[Status: Launched! 🚀] Custom field manager

I am currently evaluating Wrike for use in my company and the lack of custom field management and display across views and widgets is the #1 reason why I won't be purchasing the product at this time. I love the Project Management capabilities of the tool, but the Portfolio Management capabilities are severely lacking, particularly robust dashboarding.

What is the status of being able to delete (or at the very least, truly hide) custom fields?

Hi all, I've raised this with the Product team for some information.

Keeping in mind that building a management system for Custom Fields is a large project, the team will need some time to think about this. I'll be back here as soon as I have some information to share 👍

Just to add to this... We have a Custom Field Management within the New Table view via Wrike Labs which meets a lot of the requirements here.

It would be great if you could try it out and let us know your thoughts here 👍

That's a good start -- thanks for letting us know!

I agree - would be great to be able to resize the custom fields AND to also be able to sort the order in which they are displayed. Makes it easier to group the content that is being captured and displayed.

Additionally, would be great to have an "Info / Help" button next to each custom field that can be hovered over to provide an explanation of what information is required to be captured in each custom field.

Fully agreed!  This would also hopefully solve the ability to delete, which is talked about here at length:  https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003695025-Delete-custom-fields-?page=1#community_comment_360008728253.  The access to custom fields from the ellipses on projects/folders takes way too many clicks and is not a good UX in general I think.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, thank you for keeping this conversation going!

New Table View with updated Custom Field management (mentioned above by Stephen) is out of Labs and publicly available now. As for other enhancements mentioned in the post and not covered by the Table View functionality are in research.

Thanks for posting! 

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

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A quick update, everyone: the investigation continues and there are some plans in regards to this suggestion for the next year. I'll let you know more in the next quarter. 

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This feature would be a huge help. We average 15-30 custom fields per project. For some user access levels, the adjustments made to table view are not reflected in the project view. I get requests to remedy this daily.

Voted ! We neeed this!

I waited to post on this until the new field manager came out and our team had a true chance to work with it.  OPs original issue/suggestion is a true need.  While the Custom Field Manager in the table view helped, it has not solved the majority of the pain points with what I consider a critical feature... custom fields.  Custom fields are what allow our businesses from different sectors to use a common tool (Wrike) in support of a common function (project management) regardless of our sector.  They allow us to supplement the Wrike records with changing required project data.  They allow us to manage one project/tasks and track/report on the data associated to that project/tasks very differently from the next, as is required in our various businesses.   Key needs as I see them based on our specific pain points, in order of importance:

1 - OPs idea of a true custom field manager is A+.  A single location to manage fields and which folders/projects they apply to. 

2 - Ability to manage the display of custom fields on each view.  Primarily the List view.  Table view is functional with the addition of the Custom Field Manager.  I rarely run into issues when managing and working in Table view with our custom fields.  A similar design structure for projects and tasks in List view is sorely needed.  It would be great to be able to define the view at the folder level, drag/drop fields in the header, resize so I can determine space to take up vs. data to display in the header (i.e. I may want to show only the first line of a project status summary, but allow for a longer entry for reporting purposes... I definitely want more than 15 characters to be seen), and select which fields are applicable to the projects/tasks in that folder. 

3 - Ability to delete or archive a custom field.  I can understand that delete may be an unruly proposition, however as Admins we should be able to "Archive" a custom field so it and historical data are no longer accessible/viewable/usable/reportable

4 - Ability to define whether custom field applies to folders, projects, or tasks or any combo there of.  While I can't really think of a use we would have for a custom field to be applicable to a folder and task but not a project, I'm sure there are use cases out there.  I can think of fields that would be folder only, project only, task only, folder/project, project/task and folder/project/task. 

5 - Enhanced user rights on custom field managers.  I.e. as Admins we create and manage global custom fields that apply to folders, projects, tasks, etc.  PMs can be granted rights to create custom fields that can be applied to a single project and it's tasks. 

Looking forward to what you all come up with in the new year on this one!

Thank you for sharing such detailed suggestions here, Dawna Aigner! 

I don't have an update at the moment, but I was assured I will have soon, so once I know more, I'll make sure to get back to you here! 

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

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This would be extremely helpful to my company. We have 20+ request forms with similar custom fields, but if I add say a client, or another answer option, I have to go into every single request form we have to update the answer options. Would eb great to see a custom field manager than can also map them to request forms!

Thank you for sharing your use-case here, Kara Murphy, really helpful! 

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If the custom fields could be managed in to groups that could be collapsed it would make the experience of using them so much better

We have several different categories of fields used, if I could sort them into groups I could collapse it would make finding the field you are looking for so much easier. 

Hey Aaron McLaughlin, thank you for sharing your use case here! It's been passed on to the Product team.

I would like to see the custom fields management improved. There needs to be a way to see and manage all custom fields, show where they are applied, and differentiate them from each other. I find it impossible to determine which custom field with the same name was created in which space or folder.

Case in point, recently I was adding some custom fields. Let's call it Budget Remaining, which is a calculated field based on effort, time spent, and rate. I have added this to a folder somewhere, but then wound up adding it again to the overall space since it is inconsistent and confusing as to how to use a custom field across spaces. Now I technically have two instances of this custom field and can't figure out which one is which or where the original one was created. I have poked around through many locations to try to determine if I can find the custom field that was created in that folder versus the other location, but have not found it yet.

When I go to Table view of a project and click on the plus sign to the right of the columns to add a field, you can see that there are 2 of the same name fields with no additional information provided to understand where it is sourced (see image below). I cannot determine which one was from the space and which one was from a specific folder.

So how do we manage the custom fields in their entirety? We can open the list for each folder or space, but we need a centralized place where we can manage all custom fields, listing each one, the type, who created it, and what folder they belong to. In this example, I would then be able to see which field was created on a single project or folder versus the one that was created at the space level.

I can only agree to what Jason pointed out. Its absolutely frustrating and even with just a few spaces its just spiraling out of hand. Secondly there's no way to even delete custom fields from what I've seen.

@..., 

Thanks for the response. I truly hope they work on improvements this year. It really needs it. It's great to have custom fields, but it is very poorly managed at this time. It needs a good overhaul. 

Still agree with initial post: Custom fields should be more easily manageable. Simple case: I want to add a custom fields to ALL folders, projects, tasks and subtask in our company that everyone can see and access, but not everyone has access to the parent folder. It is basically impossible to do this, as I have to add the field to each folder (these are hundreds).

Thanks for your feedback, Adrian Fischer! As Hugh mentioned above, the team has plans to work on Custom Fields management later this year 🙂

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

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Hi Lisa !

There is a lot of feedback already on this thread, so please forgive me if I'm repeating!

I'm hoping with the investigation into more advanced custom field managment, we will gain the ability to make certain custom fields read-only for certain users or groups of users. I have some custom fields that would ideally only be modifiable by a certain subgroup in some teams, but visible to the whole team for reference or «read-only» access.

Thanks!

Thank you for providing your feedback, Ryan Miller, I'm passing it on to the team now! 👍

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

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Hi there! The custom field management functionality is coming very soon, so I've changed the status here 🙂

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

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Hey again, everyone! Our team just released new functionality - custom field management 🎉🎉🎉 Thank you so much for your feedback and votes! 🙌

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

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Thanks, it's a good start! As an enterprise, the custom field management on account level is the one we were looking forward to. This allows us to govern the use of custom fields, as well as ensures a global standard across all our countries.

Some comments on the account level custom fields manager:

Agree the custom field management update is a great start and agree with many of the asks for future enhancements.

This was mentioned in an earlier post but we really need the ability to be able to apply a custom field ONLY to a task and not to the project/folder it is in (in List view specifically). My company has many different product lines and each has their own space, projects, and folders but we have certain common tasks in each product line that need to be viewed, worked on, and reported from a global view - these tasks also have common custom fields that only need to be on those tasks (but are not applicable to any of our projects or folders). Right now we have a workaround where we have a separate folder that has the custom fields we need and then we have to make sure all applicable tasks also live in that folder so they get the custom fields we need without having those custom fields unnecessarily on their project (not needed and clutters the project fields).

I agree with Tyler Harrison that custom fields should have the option of being for Tasks only and not be forced into Projects as well. We have a number of custom fields that only apply to tasks, and do not make any sense to live at the Project level. But there is no way to omit Projects from being included in the scope of the custom field.