Asana Search Views

Imagine if, with one click, you could answer the question “What work is due today for everyone on my team?” or “What are all the tasks that are more than a day behind schedule?” Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could get that information without having to ask for it, even if you hadn’t been on the original email threads?

Today, we’re excited to announce Asana Search Views – a powerful new way to manage the work you track in Asana. Search Views take the power traditionally found in more complicated, specialized tools and deliver it with the same focus on simplicity, usability, and design that we bring to the rest of our software.

A New View Of Your Team’s Work

Search Views let you slice and dice tasks in Asana in practically any way you choose. With a few quick clicks (or keyboard shortcuts), you can, for example:

• Search for all the tasks completed by one or more people on your team in the last seven days.

• Search for all incomplete tasks tagged with “Customer Suggestion” ever created.

• Search for all tasks that have attachments and are in a specific project.

Once you’ve created a Search View, you can quickly navigate between the tasks you’ve found to see their details, or select multiple tasks to change them all at once. You can sort the Search View by when tasks are due, when they were created, and how long it’s been since they’ve been updated.

And if there’s a Search View you expect to use frequently, you can quickly make it a favorite in the left pane, essentially creating custom reports that update each time you navigate to them.

Accessing Search Views

You can get to Search Views in two ways: For a simple full text search, type any word or phrase into the search box and choose “Search Tasks”. For a more advanced, structured search, click the arrow at the right of the search box.

In the drop-down, you can now specify any or all of the following: Assignee, Projects, Tags, Attachments, Completion Status, Due Dates, and more.

To quickly see how it works, click on any of the suggested searches to go to all of the tasks you created, followed, or assigned. From there, you can focus the search by re-opening advanced search and narrowing down to incomplete tasks, those with attachments, or the ones not assigned to you (choose ‘Not me’).

If you’ve created a Search View you want to use again, you can click the star next to the Search title to save it. You can rename it if you like.

SIDE NOTE: We’ve also brought the Tag list back. Just choose “Show Tags List” from the Workspace Settings menu and they’ll appear at the bottom of the left pane.

Using Search Views

Search Views are designed to be flexible, and there are tons of ways to use them. Here are a few:

Find Any Task Across Your Company

Full text search looks across the entire content of tasks, including the notes, comments, projects, and people, so you don’t have to try to guess what someone else named a task. Simply type in any keywords and we’ll do the rest.

Manager Reporting

Add your teammates to the “Assigned To” field, then filter by project or tag to drill down to the information you need. See at a glance when projects are falling behind or when tasks are slipping through the cracks, and take action immediately.

Bug Tracking

In building Search Views, we focused on building a search powerful enough to contend with the best dedicated bug trackers in the market.

You can now slice and dice your Asana tasks to find exactly what you want, from stale bugs to new and unassigned ones. The saved Search Views enable new workflows, like having the QA team watch for completed bugs that haven’t been QAed yet, or the customer service team watching the bugs they opened to see as they become assigned and then completed.

Another Step

At Asana, we envision a future where teams work together as seamlessly as a guitarist’s left and right hands. Since we launched, we’ve been meeting with teams, listening to customers, and improving Asana to expand the scope and complexity of projects that teams of can take on. We think Search Views represent the next big step towards that vision.