Having an editable field, or a ‘find and replace’ component would go a long way to easing the project set-up burden.
I use a few templates regularly. Those templates have ~45-50 tasks, each needing to be personalized for the project. My individual team members will be on 4-5+ of these projects at a time, so they may have 4-5+ “Review Script” tasks. We mitigate potential confusion by adding in the project name. eg: “Review React Native Script” or “Review ES2016 Script”
A ‘Find and Replace’ option when setting up Templates would be amazing.
I have some tasks that have long sub-task lists. I am promoting what I can to task status, where the project is identified in the task list on the task’s line, but I’ve also discovered that, if I put a a word or symbol in the template’s task name that I can find to replace, it’s possible to
copy and paste a list of sub-tasks into Word, or another text editor,
‘find and replace’
paste those tasks back into that list as a group.
This depends on having a word or symbol in the template’s task name that you can find to replace in the list.
Works best if all the sub-tasks are under one task, so are in one list. I don’t know what this would do to sub-sub tasks…
Depending on the structure of your template, this might be a helpful work around until the feature is available.
Thanks for the shortcut! Definitely helpful for some repetition, but in other case I lose “assigned to” and/or due dates. 6 of one, 1/2 a dozen of the other I suppose.
Dependencies and other things like tags are also lost. I really wish Asana would address this obvious omission - would think it can’t be that hard to implement? I’ve tried some Chrome extensions that add find/replace functionality, but they don’t work with Asana, I’m guessing because the tasks are data entry fields?
And also hava an option to NOT post them as “NEW TASKS” on every assigned coworkers My tasks taskslist ( some tasks are allready poitned out on a date and there’s no reason to flood this persons “NEW TASKS” list
I dread certain projects coming up because I have to “CTRL V”, down arrow, Home" repeat about 82 times to add the project name at the beginning of each task. Hopefully this will be implemented soon.
I have biweekly templates with over 150 tasks. Currently I have a generic “Artist:” at the beginning of each and when we finalize a video I have to change that to the artist’s name. Having a find a replace feature within a project would make it so much easier to change 150 tasks as one time.
I love Asana, but one of my biggest gripes about the tool is that it’s impossible to find and replace text. I make use of templates to manage my team, and often one subtask that repeats across over 100 tasks will change. I then have to manually search for all instances of that subtask and copy/paste to update the new subtask language. It’s very time-consuming. Is there a solution to this issue that already exists that perhaps I don’t know about? Or any plans to implement a product fix?
As it stands Asana doesn’t offer this option, but this is a super interesting feedback that our team will definitely evaluate for future updates! I’ll keep you posted here as soon as I have an update!
This feature would be a huge benefit to our team. We are a CPG company with around 100 products. Updating 50 plus tasks (and even subtasks) within a template is a very cumbersome task.
It would be great if we could do something like the following:
Set a character as the custom field to envelop the updated template word. For example: (product name) Design Packaging
Set project as a template
When creating a project from a template, it will prompt the user for a word to fill in.
Cannot overstate what a major oversight this is on Asana’s part - without the ability to do this, you are basically rendering templates useless. And from looking through various Asana forums, it looks like this has been lacking (and requested by users) for years. Huge frustration within our organization, please do something about it!
Agree with Jason’s proposed solution - templates include a generic placeholder word of choice, when you create a project from the template it will prompt you to enter a word to replace this with. Even just a basic find and replace (you already have the find!) would be awesome. This exists on far older technologies, I do not understand why it is not a part of Asana’s features.
I have several project templates that I use on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Since each task name has to include the month or persons name, I am having to copy and paste more than 100 times within one project. It would be AMAZING, if there was a find a replace feature within a project so that I could replace the placeholder with the correct month or name.
Hi @Kari_Stober, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us!
This is a great question! We have an existing thread about this topic and I’ve gone ahead and merged your thread with ‘Find and Replace’ for Templates to avoid duplicates and centralize feedback. I hope you don’t mind!
I’ll make sure to update the main thread when I have more information about this feature. Thanks again!
It would be really useful to be able to do a find and replace within Asana for task names in a certain project.
For example, we use unique docket numbers for each new project but if we wanted to duplicate an existing project because the tasks are similar, currently we need to manually update all the docket numbers which is very time-consuming.
