How to mass edit and rename projects and tasks?

Hi, we use Wrike for new product development and I have created a template with sub-projects and tasks. We typically start off with a working name and then assign it a unique identifier later into the project. So the projects and tasks within this would need to be updated with the unique identifier. I would like to figure out a way to rename all of the tasks and projects but the only way I can think of doing this is duplicating the entire thing and then adding a prefix. Is there another way to do this?

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Comments

Anton Pasisnichenko

Hi Jennifer! Thanks for asking! As you correctly pointed out, the best way to mass edit task and Project titles is via duplication.

The prefix you add in the duplication wizard will be added to the new Project copy, all of its Subfolders and tasks inside.

In case you need to update the items after the Project has already been duplicated, you can use Excel export/import feature:

Export existing Wrike Project to Excel (Export XLS);
Edit the titles in the spreadsheet;
Import the updated Project back to Wrike (Import XLS).

The Excel import will create a new instance of the Project and add all the data you exported except for the comments (if you had them in the original Project).

There is also an option to quickly edit the titles in the Table view in Wrike. When you open your Project as a spreadsheet in the Table view you can double click on the cell to edit the item’s title or any other values you would like to be changed.

I hope you will find these suggestions helpful. Let us know if more questions come up or in case any help would be needed.

Jennifer Olvera

Thank you very much for your help!

Daniel 🚀 Lipschitz

I like the suggestion above, but we change project names half way through our process. We really need an easy way to quickly edit the task prefix for all tasks in the project without losing the history.

Permanently deleted user

@Daniel, thanks for sharing your thoughts here! I'm really interested in learning about your workflow for this, so I could understand the use case better. Are there any particular Project attributes which change and require these updates?

Jennifer Olvera

Hi Daniel - this happens in our projects as well. First they have a working name then they are assigned a different name and/or unique identifier. I have found that our only solution to not lose the history is to view it in the Table View so that you can double-click and edit all titles through there.

Melissa Towers

We are a book publisher, and we have to start our schedules before a book is titled--so we also use a working title. So the inability to change the prefix makes it very, very difficult to see Wrike as our long term solution. If there was an easy way to update task prefix--that would be wonderful! We are shopping for our long term solution, and unfortunately, this along with a couple other things makes it very difficult for us to stay with Wrike. We start projects about a year before completion.

Stephanie Simons

Agreed - we do multiple projects concurrently that use the same template and if the project manager doesn't put in a prefix, we are all lost! Please consider a fix to add task prefixes throughout the project's timeline.

Stephanie Westbrook

@Melissa @Stephanie Thank you both for the details about your different use cases (I can't stress how helpful that is). We've passed feedback to our Product team about situations where editing task prefixes is helpful/necessary.

Todd Fairfoul

Would be great if there was a find and replace option for multiple tasks to edit text

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Todd, just in case you're looking for the option to mass edit task descriptions, check out Derik's request for such an option.

Todd Fairfoul

Hi Stephanie,
Unfortunately no, I am looking for a way to mass edit multiple tasks once they have already been created and some text inside the task needs to change such as a link, a contact, instructions or something else.

ex. I created a task, duplicated 50 times, assigned it to 50 different people and then something changes and I need to edit the instructions in all 50 tasks.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Todd, I understand now, thank you for the clarification!

Jennifer Olvera

Hi Wrike Team! Wanted to see if there is any discussion around adding this feature?

Permanently deleted user

Hi Jennifer, it's not on Product Team roadmap but they're aware of this post so if this changes I'll be sure to update you.

@All - please remember to upvote the original post here so the Product Team have a better idea of the popularity of a request post. Thank you! 🙌

Helen Abbott

I am also having the same issue. My standard templates have 157 tasks / sub tasks so to manually rename is a massive task. A Find and Replace function would be good for tasks that are already created using the Prefix but where the Prefix needs to change.

Kight Haberer

I would like to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, to the nth degree this request. I have templates with tasks and subtasks that change names during the normal work process. For example, this is the template:

And this is the first time it changes:

And then this is the second time it changes:

It would be extremely helpful if I was able to change all of the subtasks to include the final information like this:

This format is used across everything in our workflow. The most important being all of the filenames for video files, project files, etc.

Permanently deleted user

Note: Moved to Product Feedback section 👍

Laura Walz

I'm also very interested in mass editing projects. We just went through a major internal restructure where our reps (Project Owners) were re-distributed. We had to manually go through each project and change the owner, which took a lot of time. It would have been nice to be able to mass edit!

We also have instances where a projects are kicked off by one team, then another team actually works on the projects - they name them and add in custom data details. It would be helpful if they could do this in bulk to save time.

Melissa Towers

I also wanted to add that in addition to easily changing a prefix for an entire project. It would also be good if, when duplicating a project or folder, you can add a new prefix, and the old prefix is removed.

Bailey Burke

+40 votes for our team.

A lot of our new projects are automatically created from a template off of a request form (Request for Quote). Because it is created from a request form (and not duplicating a template) we are not able to add a unique prefix to our tasks.

Preferably being able to mass update a task prefix after a project has been created would be best - as our first task of a project tends to be to create the unique identifier that we organize our projects by.

Soraya Jung

+70 votes for our company!!

We use a template when starting a new project and the prefix option is great for adding the project's name to every task. However, when doing this all the subprojects are also renamed with the prefix (not what we want!). If we could just mass edit the tasks instead and add the prefix in that way it would be perfect. Eventually, every project name also gets an internal company code added to it - when the time comes these are currently manually updated in each task prefix. Again, if we could mass edit tasks for these scenarios it would save us a real headache! PLEASE pass this on to the product developers it is very important for us.

Philippe R Collin III

+ Alot for myself as well. We also use a template and duplicating is how I am doing it now.

However in order to better sort, we add "Division of company" prefixes to the client name to be able to easily sort (as having a 1000 folders was getting cumbersome due to the lack of real tagging and labeling). There are times when projects (more often than not) will bounce between divisions of our company, or a group of tickets will at least. It would be great to be able to change that whole folder or tickets' prefixes to match the parent folder prefix so I don't have to manually go through all of them (sometimes there are hundreds and subfolders as well that need to be changed)

I can work with your team on designing an implementation for this if needed. Please let me know.

Doran Joy

A design suggestion/feature request for Wrike that might address this issue:

What if we could "pin" one or more custom fields to appear in the task/project/folder names? This seems like it would make the Table view editing functionality more useful for making quick updates at different levels of detail. I believe custom fields are also supported by the Wrike request forms too. One could use a folder/project level field to define a string for all of the tasks, subtasks, etc. that it contains, or break the inheritance and set the value on a single task and its subtasks. It would be particularly clever to add the capability for multiple fields to be pinned (and rearranged!), and this raises the topic of improving mass editing options for fields on tasks.

Does anyone have any thoughts about whether this would work for the issues of prefixes/suffixes? Any suggestions for improvements to fill out a full feature request?

I am also happy to resubmit this as a separate feature request if it is already too distinct from the original post.

Tina Clemens

Desperately awaiting a "Mass Edit" function for WITHIN tasks, ie can mass edit sub tasks. Please create!!!!!!!! 😃

Tina Clemens

If in the new MASS EDIT function WITHIN tasks, there could be an option to update all subtasks' prefixes, that would be perfect. Thank you 👍👍👍👍

Abbey Carman

This would be so helpful for our organization too. Many times, our project names changes halfway through and we assign the task prefix the same as the project name so that it can be easily found when searching. When a project name changes, I have to manually change every task name. It's not a problem if it's just a few, but many of our projects have a hundred+ tasks assigned to them so much of my work becomes busy work.

Bryan Nikkel

As a new client at Wrike, it is quite disappointing to see that this requested change has been requested for over a year with no resolution. I sincerely hope that a fix is coming soon. Being able to mass edit is database 101.

I have an additional request beyond mass editing. For our marketing agency, our work processes change throughout the year as we adapt our services, or if how we work with third party vendors changes. I would love to see Wrike have the ability to create master templates that are linked to the duplicate versions you create from them. With these being linked, the hope would be that any change made on the master template can be pushed out and changed on the duplicates without even having to do mass edits.

Rui Dias

Hi, adding to the request above. A 'bulk rename' tool is an important feature as projects change titles halfway, or if you're copying tasks in bulk from a project folder. Renaming should allow for prefixes, suffixes, insertions or deletions.

Iñigo O'Neill

When we start a new project we add the prefix that will change a few weeks later. We use a massive template with more than 400 tasks, so it is really painfull to rename every single task...

Would be great if Wrike will allow to the administrator made a massive rename of the task in a similar way that you can do in Excel.

Joel Gold

@Doran, your suggestion about “pinning” Custom Field values is a stroke of genius! Essentially it is “tagging” that appears in the name of a task that can be added or removed. It would solve most requests regarding mass; adding, removing, or replacing prefixes and suffixes. However there is a separate need to use typical mass; edit, rename, substitution, find/replace and “remove characters” feature so users can quickly make changes to task/folder names in “batch”.