How do I create subtasks?

[Erin_Chadd]

I can’t figure out how to make subtasks. Any ideas? Thank you.

[Rebecca_Robinso]

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!

[Yaman_Saleh]

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

[Faith_Dallas]

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.

[Yaman_Saleh]

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

[Geza_Molnar]

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!/

[achamess]

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

[trs966]

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