[From Wrike] Let's Talk Custom Fields๐ข
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Hi Community!
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While we often share best practices on the Community, we also share them internally within our Wrike team to keep learning new tricks and improving our skills.
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Recently, Custom Fields have had the spotlight internally - we talked about how they can be a powerful tool to visualize, organize, manage, and report your work. We have 15+ Help Center articles on how to level up your work using Custom Fields, and hundreds of Community threads dedicated to them.
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In this post, I want to cover a few tips and tricks from the Wrike Team on custom fields. If you face challenges when managing and organizing your custom fields, read on ๐
#1 Tip ๐ก Managing Custom Fields
"Like most things in life, occasionally you have to clean up around the house. It's not fun, but it has to be done." - This is a quote from one of our team members and an important one when it comes to Custom Fields ๐ก
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Before implementing any changes, we recommend a custom field spring cleaning for your account to eliminate clutter. Start by reviewing all the fields you have in the account. To do this, click on your profile image and choose Settings. Under the Account Management section, please select "Custom Fields".
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"Times Filled" and "Last Filled" columns are a good indication of whether or not a custom field still has any value or use for your account. You can review with your Account Admin(s) to decide which custom fields to keep account-wide. Don't forget to consult with the creator of a custom field before removing it from the account.
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There is always the question of how to remove a high-level custom field that is only relevant for a certain folder but was set up account-wide. To avoid losing the custom field, add it to the relevant folder(s) first, and then remove it from the account-wide level custom fields list.
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You can create a custom Report to see where a custom field is used.
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Aim at having a better understanding of how custom fields apply to the account, space, folder, project, and task level, and their creation and visibility permissions for users.
#2 Tip ๐ก Permissions
If you have a large account with many users, it is good practice to utilize custom access roles, which give permissions to specific users including the right to add/edit custom fields. This can prevent the setting up of accidental duplicate custom fields and potential clutter.
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Our team's suggestion is to create a custom access role: "Full + CF". Access roles help you control what users (or user groups) can do within a shared folder, project, or space. You can customize the permissions for each role and can create new roles using this functionality. This will show who has custom field editing access in spaces/folders/projects throughout your account.
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Another important permission is the visibility of custom fields. Not every custom field needs to be visible at all levels by all users.
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You can also limit the ability to create Custom Fields to Space Admins in the Space Admin Management menu, selecting "Custom Fields", and updating the "Manage Permissions" setting to only allow Space Admins.
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๐ก Bonus - Automation and Custom Fields
Last but not least, we would like to share a quick tip on how to auto-tag subprojects upon creation. Let's cover a use case and our solution using Request Forms and Blueprints.
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I have an event project that is in my Corporate folder. The project contains digital projects and creative projects that must live in their respective folders. How do we use the Automation Engine to auto-tag subprojects?
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First of all, you need to create a question with the option of "adding a subproject" in your request form.
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Create a checkbox type custom field for the relevant space, and in Blueprints check that box for the subfolder you would like to be cross-tagged.
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Then create an automation rule for "If the custom field is checked, add it to the Corporate Events folder"
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When your Request Form is used, you will automatically have your subproject tagged upon creation.
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These are our tips on how to use custom fields to your advantage in Wrike!
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Let us know if you have any questions or comments and don't forget to share your tips in the comments below ๐๐ปโโ๏ธ
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When we think about Custom Fields, we discuss how will we use the data. We have many custom fields that helps us summarize progress that we utilize with Wrike Analyze.
Thanks for the tip about permissions. This is something we need to review.
Creating a new access level that allows custom field rights and removing it from the regular Full rights user role is genius. Thanks for the tip!
Thanks for this post. creating a permission to manage CF is a great tip!ย
We are using them in many ways, but one useful way to use them is to dynamically populate a communication/publication calendar by segment.ย
When deciding on custom fields, we looked at what we wanted to report on. Custom fields has allowed me to eliminate a huge manual excel report! I run the report out of Wrike now and distribute. I do wish the access to CF's add/delete was individual. So allowing some to add but only the owner to delete.
We have used custom fields since day one, it was one of our most important factors in deciding on Wrike. This has helped us with organization, reporting, and just keeping track of things.
We use custom fields for our billing information making it easier to run reports on various data. Our forms direct some responses into the custom fields directly while others are left blank. We have many fields that calculate totals in order to eliminate manual calculations and automate more processes.
The thing I would love to see with custom fields is the ability to arrange, group and separate the information. It would also be helpful to have the ability to print the custom fields from task view.ย
Agree - good use and planning the right custom fields to use, is an excellent way to benchmark success.ย We could spend more time doing the housekeeping of custom fields, but for the most part, all the custom fields we use, are pre-populated at the blueprint level, and come in with every project!ย ย I didn't realize there was an automation rule that can be tapped into with custom fields, so will definitely check that out!
Thanks for the tips, @...! After reading these and following up on some other links here, I have some ideas for custom reporting that will help out team!
We connected the custom fields to a request form so we can easily have the right information there in our overview
Thanks for these great tips! Custom fields are such a powerful tool. We are still working through how best to utilize them across some of our teams. These tips will definitely help us think through how to best deploy them.
Hi everyone, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback, happy to hear the post gave you some fresh tips๐ฅณ
Thank you for the great tips on custom fields! Our account has so many, some of these might help us downsize them a bit. One gamechanger mentioned that we implemented is that only certain users can create or remove custom fields. That helped with not having everyone creating more and more fields.ย
Our team specifically uses custom fields a lot! From basic reporting to being able get the correct blueprint added for the correct type of request. One fun thing we have done is if we change the value of one of our custom fields from our team to the other team in our department, it moves the request over to them and @ mentions them for awareness. I would love to see more automations involving custom fields though!
Nice tip Devree Czupinski, thank you for sharing๐๐ผ
Great tip! Thanks for for sharing!ย ๐๐๐
We're glad to hear this is helpful Aloi Calvert ๐
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