Custom field types and limitations

Available on Asana Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Premium, Business, and Legacy Enterprise.  

Custom fields let you add additional data to tasks in your Asana projects. You can create a field for stage, priority, cost, or anything else that’s important to your workflow, team, and company. This allows individuals to have clarity on work happening across their organization. You can view the custom fields as columns in a project or within the task itself. 

There are multiple different field types to choose from, some of which have additional options associated with them:

• It is possible to have 100 fields in a single project.
• You can have up to 60 fields per task (this can be achieved by multi-homing a single task to multiple projects).
• A drop-down custom field can have up to 500 field value options.
• Rules can also be used to update the contents of a text custom field or a numeric custom field. 

Multi-select custom field

The multi-select custom field allows the selection of several different values at a time for a single custom field. When you choose the multi-select custom field type, add all the relevant options in the edit field pane. To use the multi-select custom field, scroll to the field you would like to edit and select all applicable options.

Choose an existing field from your library

You can make custom fields global across your organization, so you and your colleagues can use a custom field across multiple projects. You also have the option to make fields that are local to a single project or portfolio.

You can choose global custom fields from your organization's field library.

Navigate to the Customize menu in your toolbar and click Add field.

 

From here:

1. Click Choose from library
2. Select the field you wish to add to your project

Asana-created custom fields

You can access a list of Asana-configured custom fields here.

Currency and percentage field labels

You can create a numeric custom field based on currency or percentage.

From your project's list grid view:

1. Click on the Customize icon in your toolbar
2. Click Add field

 

From your add custom field tab:

1. Add field title
2. Add field type
3. Add units, decimals or preview
4. Choose your field’s edit access
5. Create field

Calculate summation values

By clicking on Sum at the end of the column, you can calculate:

1. The sum
2. The average
3. Minimum values
4. Maximum values
5. Summation count

Using custom fields

Custom fields help you track work according to your team’s needs. The name and value of any field is up to you and possibilities are almost endless. Here are a few examples that show field types across different workflows:

Priority

You can use custom fields to indicate a task’s priority level. For example, an engineering team using Asana for bug tracking can create a drop-down field to set the priority level (low, medium, high) of the bug.

Once implemented, you can filter tasks down in the list view to focus just on tasks with a certain field value set. Click Filter at the top of your task list, then Custom filter. This will allow you to view just the "high" priority tasks, for example.

Use colors to distinguish between the drop-down field options. Red can mean “high priority”, for example.

Costing

Use custom fields to track work requests and time costing. A design team might have a number custom field to input how much time they anticipate for the work. Then, designers can prioritize hours accordingly and know how much they’re working on before deciding to take on more work or not.

Multi-select tasks with number fields to add up their sum:

Once you multi-select tasks with numeric fields, the following menu will appear at the bottom of the screen displaying the number of tasks and their sum. You can also:

1. Move tasks between sections
2. Edit a project or a section
3. Copy task links
4. Delete tasks
5. Click the three dot icon for additional actions

Information tracking

If you use Asana for candidate tracking or account tracking, you can use a text field to enter specific information like an email address, phone number, company, or address.

Using tags vs. custom fields

Tags and custom fields allow you to categorize, filter, and denote information in Asana. Custom fields are best for standard use across an organization, while tags are more informal. We strongly advocate for the use of custom fields, which are more robust and visible than tags. Depending on your workflow, you might find that your team uses them in different ways, but here some scenarios to help you decide:

Use custom fields if you:

• Want to add certain data to all the tasks in a project
• Need to give additional context to group similar tasks for easy viewing, more informally and without the same level of granularity as custom fields allow
• Have standard information you need to track on tasks across projects (e.g., priority level, time costing, work stage)
• Want to make sure your teammates fill out certain information for each task in a project
• Need to sort or search by specific data fields

Use tags if you:

• Need ad-hoc tagging, you have unlimited options, or aren't quite sure what needs to be tagged at the time of creation
• Need to see the tag from My tasks
• Only need to mark a few tasks within a project
• Want to mark template tasks

You can track links in custom fields when using a text field. If you enter a URL link in the text field, you can then access the link directly from the task pane. Once you click a link from a custom field, the page will open in a new window or tab.