabled this. It was a basic template.
With the TAB-N change, this approach no longer works. Which means there is more pressure to solve the template problem by…using templates. Which gets more people to paid plans. Hmm.
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This is not acceptable. Please fix ASAP. I can think of multiple ways that you can implement the ability to toggle between a board and a list view while also making sections by adding colons. It’s not an engineering impossibility.
Also, why does the first post say you make a section with a semi-colon? You make it with a colon.
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Hi - I signed up for the community just to tell you how annoying this change is.
I loved Asana because it behaved like “notepad” in the beginning - this feeling is now gone.
Tab + N is not an easy shotcut to press - you need two hands.
At least bring it back as a “Hack” …
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So agree. I used to be able to copy and paste an entire list into asana and add colons where was needed for sections. It was so easy to add and remove sections.
Now everything is a task and it makes it so clunky. 
Please bring back the functionality. or make it so highlighting a task and pressing TAB N will make it a section
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So agree. I posted this earlier…
I used to be able to copy and paste an entire list into asana and add colons where was needed for sections. It was so easy to add and remove sections.
Now everything is a task and it makes it so clunky. Asana, Please bring back the functionality. or make it so highlighting a task and pressing TAB N will make it a section
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Don’t worry. Asana’s concept of sections doesn’t work for board users either. In a board view, a section should collect or link together related tasks across multiple columns, not just add a new column. I’d much rather an easy way to apply categories and tags, and convert categories to sections for grouping. But that’s just me.
There should be a third option: Freely toggle projects between board and list views, and dissociate board columns from sections. They are two completely different concepts. Sections are more like overarching categories; in Agile they could be used as Epics. But at any rate, they are larger bodily groupings for tasks that could be in any status.
The common use for Boards is to have multiple columns to indicate status, not a grouping or section. They could be, but most commonly the columns are named To Do, Doing, and Done. Sections would be “Preliminary Budget”, “First Use Scenarios”, “Test Criteria”… can you see the disconnect here?
I say return the colon for new section shortcut for list view and board view, and work out a way under the hood to perhaps add some metadata to use for filtering and grouping rather than designing the solution from only a visual standpoint.
1 Like