Share Your Insights: How Do You Use Default and Custom Views in Wrike? 📣

Hi Lisa,

custom views are a very important feature, and I'm glad you are working on this issue. I am hoping strngly that your team will consider feature requests like this one: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/18042176701079-Copy-custom-views-to-different-folders

Florian

Understanding Views: Yes

Usage: I use custom views when I want to do something personally and not impact views for others (eliminate or add different columns, etc.) I believe our users set up custom views for their daily stand-ups so that all information is quickly there and they don't have to 'reset' the view when others come in and change it.

Creating New Work: LIST VIEW - do not take it away!!!!!!!!!  We have 600 users who are used to list view and were trained on it.... OCM will be ridiculous if you take list view away. I would love to be able to set a view at a folder level and have that view cascade down to all projects within that folder instead of having to recreate it every single project.

Understanding Views: 

Yes - familiar and aware!

Usage: 

I use both custom and classic views. If my team needs to use a view, it is likely one of the custom views. We access most of our work via dashboards, calendars, and reports though. I enjoy the ease of use of the custom views and all of the updates to the table view over the last year or two. The chart view is nice to have, but I am using charts within dashboards more than in the custom view currently. 

The main classic view I use the timelog view. That view is annoying to navigate most of the time and you can't save any of the filters, so it always defaults you to the current week. I often need to use this view to see what time I spent on a ticket this month (we track our total hours in a custom field). Easier timelog navigation in general would be nice!

Creating New Work:

When creating a space for a new team, I often find myself setting up custom table views for respective parts of the team. If they need a table to show in progress work, we can create that, if we have people that need a project manager type view, we can customize a view for them, etc.. 

Thanks a lot, everyone 💚

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Thanks for giving us the chance to share feedback!

Understanding Views: Very fimiliar with the difference.

Usage: Our team uses custom views, with a custom Table view as the default. We never use the List view. The classic Table view has too many columns (almost all our custom fields) by default, and it's rather annoying to go and switch all folders/projects to a custom Table view with pared down columns (basically just Title, Status, Assignee, Start date, Due date, plus a couple custom fields).

The Gantt classic view is fine, and we use that as-is. One thing many teams I work with have asked for is a way to show a high-level timeline, that does not have items on separate rows. They want to see one line - a timeline - with the tasks/projects following one another along the line (if things overlap then this could be an additional line). There's no way to do this currently, because you cannot see the item titles in the Calendar view when you are looking at it on a quarterly basis (even if you show just milestones). You have to hover over the title but this is not practical when presenting the timeline to people in a meeting and need to show high-level a timeline at a glance.

Another thing that would be great is if all views could have items collapsed by default, and add a way to collapse all projects with 1 or 2 clicks. It's overwhelming to see a huge list of projects that are all expanded, and it's time-consuming to have to go and collapse each project just to see the list of projects one per row. 

Creating New Work: By default, I expect to see a Table view with Title, Status, Assignee, Start date, Due date. For filtered views, it would be great to see just the items you are filtering for, without having the hierarchy visible but greyed out. We'd still like to see the hierarchy/path, but as a column, so that you see each filtered item in one row, and you see the full path of it's location, or maybe just the highest level project it's in (the Location field right now shows just the parent item, which is not helpful when you have more than 2 levels in a project).

Thank you Karen Sudre 🙌

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Understanding Views: Yes, I am familiar with new & old views. 

Usage: We use Custom Table Views to share with users outside of Wrike, which is great! Shout out public links. 

Creating New Work: 
When you create a new project, what view options do you expect to have by default?
The most important thing to me is that custom views are recyclable across projects & that this process can be automated (Maybe Account Wide Views/Space Views/Folder Views/Custom Item Type Views?). Our team spends hours setting up projects & subprojects the exact same way - when really, we should be able to pre-ordain this from a systems perspective. Either, from banked Account Wide Custom Views that would deploy a table the same way every time or inherited views/account wide views that you could select. 
*Our Finance Team also QAs projects during Rev Rec, checks up on Billing Milestone Tasks, etc. and it would be super helpful to have default Finance Views for Project/Products/Billing Tasks. 

• Views should be inheritable from the parent & maybe should be allowed to deviate by Custom Item Type. 
• Since a Customer is a different object than a Project (Services Opportunity) and both are different than a Subproject (Services Product) in our instance, we would expect to create all of these items by API with correct views ordained by where these items are created or by custom item types. Your Table or Chart View, for instance, should be the same for all projects created in this folder that are this item type or that across custom item types. 
  *I think the caveat here is that you can't create a project or task that is custom item through API right now. For this to be practical, it needs to be cut down to one action in the API/Wrike Integrate - as creating a Custom Item by API is incredibly inefficient (x2). The easiest way is probably to allow the Custom Item Type to be invoked by the Project/Task API as an additional feature - or you'd need to enhance the CIT to set all info currently on a Task or Project via the existing Custom Item Type API. 

How should filters work when drilling down through subprojects and subfolders?
Honestly, I wish filters worked more like Dashboard or Reports. Since current state, Table View is the only internal mechanism for almost mass editing (missing import to update active items with Bookings) - only show me the items that meet my filter criteria. That way, I can update without doing a SF-> Wrike Migration and can spin up updates in Excel - if it's a simple migration. 
*[Status: Backburner ⌛️] Excel Import to Update Tasks – Wrike Help Center - Achieving this for all item types and for all data types (bookings too!) would render this moot though. To me, the current filtering would be fine showing the parent item if there was a mechanism to easily export/import. 

+1 Florian Kislich's suggestion to support copying custom views to different folders which would be what we need, a way to re-apply filtered custom views when users have managed to delete them.

Understanding Views: Are you familiar with the difference between classic and custom views? 

Familiar with the difference - We always use custom to allow for defaults to be the same for anyone who arrives at the project or folder. This requires deleting the default one created for all new projects and folders and makes training and consistent usage across our account difficult since most do not remember to do that level of view configuration.

Usage: Are you actively using custom views and if so, how often and why? What key features do you find useful for your work within the two kinds of views?

Our use cases always use custom views since these allow for custom naming and is helpful for training and UX for everyone to arrive at the same defaults.

Creating New Work: When you create a new project, what view options do you expect to have by default? How should filters work when drilling down through subprojects and subfolders?

I would expect a custom view to be the default view when creating a new project or folder.

For filters when drilling down, currently when I try to use today's project filters on a folder with subcontent of folders, projects and tasks, I do not get expected results. Below is the structure...

Folder / Folder / Project / Tasks. On a custom table view, when I use the Project filters and select Status = Active and Owner = current user and no Tasks filters applied, the results show me less than 1% of tasks (expected all tasks underneath projects that apply to the filter), none of those tasks are ones I'm assigned nor a project owner for, doesn't show the project level but only the parent folder which is greyed out. This is new behavior since Lightspeed. 

Custom views should allow for configuring the subitem defaults so that we can set the default collapse/expand. Currently in Table view, after collapsing all parent tasks and navigating away then back to the project, all subtasks are expanded again. It would be nice if you could set the default level of expansion and it stick just like other elements that save.

Understanding Views: Yes, although maybe not in full detail. Main difference seems to be the ability to set a filter setting as default.

• Classic: Timelog, Table, Board, Files, Calendar
• Custom: Table, Board, Gantt Chart, List, Files, Chart, Calendar, Stream

I just noticed 'List' is also available as a custom view now? Does this mean list view will stay? If so: please move the item type icon before the name of the item :-)

Usage: We use filtered custom views as much as possible, in an attempt to make Wrike more user friendly for novice users, preventing them from landing in all kinds of project details (tasks and subtasks) that scare them off. For example, we show/hide certain fields, filter, group by year, sort (groups and a column), show this as a single list of tasks and collapse the old year groups. Still a long way to go, because of the missing option of copying views to other folders/projects.

Creating New Work: I would expect a custom table view by default when creating a new project, with name (incl item type icon), status, assignee, start and due date. I would really love it if a set of views could be defined on the level of a custom (project) item type, so that all projects of a specific item type have the same public custom views. I guess it would be best if new subfolders have the custom view of the folder or project the folder is created in (but I am not sure about this). It's easier to delete views than to create them.

Edit: What I really miss in new table view is the (mass edit) shift dates option that is available in the classic list view.

Thanks a lot folks 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Understanding Views: Are you familiar with the difference between classic and custom views? - 100%

Usage: Are you actively using custom views and if so, how often and why? What key features do you find useful for your work within the two kinds of views? - I like to be able to create different table views with different filters saved to them; so, we can have a table view that is always showing active, one for deferred, and one for completed. 

Creating New Work: When you create a new project, what view options do you expect to have by default? How should filters work when drilling down through subprojects and subfolders? For project work I always use Table as the default with a Gantt chart as a secondary. 

A huge gap in filtering is being able to filter by both assignee and owner. Example - We want to filter out all unassigned tasks that are part of a projects for a specific owner as they are accountable for all tasks to be assigned out.

Another way we would like to be able to filter is filtering for all projects, when owned by another user, where if you are assigned to at least one subitem, AND still be able to see the full project. Right now, it will only pull in the tasks you are assigned to.

Lynn Graham Thanks so much for the detailed feedback 🤗

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover