How to Create a Form in Asana: A Step-by-Step Guide

Hi there, welcome back to the channel.

In today’s video I’m going to talk about Asana and specifically how to produce a form. And this is the form that we’re going to produce. I’m going to create a form for submitting a ticket to our IT support, MI, infamous ticketing system.

So I’m going to take you through a very brief process. I’ve taken a look at some of the videos online and they’re a little bit complicated and don’t always stick to the point. So I’m just going to cover forms in this particular video and then we’ll talk about workflow and rules and other bits and pieces in a part two video. So let’s take a look at forms. So here we are. I’m going to use my trusty support ticketing system as the project for my form. Forms are available here from the customize menu, so not entirely intuitive. And it’s the third one down, not surprisingly called forms. Click on the forms and up comes the add form dialog box. So it takes the name from the ticketing system and allows you to add a description, which we can add here. So this is for submitting, I’ll call it IT requests. And you can add the various bits and pieces. There’s plenty of options in terms of formatting. You can also add a cover image. I don’t have the upgraded version of Asana. And this one, it’s not available to everyone, even on the page, some of the paid accounts.

And one of the things that I should point out here is access. It says here anyone can access this form, so anyone inside or outside of your organization. For this one, I’m going to probably mark it as organization only because they’re submitting internal tickets, but for now I’m going to leave it as is. So let’s go ahead and make the form itself. So let’s start with the name, and these are the defaults when you open the form. But what I’m going to do is I already have the name set up within my project, so I can connect it to a field. And I’d refer to it as your name, as in the name of the submitter here. It’s required and their email address. I haven’t connected it to a field on this one, so I’ll add it in here and call it the user email address. And it’s a text field, but there are other options available here. So I’m going to create that. And then I want to know additional pieces for this.

So I’m going to add some additional fields here. So I will want, let me have a description. So the description of the issue. And so obviously it’s going to be a required field. And I’ve connected it to, I’ve already created the field for a detailed description. And then I want to know, I want to know who, where this person is. Because probably if their computer is out or their IT is out, I want to know where they are. So I want the department they’re in, so I can come and find them. And I’ll connect that to a field and I’ll call it the human department. And I’ve given the options of sales, marketing, operations and HR, etc. I’ll probably need that as required if I need to find them. And then I’ll want probably another symbol select. And this one I’ll need to know the priority. So the temptation with all the users is of course it’s absolute maximum priority. I have a priority field set at a high, medium and low. I kind of expect everything to come up as high, knowing most users, but there we are. It’s there. And that’s probably all I need to know in terms of the form itself. So really simple to put together is just a case of creating your questions. You can section these out, you can add in headings here and attachments and pictures of the issue and so on and so forth. But that’s it. Really simple, really straightforward. So one of the important things here is this share form. So I can send it to a recipient, so anybody within my organisation. Or I can copy the link, if I open this up in a window. You could paste a link to this anywhere within your organisation. So let’s have a bash. I’ll put this in here. So my name for now is Joe Bloggs.

My email address is joe.orgs.com. I’m going to say that I work in finance. I’m not going to say that my screen doesn’t work on my computer. I’m going to say, well, it’s a laptop. It’s medium. I’m going to submit this. And that’s it. The form is submitted. It’s received. That’s it. That’s all there is to forms. That’s all there is to users. So really, really straightforward. Let’s have a look at our ticketing system now. And we can see here that we’ve got a submission. It hasn’t been assigned to anyone. It doesn’t have a due date because I didn’t put those in the form. But we can see that Joe Blogg submitted this and they work in finance. He says the screen doesn’t work. And that’s my user email. So you see, I don’t necessarily need to add every single item on my task within the back end of Asana within my form. I can cut that down. It’s a good thing because the fewer the number of fields there are on the form, the more likely that people are to use it. So kind of bear that in mind. And I could just say, OK, I’m going to assign this to Thomas and I’m going to set the due date rather than the user setting the due date off. Let’s do it tomorrow. And we know that this is a hardware issue. I’m not asking the user to diagnose that. And hey, presto, it’s within the system. That’s it. Super simple. Don’t want to over complicate it. So I’m going to draw the line here.

That’s forms. That’s the end of it. As with many things in Asana, it’s likely that these will change in the near future and more features will be added. But that gives you a good overview of forms and one of the most simple ways to kind of put a form together and get the data directly into Asana. I suggest that you play around with things. You can’t really break anything. All you’re doing is adding more data. Play around with it. Play around with the fields. Find what works for you. But always keep to the principle of the fewer the fields and the less complex they are, and it’s more likely that your user is going to submit data within it. So just bear that in mind. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.