How to change many tasks at once

When a launch slips a week, you do not want to open forty tasks. Ticking them in a list gives you one bar that acts on all of them. This works in the List view of a department or a project, described in How to work a list, a board and a calendar.

Where does it work?

In list views, which are the ones with checkboxes on the rows. Tick two or more and a floating bar appears at the foot of the screen reading N selected.

Boards and calendars have no selection, and neither do My tasks or the Tasks home screen. When you want to act in bulk, go to the department or project list first.

Clear the selection with the X on the bar.

What can you do to a selection?

• Complete every selected task.
• Move to a status, sending them all to one column.
• Reschedule them to a date, or clear their due dates entirely.
• Assign them all to one person, or unassign them.

Up to 200 tasks in one action. Beyond that, split the job.

Assign has one extra condition: the whole selection has to be in a single department, because the roster you are picking from belongs to a team. If it is greyed out, the tooltip tells you to narrow the selection to one department.

How do you read the result?

The bar reports what actually happened rather than claiming success. A run that partly worked says so, for example "24 moved, 6 couldn't be", with the reason attached.

Read the reason before you retry, because retrying the same selection gets the same answer.

Two reasons come up. You can't edit some of these means part of the selection is in a department where you do not hold edit rights, since every task is checked individually against your rights in its own department. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

Some are waiting on an unfinished task means blocked tasks were refused. Acting on one task at a time offers a Complete anyway override, and acting on a whole selection deliberately does not, because nobody can review forty overrides at once. Handle those individually, per How to break a task down and put it in order.

What does a bulk move do to card order?

It sends every moved task to the top of the target column. If the order inside a column matters to your team, drag the few that need to sit lower afterwards.

What is the fastest way to reschedule a slipped week?

Open the department list, tick the group header rows for the work that moved, and use Reschedule with the new date. That is one action rather than one per task.

Clearing dates works the same way and is the tidier move when work is going back to the backlog. A task with no due date leaves the calendar and the Due soon groups, and stops producing reminders.