+1 for the switch.
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+1 for the BOARD to LIST (and LIST to BOARD) conversion feature
I need this so bad!!!
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I would think the problem is the development team gets so busy doing something that takes months that such simple changes that wouldnāt take more than a couple of days get pushed forever and ever. They need to split the development team so that one part would work on rapid development tasks and the other work on slower development.
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I think the most disappointing thing for me is the utter lack of customer service that Asana is demonstrating. There is nearly zero meaningful communication and this issue has been dragged on for 6 months. Either address it or kill it. It doesnāt inspire me to change my plan from the free version to the paid version.
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I agreed, either let us know you guys able to do it or just say it is not doable - we are basically checking here frequently to see any āgoodā news or not. thanks
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We are still getting up and running with Asana and this is the second major road block/lack of a really basic feature weāve encountered (first was no secondary sort function). Itās super discouraging to find a thread like this where an Asana rep says in March that itās a priority, then months later no action and theyāre āthinking about itā and then less and less response over time. Is this typical? Are there any major bugs or needed basic features that they have addressed in a timely manner?
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Also, I tried to copy the project I wanted to change from board to list, hoping I would have the option to set the new one up in the other format. Do not do this. You donāt have the option, and even though I deleted the copy of the project as soon as I realized it, my team is now left with duplicates of every single task in that project. Iām now going to be stuck at work late for several hours undoing this. 
Asana fail.
Hi Natalie,
Iām sorry to hear youāre feeling frustrated and can understand where youāre coming from. I do hope you feel heard by our team here at Asana. Feel free to send me a private message if youād like to discuss this further. In addition, I think youāll find this post valuable - we describe how product feedback happens in the Community and how Asana creates our product roadmap. **Read me first** How you can give feedback and what we do next
Thanks very much,
Alexis (Community Manager)
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+1 Functionality HIGHLY desired in my workflow
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+1 for the feature! Essential for my Kanban workflow.
+1 on this request too!
Highly desired feature
Hiš,
My name is John and I am the Product Manager for Boards at Asana.
First of all, rest assured that weāve been reading all of your comments and took every piece of them seriously. Thank you all for spending the time to provide feedback. I wanted to respond here with the intent of giving our community as much context as we possibly can around the decisions regarding the ability to switch between lists and boards. To be upfront, I donāt have answers about whether and when we are going to add this feature, but I may be able to shed some light regarding why this is taking longer than what some would expect. Additionally, weād love to hear your thoughts regarding the following questions:
- What problem would being able to switch between list and board solve for you?
- In what situations would you use lists vs. boards and switch between them?
For those of you who are curious, when the team worked on boards, we had the intention of delivering the feature as quickly as possible while maintaining a high product quality bar. To achieve both, we made some huge bets to cut out certain features that we believed wouldnāt be as valuable to our users. One of these bets was the view switching feature that largely contributed to why it only took a mere 3 months to build boards from scratch and launch it. Regardless of whether that was the right call, the reality is that adding it back would take significant resource investments. Without boring you with all the technical details, the analogy is building a regular car and not realizing later on that drivers valued hybrid cars with the ability to switch between gas and electric fuel. Imagine having to rip out the existing engine, gas tank and fit in batteries and components that would work for both modes. Many parts of the car would need to be re-engineered and tested. Knowing the cost, we decided to dedicate our resources to building other exciting features to give our users this year (stay tuned!) with the intention of revisiting this user problem later on.
I hope this explanation, while lacking promises, gives you more confidence that we have a strong desire to address this particular pain point of yours. The intent of this post isnāt to suppress responses, but to achieve the opposite instead. Please let us know what your answers are to the two question above. We know you all have to spend time out of your busy lives to type these comments so we are absolutely grateful for any feedback you may provide!
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This is a thoughtful, reasonable response, @John_Hung. Iāve also read the often passionate comments above, but Iāve yet to read a compelling example of why this is such a must-have feature. Personally, I prefer lists for 2 key reasons:
- Lists allow one to select more than one task at a time.
- Lists provide a better visual overview of custom fields.
If you could improve those 2 elements in boards, Iād use them more. However, Iām still more than happy with lists, and I tend to dip in and out of boards for certain types of projects.
Iām excited to see what new features are coming soon.
Best wishes
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This feature is so crucial. Please @Asana_team, you have so many people asking for this. Itās the one feature that made me definitely switch from Trello to Asana, but right now Iām stucked in one of the 2 formats
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Hi @John_Hung glad u asked this.
First question we may ask is: why Asana implemented board view at the first place? I believe the answer is already there: kanban system is proven to increase productivity, more efficient to manage projects with process and easier to view entire projects as a whole.
Numerous kanban apps out there have proven how popular and acceptable is the system.
Now Asana have it, but we could not use it for full potential, why? Because in board view you canāt:
- Multiple select task and edit - think about able to edit due dates for multiple task.
- View tags - so so useful to segment the task easily
- View how many task on each list
- Batch add tasks to multiple projects - that is where Asana really shine in productivity world.
- Batch move tasks to another list/status
- We miss out most of the benefits in the list view to summarize
So why we want to able to switch between list and board view? The reason is being simple ( at least for my case )
We want to manage projects in kanban system (proven is more prodocutive by many people) and still able to manage those tasks effectively with the features mentioned above.
If you add in those features on board view, I believe it can solve many people concern out there.
For the record, task world, kanbanchi, wrike, hive, bitrix24, azendoo, avazaā¦ are able to do it - by switching kanban and list view.
Why i know it? Because i wasted numerous days to find other apps that can solve this issue for me.
So my point is, since u guys already made the board view to adapt popular request, why not make it even better?
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John_Hung wanted to knowā¦
āWhat problem would being able to switch between list and board solve for you?ā
Here is my answerā¦
I often will start a task, with a couple subtasks.
But then, I will āFlush Outā the details of a subtask with more lower level (sub)subtasks to the subtask. That IMO is one of the greatest features of Asana.
However, often what started out as a subtask will later need to be moved to become a higher level task. Or sometimes I will want to move a task ātreeā with all its subtasks into another task.
You can do all that with lists, but in the Board View, you cannot drag a task anywhere.
Either allow that (and all other capability that lists have to the board view), and I believe you would appease at least half of the people who what to be able to switch.
2 Likes
I often will start a task, with a couple subtasks.
But then, I will āFlush Outā the details of a subtask with more lower level (sub)subtasks to the subtask. That IMO is one of the greatest features of Asana.
However, often what started out as a subtask will later need to be moved to become a higher level task. Or sometimes I will want to move a task ātreeā with all its subtasks into another task.
You can do all that with lists, but in the Board View, you cannot drag a task anywhere.
Either allow that (and all other capability that lists have to the board view), and I believe you would appease at least half of the people who what to be able to switch.
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We tried out the board view for a project to see how it would work, but it didnāt fit our needs well. Due to several integrations it is cumbersome for us to move all the tasks to another project.
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Thanks for all of your thoughtful responses! What Iām hearing so far is something along the lines of āwe want to be able to have certain features that make it easy to manage tasks on lists and that do not exist in boards.ā
Looking forward to hearing more from others about what your reasons are.
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