Wayne Olson
Wouldn’t it be amazing if.... we could use merge fields to auto-populate data from custom fields? For example, auto-populating data in task descriptions or, in particular, documents….?
Let’s say that you have a workflow that has you referencing custom field data for external parties every. single. time. you run said workflow. For example, you might track key metrics in custom fields that you need to summarize for your client, or for a group of people outside of your team, or that you need to update your client or group on with regularity. And every time you do that, you have to transpose said data manually.
If it’s just a single client that you are sharing data with, creating a guest account for that person makes sense. However, to use my own case as an example, I am regularly sharing data from custom fields with a different group of people for every project, so it’s just not feasible to create guest accounts for every single person who needs access to this data.
So what if, instead of manually transposing data every time, you could....
  1. Create a template document in a Doc view;
  2. Use merge fields to reference custom fields in your template document;
  3. Link the specific task, whose custom field data you want populated, in said document; and
  4. Regain HOURS of lost productivity every year from the time no longer lost to manual data transfer.
The only thing I’ve seen like this from a competitor is Airtable’s Page Designer block, which uses merge fields to reference record data (which would be the equivalent of a ClickUp task). I wouldn’t say that ClickUp should have a full blown page designer, but even just the ability to use merge fields with documents in their current state would be AMAZING. And in fact, I actually prefer ClickUp's ability to create a public link to a document, where the custom field data would update automatically, to Airtable's Page Designer where you have to export a single-point-in-time document as a PDF.