monday.com can help you manage your project and grow your business. Perhaps before you were using Excel sheets to keep all your data organized. Now is the time to enhance your experience with worksheets by importing them to an existing board on monday.com, you can do it in an easy way. From this article you will learn how to do it step by step.
Why would you import data from Excel sheets to monday.com?
There are many reasons why users decide to import data to monday.com. You might need this feature when:
- you are a new user who has previously worked on Excel sheets and now wants to upload your work onto monday.com to have everything in one place.
- you are regularly getting data from an outside source, for example, a client or other platforms, and need to add that information to the existing board.
- you used or are using another platform, and need to export data from there and import onto monday.com.
Putting all your data manually on the platform is an option, but it is not efficient at all. By importing data from Excel sheets, you save time. Less time spent on working on something that has already been done means more time to do tasks that actually matter.
When you were creating your sheets, you probably checked if all the data was correct. Why do it again? When you import sheets, you are sure there are no mistakes and that none of the items will be missing.
Before you start the import
Importing files can be easy and smooth, but you need to be sure that the Excel sheet you are importing is correctly formatted. So before you jump on monday.com, check the files you will be uploading. Think how you want the information to be displayed on monday.com and edit your Excel accordingly.
How to import data from Excel to an existing board on monday.com
Go to your monday.com profile. Open the board to which you want to add files. Click on the New Item button (it can also be called “New Contact”, “New Project”, etc., depending on what you are working on), and a list with two options will pop up. Click on ‘Import Items’.
The window with the option to import data from Excel will appear. After that, you will see an option to import data from this software to monday.com.
You can drag a file you want to import from a folder on your computer or click the button to browse files on your device. monday.com supports all spreadsheet files, including .csv, .xlsx, and .xls. Thanks to that, you don’t have to waste your time on changing your file format from one to another.
After making the selection of the file, it will be uploaded. After that, click the “Next” button.
Choosing the item name
After you choose a file to be imported, you need to take care of how it is going to look on monday.com. First you choose which column on your Excel sheet will appear as the item name. The item name could be, for example, a name of a product, customer name, and so on.
Mapping the columns
While importing files, it is crucial to map the columns correctly. This way, you ensure that all data will be presented the same way as on your Excel sheet and you will avoid confusion or mixed information. On the screen, you will see two columns: one that shows you what Excel columns you are mapping, and the other that shows the name of existing board columns. You can have different names for columns on monday.com and Excel but it might be harder for you to remember what is what while mapping. Decide to which existing board columns you want to transfer data from your Excel column. For example, you might want to assign the “Addresses” column from Excel to “Customer Addresses” on monday.com.
Remember that columns that are not mapped will not be imported to monday.com. It is a great feature if you don’t need all your data imported but also don’t want to copy and paste data you want to import to another Excel file.
How to handle the duplicates
Some data from your Excel sheet might be already on monday.com. You don’t have to worry about duplicating the content, as there are three options to manage duplicates. Your choice depends on what you want to do with the duplicates.
After mapping you click “Next” and you will see three options on your screen.
- Create new items (Choose if you want to add all duplicated entries as new items to the board).
- Skip items (Choose if you don’t want to add items that match a particular column).
- Overwrite existing items (When you choose this option, the data from Excel will be overwritten by data on monday.com)
If you decide on options two or three, you should choose the unique column in which the value is different for each of the items. Usually it is the item name column.
Once you decide what to do with duplicated data, click the ‘Start Import’ button.
Wait a moment for the import to end. When the process is done, a new group will be created on your board, and the new items will appear.
Batch Actions
While importing the data, not all columns are supported, for example people column and dropdown.
If you have a dropdown column, you need to update it manually on monday.com. However, you don’t need to update each of them one by one. You can use batch actions.
To proceed with batch actions, mark all the items you want to edit, ticking the box on the left side. You can now edit all the marked items at the same time. This way you speed up your work.
Copy and paste option
You wrote down some data in one Excel column and want to quickly add it to your monday.com board? No problem. You can do it very easily. Skip the import part and simply use the copy and paste method.
Copy data from the Excel column. Then go to your board, click on the +Add item button and use the shortcut or right-click the “Paste” option to add data from the Excel column into your board.
This option is available just for the item name on the board. It means that if you need to upload data to other columns, you should use the importing process described above.
