Archive a Section in a Project

English Forum Product Feedback
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Feedback on New Section / Column Heading Element
#productfeedback

Hi @Marie. Sorry for two posts from me tonight but this is just so painful. I am putting this feedback here in the forum because the behavior of the new Section/Column headings has clearly been designed to support the use case of switching between boards and lists. With, I will unfortunately have to say, some really annoying consequences.

Use Case:
Each department has an annual operating plan or strategic plan. It is comprised of all the milestones that they are responsible for, broken out by quarter.

I was excited to see the list/board switch feature roll out to my company recently. Some of the teams like the Board view better for their strategic plans. Frankly I support ANYTHING that gets them to like Asana. So that’s a win.

So tonight I was going through each of the department’s strategic plans getting everyone all set up for the new strategic plan we’re rolling out. Simple task while I’m watching TV - add the new quarters between now and FY2023.

BEFORE THE UPDATE
Sections looked like this:

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What was great about this was:

  1. It was easy to move milestones (or as we call them, “rocks”) from one quarter to another, using the sections.
  2. when the quarter was over, you just closed the section and it was hidden from view. Project stayed nice and neat.

Enter the New Section behavior.

New sections are like the house guest who has vastly overstayed their welcome but is not taking the social cues that maybe it’s time to go home.

The Quarter is OVER. But due to the new behavior of Sections (e.g. you can’t close them) what on earth do you do once all the work below them is done?

I have another project that tracks all the high level items for our electronic health record roll out by program location. Once that program location is done and live, why on earth does the section heading need to live on in perpetuity?

I’m writing this well aware of the work around you, dear reader, might be wondering. “What’s the big deal? Why don’t you just delete the quarter section heading when it’s done?”

Do you think getting rid of house guests is that easy? Come on.

You can’t delete the section header, because you have to MOVE all the tasks (whether they are done or not) OUT of that section before you’re allowed to do that now.

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So now Asana is asking me to move the tasks
where exactly? The only place to put them is at the top of the project where there is no section heading.

Oh and I have to teach that now very stupid work around to every person in Asana: “I"m sorry but for some reason you now have to move every single task under that section that you’re done with all the way to the top of the page so it’s now unassigned, and then you can call an Uber for the house guest you don’t want.”

Sigh. So that’s my feedback @Marie.

10 Likes
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Hi @Kristian_Sekse and thanks for sharing your feedback with us. The ability to archive Sections is so far the biggest feedback we received from customers who have access to List < > Board. We already have a thread on this topic, so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with this topic as your use case illustrate perfectly this idea. We’re still in the process of rolling out this new feature, but just like for other launches, we’ll look into some improvements in the future, so your feedback is super important; thanks for sharing it!

7 Likes
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Did I read that right? Asana is going to first make sure everyone has this broken feature and then fix it?

4 Likes
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Please fix the issue without worrying about who has the new version yet. That way, when more users have it, they can still mark sections complete like they have always been able to.

For me, it doesn’t matter who has it yet. I have it, so my workflow is broken and there are dead sections sitting around and waiting for Asana to let me mark them complete. To be clear, I don’t want to delete the sections, since that doesn’t make any sense. Marking them complete is what has always worked well for everyone here, and should continue to work well. Also, section descriptions were very useful and those need to be returned. Also, being able to make a section simply by adding a colon at the end of a task title was perfect. Why was working functionality removed? All this functionality could work while still being able to switch between a board and list view. When switching to the board view, it would just interpret the sections as it does now. I don’t get why this has to be explained


9 Likes
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Would really like the ability to mark sections complete or archive please. Having a bunch of empty sections hanging around is problematic for me.

15 Likes
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This is definitely and urgently needed since the introduction of board <> list views (which in itself is great). However, we still need to be able to “complete” a section as we used to.

They should follow the setting displaying only open, only closed or all tasks.

Please bring this feature back asap!

Thanks & Regards
Fabian

8 Likes
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Hi Marie,

I am currently running into an issue. Recently today I had four(4) tasks that I marked complete under a Section. My problem is that with so many sections on my list I cannot delete the section without it deleting the completed tasks as well(which I do not want to do as I need them saved in the system). I do not want to have a stack of sections with no tasks underneath them, that will just simply pile up and become extremely cluttered for me.
If you have any solutions for me I’d really like to know. Thank you!

1 Like
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we definitely need to complete a section! We were not warned that we will be forced to use sections in a complete different way than we did until now. I have sections all over my projects which I need to get rid off. But I do not want to delete all the tasks underneath.

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This is very urgently needed. Since our team has been put on to these new sections our organization has gotten much worse. Any workflow that relied on having sections become “complete” or processed in any way is now unworkable. We do not want to lose comments and history on tasks in those sections. The work around of showing all tasks and moving them out of the section before completing it adds unnecessary steps to what used to be a single simple action and also can cause confusion if those tasks are ever uncompleted.

4 Likes
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Indeed, removing sections DELETES all tasks and there is no trace back, the heck?!

3 Likes
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I second this as well, because our tasks are connected to airtable and xero

1 Like
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This really needs to get fixed ASAP. I just worked through completing a working system that was beneficial to my clients needs in Asana and now hours spent have been wasted. WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO ARCHIVE SECTIONS. Otherwise we are looking at sections that we don’t need anymore once tasks get completed and the only option we are now given is that all tasks associated with the section must get deleted too if we want to delete the section so we don’t see it? It makes no sense, especially if we are using add-ons like Everhour where we have time tracking directly related to tasks. We love Asana, don’t get me wrong, but this update has been very frustrating to try and work around. Is there any timeframe as to when this is going to get resolved?

6 Likes
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Please fix asap! This is a huge pain and is making my projects very cluttered as I dont really want to move tasks from Sections to fix.

3 Likes
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+1 feedback from my teams - we really need the ability to close Sections.

3 Likes
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Yes please! Let us know when this is possible.

2 Likes
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+1,000,000

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Any update on when it will be possible to archive Sections? We’re ending up with projects full of empty sections that we can’t delete because we don’t want to lose the completed tasks inside.

4 Likes
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It’s now been more than a month since my last post in this thread about this. This should be the only task in the Asana team’s list of tasks that needs to be done, yet it’s been more than a month. Everything else in Asana is relatively okay, but this is still not fixed. It would take 1 programmer maybe a maximum of 1 week to complete. I can understand if there are technical difficulties, but not for a whole month. It seems like a management issue at this point, rather than a programming issue.

6 Likes
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#moderators I believe we have several threads on the topic of archiving/deleting a section, maybe we should merge them?

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Please revert this feature. Currently Sections are limited to being able to divide permanent tasks up, but are useless for organizing seasonal, quarterly, or temporary tasks within a project. Also very saddened to see they don’t hold data. This was a very useful feature and I like the new collapsibility and reordering of it, but it lost too many of it’s positive aspects in the rework.

4 Likes