Allow Project Owners to Hide & Make Read-Only Custom Fields

With the implementation of Custom Fields, the ability to track and manage projects has increased significantly. Many of these fields are for reporting purposes only and don’t need to be available to the team and there currently isn’t a way to prevent other users from modifying.

Optimally, project Owners should have more control of the accessibility of the field to other users. Specifically, if the fields could be hidden (if nothing more to make projects appear cleaner) and have the ability to create read-only fields (for data integrity) would be welcomed improvements.

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I understand you can show/hide custom field columns in the task list but once a Custom Field has been created can it be removed from certain tasks within a project or by default is it going to made available to all tasks.

In my experience, if you remove a custom field, it is removed from all tasks within that project. Custom fields are tied to projects, not tasks.

But I’m still in my first few months of Asana, so I’m sure an Asana champion will chime in if I’m incorrect.

You’re spot-on, Crystal. Custom fields are available to all tasks in a project, rather than individual tasks.

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@Administrator1, the only way to have a mixed view in a single Project – where some Tasks have certain Custom Fields and others do not – would be to have the Tasks themselves live in different Projects. So, for example, “Status” may be a Custom Field for all Tasks in Project A. Any Tasks that live in Project A will have a Status Field. If any Task in Project A also lives in Project B (and Project B has no Custom Fields), those Tasks will still show Status as a field, but no other Tasks in that Project will.

While this may be overly complicated for what you’re trying to achieve, I’ve seen this work well for surfacing important information about company goals. Tasks that live in the Company Goals project have metadata that’s important to surface (like result, stakeholders, etc.), and so those Custom Fields are added to the “Goals” Project. Tasks in that Project (representing Goals) may live in other projects as well (like a roadmap project for work for the upcoming quarter. The roadmap Project will then have a mix of Tasks – the Goals Tasks will have the Custom Field data from their “home” Project, while the other Tasks will not.

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I’d like this feature too… We use Asana custom fields a lot, and our main limitation is on each project there’s often a small handful of tasks that don’t need the custom fields. These are tasks like ‘Instructions’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Other Resources’

It would be great if there was way to hide the custom fields in the right pane on these tasks, as they can distract from the important information, which is always contained in the task description or attachments.

OR: does anyone know a better way to present things like Instructions and Resources without the distraction of custom fields?

There’s a few other topics that relate to this, if anyone wants to vote or comment on them:

Summary

Select Custom Fields to show in Right Pane
Custom fields in tasks
Custom Fields on a Single Task (Not a Whole Project)

1 Like

Admins, is it possible to have this topic merged with Allow Project Owners to Hide & Make Read-Only Custom Fields so that we can vote on it?

I too, would love to eventually see the ability to hide custom fields on individual tasks.

Because I wear multiple hats, I need different types of information to fulfill different types of requests (i.e., a brochure creation, social media post). However, our team is rather small and they do not want to have to go to multiple projects to submit requests. Being able to hide certain custom fields would allow me to create template tasks for multiple types of requests all in one project for requests.

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Done! Now in the #productfeedback thread you referenced @Crystal_Alifanow

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I just wanted to come back to this topic and hope that a few more people might vote for it. I recently updated one of our project templates, and I sent a message to some of my colleagues asking them to add a new custom field to existing projects in the old template. Despite my step-by-step instructions and screenshots, one person - who shall remain nameless - ended up editing the new custom field in the process, changing its name and confusing everyone else who was trying to search for it. We’ve also had an instance of someone accidentally deleting a field when they thought they were simply removing it from their project.

A read-only custom field option for certain projects would help me to feel considerably more relaxed. :slight_smile:

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I dont use custom fields just yet due to this missing, so have not upgraded. I may upgrade to have them, but the problem is I need them for commercially sensitive information. Some of our tasks have a cost we have quoted. So I need to track all quoted costs. But i dont want the development team to see all that.

Yes this is key. It’s too easy for other users to add entries, which can lead to an admin headache tracking down the instances of those rogue entries.

Hello, I just voted this topic

I have some projects on asana that my clients can see as guests. It would be useful to hide some columns to them such as notes made by my team etc.

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Up voting this one. I think it is a highly value feature for the integration case. I have data integrated from JIRA that the “project manager” needs to know only. These custom field values, change by integration also trigger rules. Allowing anyone in Asana to change the value of these field breaks the integrity of the integration and lessens the value of the end to end solution.

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We have created different Task templates within a Project and determined through “Customize” Fields that are visible on those task templates. At the moment same Fields are visible on every template and this is not ideal. Could there be a way to hide unnecessary fields from different tasks?
So from get-go, same fields would be visible on all tasks, but there would be a possibility to hide unnecessary fields straight from the task.

At the moment you can only hide/show fields in the list view. A task always shows all the fields available, not sure if this will ever change.

Welcome to the Asana Community Forum @Jenni_Ranta :wave:

Is this or this what you are looking for?
If so then we could merge the posts.

Thank you! And I think first option you posted, fits right in.

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Hi,
I have shared projects - where most members have and should have access to see all info. However, I would love to be able to hide cetain fields. for certain people. Ex. budget estimate or similar. So I can customize who can see what info.
Can this be done? Or is this a feature in the pipeline?

/Marte