[Status: Not planned] Convert a Task into a Project

Hi Jonathon Burrows, 

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Elaine Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

I would also want to express my need for this feature. I'm currently migrating 100s of tasks to rectify a mistake made while setting up a project / task structure. The tasks now need to be assigned to the workspace and be converted to projects manually. It would save a lot of time if this feature would be available.

I have to admit that this could be prevented if we started with the correct structure to begin with.

I would like to bring this topic up again. It's scary that it has been sitting here fore 3 years. It's incredibly time-consuming to convert existing tasks to projects/folders. Please work on this feature! Thanks!

Anna Grigoryan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Anna Grigoryan Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

I can't believe that there is still not a functionality to convert a task into a project yet.

It seems that Wrike may have listened to those of us calling out on the regular mods in here rehashing the same lip service messages of "great!  Thanks for the comment..and we have nothing to offer in the way of actually addressing these requests" and thinks that a PM coming in here, I'm looking at you Anna Grigoryan, saying the exact same thing in so many words, is going to appease myself and fellow, legitimate, paying users, users who are taking their own valuable time to come in here and provide very relevant feedback, use cases, even asking legit technical questions re: what is blocking this.  It is uncanny the degree to which you insult the intelligence of your users Wrike!

All you have to do is read just one page back here looking at the very succinct commentary from my colleagues Joey Horst, the author Phillip Adams most recent post one page ago, Jonathon Burrows, Bill Vincent, Rose Kilsdonk, and the ignoring of Mary Hess saying what is said in the forum daily - where is the roadmap shared?  And I don't mean a link to your same tired old post about "the product feedback" section, but what you guys actually are working on?!  I read fairly religiously your Weekly Release Notes, and maybe 1 of 30 of the items in there I can trace back to this forum.  So who does the prioritization?!  So much for working in an Agile or Lean manner, where you actually are supposed to factor in User Request.

Wrike has some truly unique features, so after not renewing my license, I evaluated again the last month, and - I'm not coming back.  The lack of this feature, code snippets in Task Descriptions, editable closed date, subtasks in boards, etc. etc., and seeing no movement on any of them since I first came to Wrike in 2018 - while entire new tools like Clickup and Clubhouse.io have come into existence and developed tons faster - is a big reason I'm not coming back.  And speaking of ClickUp, many of us watch their very TRANSPARENT feature board, and I could not imagine in the slightest hearing from one of their PM's that a #2 request is just "quite complex and requiring more investment than is possible at the moment."  I'm sure ClickUp is eating you guys for lunch, and you better hope your strategy of sucking in Enterprise accounts with 100's of users who are too bloated to organize an evaluation of more effective, cost-efficient, agile-moving tools works.  Because years are going by and you guys are getting passed by the minute.  And if you think a dinosaur of Citrix is going to help, just have a look at how well regarded their Podio suite is these days.  Talk about an enterprise software company from the dark ages...remember GoToMeeting?  How many of those users are still not on Zoom?

After seeing the stalling, obfuscating, and finally the outright denial of the Wrike team for 3+ years to do anything regarding this feature request, I can only assume that the following scenario (or something very similar) has played out here:

 - The original dev team is long gone, replaced by cheaper maintenance developers who do only minor cosmetic changes designed to make the product appear as tho it has been updated when in fact no changes to the actual architecture have been made or attempted.

 - The original dev team was never contracted for upgrades over a period of years - which now means that Wrike would have to basically pay them whatever they asked for to come back to Wrike for an unspecified amount of time/effort in order to make significant structural changes to the software architecture.

 - Wrike in it's current form did not write or have anything to do with the original rollout of this product, possibly bought or inherited from another company or third party.

It is painfully obvious that at this point, this request would cost them money. It always comes down to money and resources. Money they do not want to spend, or resources they do not want to devote. If they could have done this without spending money or using significant resources, they would have done it long before this. So, if what I'm saying is even partially true, Wrike is between a rock and a very hard place, and chooses to do nothing.

I'm no Nostradamus, but it doesn't take a genius to deduce the above scenario, or something close. And even if my predictions are not accurate, it's still no excuse. This feature request being ignored for SO LONG after SO MANY have asked is nothing but a conscious decision on Wrike's part to not invest in having this work done. In other words, THEY DON'T CARE. They just don't, and any attempt to "soften the blow" by having everyone but the CEO come in here and give us the same tired BS about how they really do care is just that - BS. 

So, HERE I AM, WRIKE. PROVE ME AND THE HUNDREDS OF OTHERS ON THIS FORUM TOPIC WRONG. PROVE TO US THAT YOU ARE WILLING TO FIX WHAT IS OBVIOUSLY A HUGE DESIGN FLAW THAT YOU NEVER BOTHERED TO DEAL WITH (for whatever reason!). Otherwise, this entire topic serves as a testament to how Wrike does NOT care, right down to the latest load of excuses and avoidance posted by the PM which gave absolutely no answers at all to why this has not become a priority and not been fixed.

It’s uncanny how similar the frustration is here just like it is over in the Asana feedback forums.

Every one of these tools is getting outclassed by Clickup by the second. I’ve been evaluating Wrike as an alternative to Asana but it’s posts like these that immediately make me say, “Well, they’re still just not a viable solution yet.”

It would seem to be that "our second most popular suggestion" and "Been our radar for a while now should be incompatible statements.

I think the community would like to see a top 10 dashboard with roadmap and progress details. Shouldn't be hard to detail and share.

Great to get all this solidarity, and of course, Wrike doesn't care!

Skyler Reeves great point, but at least in Asana you can convert a task into a Project!!  I don't know which board is more littered with key feature requests ignored though - Wrike or Asana's.  Somebody should do a case study.  It's not just ClickUp outclassing them - they are losing out to Monday, Hive, even the likes of Notion, Clubhouse.io, etc etc.  Once the enterprise customers using each tool start to realize they can move to cheaper, better solutions that let their teams work much better - or, those tools start to target enterprise contracts - Wrike and Asana will have their hands full.  Airtable it turns out has many, many $100k/year contracts, and has grown much faster than both...

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Elaine Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Elaine
Now that we are in August 2021, any update about this feature "Convert a Task into a Project" from your product development team?

Tach Sirichai Thanks for reaching out! No updates at the moment; we will let you know if there are any changes in the future. 

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

I VOTE for CONVERTING PROJECT TO TASK!!!  I could definitely use this feature.

@Wrike team:
Our whole team waits (20 employees) waits for this feature. The reason:
Sometimes a task gets bigger and bigger and becomes a project. Or vice versa.
We don't always know in advance whether an assignment is a task or a project.

Strange that it takes so long to get a go for this, as it doesn't seem a very complex implementation.

Thanks in advance to give priority to this thread.

Welcome to the Community Sue Marye, Koen Floré 👋

Thanks a lot for supporting this suggestion! Any updates from the team - we'll make sure to let you know here. 

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

I have a WORKAROUND!

I created an asset list for a client in Wrike, but determined that the assets needed to be their own projects instead of tasks. Each Task had a lot of custom fields as well, so that info was important and difficult to input. Since I was definitely not going to take 100s of tasks and make them Projects manually, I came to this forum for answer.

After reading this thread, I too, was disappointed to see that such a large tenant of the GTD methodology wasn't possible in Wrike. So after thinking about it, I have found a way to convert all tasks in a folder or project to their own projects with one caveat. You can get the name, assignments, status, description, all custom fields, everything except the written updates to the tasks. You are out of luck if that's a deal breaker. If it's not, continue!

We basically will be using the Import/Export system Wrike already has to accomplish the conversion:

1. Go into the Project / Folder that has tasks you want to convert to Projects.
2. In the far upper-righthand corner, under your Profile icon. Click the ... Menu, and Choose "Export to Excel"
3. Once you have your tasks in Excel, we have to make some adjustments. The main difference for Wrike to import something as a project instead of a task is the location slashes. Assuming that you want to create the projects in the same folder the tasks were in, just add a / before all the words in the title field. So for example, if a row in your Excel table has a title task of "Test Task", you would change that cell to say "/Test Task". This tells Wrike that the row is made up of a project instead. 
4. Once you have appended your slashes to the Title column rows, save the Excel document.
5. Now go back into Wrike and in the same place you Exported a minute ago, choose Import and select the file you just edited. 
6. After following the prompts, you should be able to see 2 sets of data in your view. One set of tasks, and one set of Projects!
7. Each project should have all the data of their corresponding task (Except the updates, as I mentioned). Now we only need to get rid of the tasks since we don't need them anymore. The way I do it is go to the list view. In list view, I choose the "Multiple Select" button at the top. Then choose "Select All". Wrike actually only selects tasks in this mode, not projects. So you essentially have selected everything you need to delete. Then delete the now duplicate tasks and you should be left with nothing but Projects in the Folder / Project. 

This has already saved me DOZENS of hours doing it this way, and is a pretty good work around until Wrike is able to make this a real feature. If you have any questions, I'll monitor this post for a few days. 

John

Welcome to the Community John Weber 👋 Thank you so much for sharing your findings, I'm sure your workaround can be useful for many members here 🤗

If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum 👍

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

+1 as well! Surprised it's been an issue since 2017. This would be super helpful for our team!

Hi Rachel Goldberg, welcome to the Community! 👋
Thanks a lot for supporting this idea! I'm passing your feedback to our Product team.
If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum 🤗

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

Our company would LOVE to see this implemented.  We moved to Wrike from Asana.  In Asana you can convert a Task to a Project where it leaves the task in place, marks it as "Converted to a Project" and a New project is created pulling over the dates and descriptions and subtasks etc.  This was a spectacular feature and I'm surprised Wrike doesn't have it.  I will follow this thread though in hopes it will be implemented soon.

Hello Missy Lane, welcome to the Community 👋🏻

Thank you for sharing your feedback, if anything changes in relation to this suggestion we'll be sure to update you here. If you'd like to learn more about our Community, please check out our New to Community forum 🙋🏻‍♀️

Cansu Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Cansu Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

I'll have to say this thread makes me wonder about continuing to push usage of Wrike in our organization. A feature that seems inherently simply to implement which has a significant impact on the users has not shown any traction in 3 years? Added my vote and will continue to monitor and proceed with more caution around Wrike implementation.

Hi Andreas Hennen, welcome to the Community 👋
Thanks a lot for supporting this idea! I'm passing your feedback to our Product team. Unfortunately, for now, the team doesn't have this in their plans; one of Wrike's Product Managers shared insight into why this isn't possible at the moment here. We will continue to pass on the feedback here and if anything changes in the future, we'll make sure to let you know.

If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum.

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

Real life daily situation:

1. Someone emails me that they need something. It needs to be made an actual project because "project management".
2. Wrike lets me forward the email to make it into a real thing. But it automatically makes it a task.
3. There's no way for me to make it into the usable and familiar "project" that I've trained and taught my entire company on.
4. I have to manually enter this myself anyway to get it into our float, making "email to wrike" useless.

How is this not a thing after FIVE years of asking??

Hi Sara Johnson, thanks a lot for your detailed use case shared here! I understand that this is disappointing that the team isn't currently planning to work on this suggestion. The simple answer is that they can't work on all suggestions submitted and discussed on the Community. One of Wrike's lead Product Managers explained some detail behind this suggestion not currently being researched here. I'm sorry that the lack of this functionality is inconvenient to you. Please rest assured that even though the idea isn't planned now, we still pass on all the new feedback to the team and report on it. If we have any updates in the future, we'll make sure to let you know here. 

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else in the meantime. 

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

Lisa What is Wrike's recommendation for that use case? This is the most common and practical circumstance (esp. working remotely) that a project manager faces.

Someone emails you a thing to do, you gotta get it into Wrike.

There are over 300 users who "liked" this inquiry on this thread alone (same wish exists on other threads).

cc: Phillip Adams

Sara Johnson Could you consider adding this task from the email to a pre-created project in Wrike? 

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

I created new projects and added the old task to it (for reference). Currently, that's the best solution for me since it is not an automatic conversion option. (but it I'm sure most wonder why you can convert a regular task to a milestone and vice versa, but you can't convert a task to a project and vice versa).

Sean Bell That's also what I did. Saved no time, essentially starting from scratch and doing the work my colleague should've done from the beginning.