Task printing format

I think this is the right category?

Anyway, here’s the deal:

I run a facility that has a small manufacturing division. We are currently using Excel to enter mill orders and track them. I have been spending a lot of time figuring out how to switch us to Asana, and I’m ready to shake up the works. The one thing stopping me is how Asana prints tasks.

Our process, as I envision it, is simple. We enter an order into our ERP (which is ancient and a real POS) and then create the mill order in Asana. The task will be printed out and given to the mill as their production order. We will track the progress using Instagantt.

I use 2 paragraph fields, one for describing the item to be made, the other for describing the material to be used. Below is an example of how we enter the info and how we need it to print.

84M - 55BDF
64M - 17BDF
1/2" INS. GLASS CLEAR 6"X26"
4-1/2 SATIN NICKEL HINGE
2-SCHWSS
1-SCHSWP48
TTPART - 3/0 ALUM BLACK SILL

What it actually prints like is

84M - 55BDF 64M - 17BDF 1/2" INS. GLASS CLEAR 6"X26" 4-1/2 SATIN NICKEL HINGE 2-SCHWSS 1-SCHSWP48 TTPART - 3/0 ALUM BLACK SILL

My production guys can’t use that.

Is there a way to force Asana to print exactly as the text is entered, carriage returns and all?

I created a “Test” task and pasted your info in and then went to the “…” button for the task and selected print. My print preview looked like this (just fyi, you can paste screenshots easily into this board with CTRL+V):

Is this more or less what you want? I’m not sure the method you used to print and why it made a single line.

Basically yes. Here’s what we get:

And then

Using the same method - click the … and select Print. I’m going to try it in Firefox instead of Chrome.

Okay, looks like it’s an issue with Custom Fields. I’m a freeloading free user so don’t have experience with that. @Marie might have some suggestions or be able to move this to the feature request board.

Yeah, did not work with Firefox either.

It’s nice to see someone using Asana for something related to construction and building materials as we do at our company.

We use the free version of Asana but @Ray_Duval’s implementation looks very attractive for spec-ing out and keeping track of our customers’ entry doors and custom barn/french doors.

We do custom interior and exterior residential doors, including barn doors. We also do custom interior trim.

Anyway, I’m still wrestling with this.

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Ray, I just saw this. That’s a nice lookin’ door.

Any luck with this printing problem you’re having?

I just do this for now. I put it in the desciption itself.

That’s what we ended up doing. I think I was trying to do too much. We now have the employees entering the info directly to Asana fields with details in the descriptions and it works pretty well.

I’d be curious to see that 4/0 mahogany door!

Haha. Hopefully I can snap a photo of it for you before it heads out of our warehouse. We haven’t even placed this order yet.

You got any other tips for using Asana in the construction industry?

Not solely construction related, but for our mill we’ve added 5 fields:

  • Budgeted Labor
  • Actual Labor
  • Budgeted Material
  • Actual Material
  • Order Sell Price

On export, we can easily see how our estimating team is doing. We’re using Asana because our ERP is from 1980-something and can barely keep track of itself.

Oh gotcha. We do mostly retail and management for builders and contractors for luxury single-family. Good to hear that Asana can work for this sort of industry to some degree.

Anything new on this? It would be great to have the print format match the display format of the list view 1:1 or have the option of printing it that way… Maybe a List:Summary and a List:Detail print option? Anyone see something like that? Would modifying the CSS through something like Open Stylebot or User CSS as an interim workaround?

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@Snake,

I don’t think there’s anything new in Asana itself, but several thousand folks are using this simple Chrome extension (disclaimer: I’m the creator):

That’s the original post announcing the tool put you can find much more by searching Asana2Go here or checking out articles/videos at Trilogi Solutions: Asana Consulting - Medium.

There are around 20 standard report formats you can choose from, and you can create almost anything with custom formats.

Larry