Getting notes to show on reports

I use the description field on each task to keep track of what I am doing for that particular item. Meaning, if I have to make multiple calls or send several emails to accomplish something, I will add whatever notes I have to this field. It is easy to use and easy to view when you open the task. With that being said, I have superiors who do not use Wrike and want updates on my projects. This means they cannot click on a task to view my notes. The only option available at this time is to create a custom text field. This is not a user friendly field when notes can be quite substantial and requires additional clicking to get to when inside a task, but it will print in totality when I add this field to my reports. This allows my superiors to view my notes, but makes my daily updates harder. I either have to 1) click into the tiny field and scroll through or 2) I have to update two sections where all of my notes are in the description and only the most recent update summary is listed in the custom field.

It was explained to me that the description may not be possible to add as a selection to the report filters because it allows for different items to be added other than text. I am looking for a viable solution since 1 and 2 listed above are not acceptable.

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Leah, great question! I had two follow-up questions for you:

1) Do your supervisors not use Wrike because they don't want to or because there aren't available licenses for them? If the latter is the case then making them Collaborators (a free user-type) might be a good option.

2) Do you supervisors need to see detailed notes, or just know the general status? Custom Statuses might be a good option if they don't need all of the details.

Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Leah Cale

Thank you for the quick response.

1) We as a company are testing the product for viability so only have a few licenses at this time. The collaborator function might work and we can give it a try, but still does not offer a simple list with the details attached for quick review. Each task would have to be clicked on to review the status.

2) Due to the nature of my job, the status option isn't very functional. I could literally be working on an insurance policy renewal at the same time as working on cash transfer transactions, at the same time as an auto purchase, etc. My list of statuses would be extremely long and would not be very helpful.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Leah, I am so sorry for the delayed reply here. Yes, you're 100% right. With the Collaborator option, people would have to click on individual tasks to see details.

I'm wondering if a third option might be better - it would be a combination of Custom Fields and a Report. You would still use the description field to store most of your comments, but then use a custom field to give a short update. You would share the Report with anyone who needs it and if someone wanted more details about a particular task, they would click into it. I'm not sure if that would be more work without giving you much return, but it might be a worthwhile option.

Leah Cale

Thank you for the response Stephanie, but unfortunately I do not think this will work. I think, as you mention, it will require more work than it is worth to complete this two step process.

Sébastien CREST

Hi,

I am also thinking that the description field should be available for reports. Especially when you share it with people that were not in a project meeting, they need to see all the important information in one look. Do you have ant idea if this is something that we will be able to do soon? This would be the only reason for me to use reports. Otherwise I just don't see the difference with the table view.

Not only people that don't have a Wrike account are not able to see it, but if I just share a report snapshot after a meeting with the sharing link, project members will only see the table. If they want to have more detail they have to click on a task and the description appears in a new tab for each task. This is really annoying. Therefore the only way to properly share a report is simply to copy and paste the URL from Wrike, not through snapshots.

Thank you,

Permanently deleted user

Hi Sébastien, thanks for your input here and vote on this Feedback. Adding the description field text to Reports is not something on our short-term roadmap at the minute but adding use cases like yours here helps the Product Team understand the need people have for future internal discussions.

It's also worth mentioning that you can invite Collaborators to join meetings which might help with sharing this information.

I assume you have read Stephanie's suggestions above using a combination of Workflows and Custom Fields to capture the needed detail. I'm wondering if this is an option you could adopt for now? Look forward to your reply!

Leah Cale

Stephen,

As I mentioned, the Custom Fields only show so many characters so your note is cut off unless you open it up completely in the app. This then makes normal work take longer (extra steps to see status while in process in order to make reports print easier). Either that or you are updating two things. Not very conducive.

I have been utilizing the comments for my updates but there is no real way to organize the data that goes into those fields. The information in this section also does not show up on reports (that I see).

Leah Cale

Permanently deleted user

Hi Leah, I completely understand. Rest assured you have shared this feedback in the right place. Our Product Team have been made aware and will review the insightful use cases posted here when discussing this information internally in the future. If I have any further updates on adding the Description field text to Reports, I'll be sure to add it here.

You mentioned above that you might try Stephanie's suggestion of adding users as Collaborators so these users can see this detail. I'd love to know if you tried this, and if so, how you found it? Looking forward to your reply!

Leah Cale

Collaborators did not really work for us very well and we ended up adding more full licenses.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Leah, thank you for coming back here. I think if adding Collaborators does not suit, then the above solution outlined by Stephanie using Custom Fields would be the best workaround for now. I understand it's not ideal and we do see the value in your suggestion so we have made the Product Team are aware of it. If I have any further information, I'll be sure to update you here. Thanks again for sharing!

Julian Bowker

Hi,

Just adding my vote for this type of feature - to be able to include the description field in reporting.

I often need to email out status reports and would love to include say the top 3 lines of the description field. In an ideal world yes everyone should just be able to click on the wrike link - but we have many people who want and need off line versions.

Adding in a extra custom fields seems to double up the effort.

So please do make this option available in some sort export.

Thanks Julian

Julian Bowker

Thanks to one of your staff I have a partial solution - however does not look very professional and I would hope Wrike could easily enhance this.

I found that when looking at the tasks in a folder - the export function (see export tips here ) will export to excel and include the description field, this is in the last (17th) column.

So to get a summary table of "Task name, due date, status and Description." I then created a pivot table with Rows selected for "Title, Status, End date, Description"

I'm sure you could do some sort of mail merge to make it neater - but it seems to work.
It would be good if the Title maintained the hyper link - but I now at least have a text status report I can use and distribute.

Hopefully this can be enhanced so it can be scheduled/automated in the near future !

Bailey Burke

This is also a needed feature for us. As we start to use Wrike more, a lot of our information is now collected in the program and needs to be exported. Reports allow for a save of the same search fields that our managers can subscribe to (great feature), but it limiting the information they get since some of it is in the description area.

I have used the workaround suggestion with the custom field, however, I would like to point out a feature of the custom field is that it does not track any changes that are made on it in the comment stream. Which is important for us with the use of this feature (a community post I that I found about this /hc/en-us/community/posts/115000475629-Custom-field-changes-logs )

Melissa Kolbe

Ditto here for me. I have users and collaborators here who could utilize custom fields for the data we need to report on except that visually the display truncates values in that field so that it's not easily apparent what those values are. So, to easily view things - we have to put them in the description but if I put them in the description area, I cannot report on them. Catch - 22. Please fix this. I mean, at minimum I could have the data in the description where it is populated from a list of value so data would be consistent. if I could only extract the data, I could spin some excel for my reporting but apparently I can't even do that. Rather frustrating.

Erin Arnold

Since the task Description field is not included in the report builder, I have been exporting to Excel from a table task view because Description data is included in the export. However, I would like to pull task Description and Notes in a report so I can schedule to have the report created and sent on a regular basis. With the export, I have to run it manually then clean up the columns in Excel.

A suggested workaround of creating a Custom Field to track "description" data does not work well. We have recently implemented the Wrike Web Form for internal requests within our company. It auto-generates a Wrike task which is a cool feature but all the data the web form user enters is written to the Description portion of the task. The Web Form admin does not allow me to select which field the web form data is written to.

Any data that can be written into Wrike should be available to pull on a report and export.

Thanks so much.

Michelle England

I also want to throw my vote in. The leaders within the organization do not have time or desire to log in as collaborators and would prefer to get a weekly report. They want to know the project description and deliverables for the project, and then a secondary area that lists out the accomplishments and next steps. Right now I have to create three different custom fields that track this information. From a user standpoint it's not front of mind like the description field is currently. It would be great if there were standard fields like "Project Description", "Project Updates", and "Project Notes (to replace current description)" The first two would not need the ability to load an image or attachment - these are just standard text fields.

Thanks so much for your consideration.

Damian Valdiviezo

Hopefully there is a solution to this need. It is important that we can communicate to others not using Wrike, gather feedback and drag it into projects, folders or tasks.

We cannot show comments, attachments. I have to export to excel, customize the sheet, present it to larger audiences, gather feedback and go back to Wrike do update manually.

Right now is completely manual. Not friendly at all.

Brandon Cook

Please make this a thing. It doesn't make sense to have task level reporting without the most important piece of the task.

Mary Patsiarikas

Bummer this isn't a basic function. I convinced a coworker to add a few projects to Wrike and he requested this basic functionality. I'm disappointed I could not do this without a custom field. Spent my whole morning copying the description into a custom field to make project reporting useful.

Lexi Goodnight

Adding my voice! Like Michelle above, my VP does not log into Wrike but wants a paper summary report. I like the format of the report ("assignee" shows the name without the email address, I prefer the header "due date" to the "end date" header that shows in a simple export, and there are less columns to have to remove) - I just want the description to be part of the format.

My VP will scan the paper report for the "deferred" or "in progress" items and then quickly wants to know why or what the update is. The description section is where we, too, put that information and don't necessarily want to have a custom field for this moving forward (for the similar reason of the update stream).

Thank you!

Simon Heathfield

We also have exactly this issue, I need to provide a summary of progress actions to senior management and want to publish the description field to a report. I just spent some time trying to work out how to do that and I am really surprised that you cannot! Using a custom field is kludge I don't want.

Justin Franz

Making my voice heard as well... It would be extremely helpful if the reporting tool could pull all info from the projects/tasks (description, attachments, notes, etc). Creating custom fields is taking time out of my day to enter in data that's already in the system and it's extremely frustrating having to look at tiny boxes that show only two words out of my detailed notes.

Claudio Picco

Hello,

I would like to add my vote to request if it is possible to have a report set up based on detail info for a specific task( example the status of a task and if possible to see the all the messages wrote inside it). My necessity in this case it to run a report for stakeholders on specific project in order to give 'em the full transparency on the situation. Especially for our big clients and let them know if the project will be finished on time. In that way they will be bale to have all the details of all messages and info wrote in it ( every day) during the project.

Or perhaps something similar.

Thank you

Robert Maida

I agree with all the above posts. As we start using more features within Wrike, the details of the task would make reporting much better. One of the best practices on your site is to use check boxes within each task and limit subtasks. This makes it cleaner but I should be able to present a report with this info.

Thank you

Elizaveta Bogdanova

@Everyone Hi, thanks for sharing your feedback here, it is extremely helpful to our Product team. For now, I don't have an update to share with you, but I'll come back here when I have news.

Ann Brown

Hi Lisa,

would you advise a timescale when this mod will be available?

Kind regards,

Ann

Elizaveta Bogdanova

@Ann Hi, thanks for reaching out 🙂 I don't have any dates as this is not on the roadmap currently. I'll get back here when/if there's an update.

Mel Lewis

We need to export task data on a weekly basis so that tasks can be allocated to our production workforce (no access to computers as these workers are welders, painters, fabricators etc.). The task sheets they use have a barcode added which is scanned on and off the job and used to record the time booked to the particular task for billing purposes.

A mail merge to Word is used to produce printed work cards for the workforce, one card per Wrike Task.

Exporting the Description column and the task ID are necessary, but none of the XLS Exports has both these parameters available, which creates a lot of manual work in order to combine data from two reports in order to obtain our required Excel dataset for the mail merge. The ID is used to generate the barcode.

Please add the ability to add ALL parameters to an XLS Export.

Thank you

Tony Martinez

Need a way to easily collect a status from projects and then report on the most recent status. This is essential to our workflow. No work arounds above seem to accomplish this easily. I think this can be done in Smartsheets. Has anyone tried Smartsheets for this?

Michael Ferguson

I would also find this useful. We use Wrike tasks in part to manage contractual items that need evolve over time. We have played with both comments and the description field in capturing things we want to address in the next contract modification. It's great when having a specific discussion about a particular item, but it would also be nice to have a flat summarized report with all those changes for heading into negotiations instead of having to drive from Wrike - which is just ridiculous in those moments.

I understand description can have a lot of formatting. Perhaps a way to tag the portions of text you want exported could be an easy solution. Thanks!