How do I create subtasks?

There is no that feature in Airtable, but you can create it yourself. Assuming you have a Tasks table, you could relate other Tasks with a single Task, or you could create a Subtasks table and relate them with the Tasks.

yes, same question as well, lot of PM apps available, most of them don’t have sub tasks options, the ones that do, costs too much for small teams or single user pm

I’d start with the Project Management templates or browse through Airtable Universe to see what PM starter applications are available. I know I’ve contributed routines to several PM bases, including one involving project phase gates and another concerning multi-year projects, so you’re likely to find additional routines documented within ‘Ask the Community.’

I really need a better option… is so terrible for me, i love this software but for a PM subtasks are go no go information… so i can’t use this software at my company.

+1 from me. Adding subtasks as a separate table is really clunky and time consuming. A new field type would make Airtable a contender for project management. I’ve had to go elsewhere despite using Airtable for other things :frowning:

Hey guys! I just figured out how to create sub-tasks in Airtable. Make a field a Long Text field, then click/toggle on Enable Rich Text Formatting. That should then show the Paragraph icon when you start typing in the cell. Click on that Paragraph icon, and it will give you the option in the bottom right hand corner to select a checklist format. Type your sub-tasks, and then you can check them off individually when you’ve completed them! :slightly_smiling_face: Hope that’s helpful!

Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was looking for!

Thanks for this, @Faith_Dallas.

Now, do you (anyone) know a way to make the row height automatically adjust to show however many checkboxes there are in the cell?

No, I don’t, unfortunately. But you do know how to manually make the row height smaller or larger, right? It will affect all of the rows in your tab, but it at least accommodates for some amount of manipulation–especially for long text fields. Would be nice to have a “Wrap” feature for a long text field so that the content can be pushed to the side as well to make the most of the space.

In case developers ever check these posts, I want to chime in and put in a plug for doing sub-tasks. It would be extremely useful in managing tasks to have that visual hierarchy and be able to collapse and expand a task and its associated subtasks. I think it would attract many more users. (It would probably help me pitch this to my employer as a tool we should be paying for and all using.)
Thanks!

Yes, that works, but only so far. Checkboxes can only contain one field. If a subtask requires other qualifying information, such as due dates, resources, dependencies, etc, it can’s be captured in a checkbox.

We definitely need Airtable to consider adding this feature directly, not as a workaround as it seems from the responses I’ve seen so far.

Thanks,
Yaman

I totally agree, Yaman! That would be great. Not that we need yet another app to help us do our work, but just in case you didn’t know about it (I didn’t until just recently) and want to look into it, there’s a platform similar to Airtable called Trello.com. I think Airtable’s free version is much more robust, but Trello is pretty simple and quick so it is good when you need simple. :slightly_smiling_face: It primarily operates in the Kanban view and was the first platform to really institute that. Each “card” in a list can be expanded and you can add a deadline (with time), add corresponding tasks, notes, attachments, etc. Just wanted to pass along the info in case it’s helpful.

Thank you Faith. Appreciate the information. Yes I know Trello and it’s great. I think Trello and Airtable complement each other. While Trello facilitates a big picture view via boards, Airtable covers the implementation of that view. But it still needs to support sub-tasks in multiple levels.

Best,
Yaman

It’s unfortunate to discover another app that the Developers state it’s handling tasks and projects - without offering sub-tasks :frowning: Some of those offered that feature years after they started off, and made a big trumpeting for the ‘fantastic new option’. Beforehand, they said many nonsense in the user forums why sub-tasks are not needed and against productivity, blabla. I tried and used around 10 so called project management tools during the last 5-6 years, and had a look of some more (good place to start out is at the user forums :slightly_smiling_face: )
Absolutely a no-go for anything slightly bigger then a Christmas postcard action.
/I think, I can create a workaround, but I want to use a tool without being creative and finding workarounds. Checklists are great - for checklists, not for subtasks. Thanks for the hint!/

Hierarchical tasks are really necessary. I wish Airtable did a better job of representing hierarchies in general.

An alternative way for subtasks would be grouping. For instance, if you have tasks A-1 and A-2 for Task A, and B-1 and B-2 for Task B, then you can add a Task/Category column and group related tasks using the column, as below.

Task A

• A-1
• A-2

Task B

• B-1
• B-2