Why Asana's CSV Export Loses Task Hierarchy and Sections

What the export includes, and what it doesn't mark

Asana's project-level CSV export does pull in subtasks alongside top-level tasks, they count toward the same 2,000-row ceiling as everything else in the project. What the export doesn't do is flag category: there's no column distinguishing a Section header, a top-level task, and a subtask from one another, and no parent-task reference on a subtask row telling you which task it belongs to, a gap tracked in Asana's own community forum for years without a fix. Opened cold in a spreadsheet, the file reads as one flat list of rows in whatever order Asana wrote them, not the nested structure visible in the Asana UI.

Dependencies don't survive the export either

Task dependencies, "blocked by" and "blocking" relationships set up in Asana, also aren't represented as columns in the CSV. Moderators on Asana's own community forum have confirmed directly that sections and dependencies are not included when importing or exporting a project, a limitation still being discussed as of a related thread's most recent activity in April 2025. A project that leans on dependency chains for sequencing loses that information entirely on export; the spreadsheet shows tasks and their fields, not the order constraints between them. Anyone reconstructing a project plan from the export alone would need to go back into Asana to see what depends on what. This was last checked against the live forum threads on 19 August 2026.

What this means for a reporting sheet

• Don't assume row order in the CSV reflects section order in Asana. Sort or group by an explicit field if the report needs to read the way the board does.
• If subtask rows matter to the report, they need a parent-task identifier added during export, Asana's own file won't hand you one.
• If the report needs to show blocked work, that has to come from a separate pull against dependency data, not the CSV export.

What the raw file actually looks like

A project with one task and two subtasks under it exports as three flat rows, indistinguishable by structure alone:

Nothing in the file says the second and third rows are subtasks of the first. If you didn't already know the project's structure, all three would read as three independent, equally-weighted tasks. The only way to tell them apart from the raw CSV is to already have the Asana UI open next to it.

A partial workaround, and where it breaks down

If you need an approximate hierarchy from the CSV alone, one option is exporting each section separately and tagging rows with that section name as you go, then treating any task whose name you recognize as a duplicate of a subtask line from the Asana UI as the parent. This is manual, error-prone at any real project size, and falls apart completely for dependencies, since there's no CSV column to reconstruct a blocked-by relationship from at all. It's a stopgap for a one-off small export, not a repeatable process.

Where this fits with the rest of the export

This is a structural gap in the file format itself, not a plan restriction. See exporting Asana to Google Sheets without an Advanced plan if the blocker is plan tier rather than structure, and exporting Asana to Google Sheets for the general field-level walkthrough.