How to use formulas in monday work management

Move to Microsoft Excel: In Monday work management, you can perform calculations and edit data via the platform’s formula columns feature. With monday.com Work OS’s formula functions, you can easily solve math formulas by pulling data from columns or as standalone calculations. These features allow you to get solutions to formulas faster and without using more than one application, making it easy to get the most out of your data in one system.

SEE: monday.com Work OS Review (TechRepublic)

This tutorial walks you through using formulas in Monday Work Management, rated by TechRepublic as the best project management software for teams of all technical levels.

What you need to use formulas in Monday work management

To add or use formula columns, you need an active monday.com Work OS account on a Pro or Enterprise plan.

Note: If you are on a Pro plan and downgrade your account in the future, you will not lose the formula columns you have created.

How to add formulas in Monday work management

To start adding formulas you need to add the formula column to your board by selecting the + icon at the top right of your board diagram (Figure A).

Figure A

In the drop-down menu that appears, click Formula (Figure B).

Figure B

After adding your formula column, a formula builder will open on your page (Figure C). You can access the formula builder at any time by clicking in the column.

Figure C

Now that you’re in the formula builder, you can start creating your formula. On the board you will see a list of the columns you can use in your formulas and a list of the features Monday Work Management offers (Figure D). You can use any of these functions to create your formula, or you can just use traditional math symbols like + to add, – to subtract, or * to multiply.

Figure D

When you want to apply functions, monday.com makes it easy to understand the purpose of each function. Hover your mouse over a function to see a description of the function and an example of how it is used (Figure E).

Figure E

To create a formula, first select a cell in the formula column where you can start typing your formula. Then you can use columns from your board and functions when creating your formula.

For example, if you want to see if your organization is spending over or under budget, you can use the following formula:

IF({Budgeted}>{Actual Spending},"Over budget","Under budget")

Another benefit of Monday work management is that the software uses syntax highlighting to help you build the formulas easily. You can tell this because certain segments of your formula are colored within the range.

For example, if a segment in the formula you created is red, it indicates that there is an error in that part of your formula. Pay attention as it can help you identify and fix errors in your formula.

Tips and tricks for using formulas in Monday work management

As with any software system that uses formulas, you must follow certain rules to ensure proper use of formulas and create accurate calculations.

To refer to a column and pull its value into your function, add that column’s name exactly as it appears on your boards inside those bracket symbols {} in your formula (Figure F). Also, formulas can contain parentheses () to change the order of operations.

Figure F

Remember that values ​​are case-sensitive, and when writing your formula you should capitalize words appropriately as they appear in your column.

Be careful when including commas in your formula columns as they can represent something different depending on the function. For example, the comma would represent a multiplication symbol in a multiplication function.

Always open and close statements by including a ( symbol before the open statement and a ) symbol after the close statement.

In formulas, text must be enclosed in quotes so that the software can distinguish it. Your quote and comma formatting can also affect the effectiveness of your formula, and copying and pasting formulas from an external text editor can cause the formula generator to read them as illegal.

Finally, always add a 0 before the decimal point when multiplying; Otherwise, the formula returns an error.

The formula column allows you to generate formulas based on compatible and incompatible columns.

Compatible Columns: Review, Country, Creation Log, Date, Dependency, Drop Down, Email, Formula, Hour, Article ID, Last Updated, Join Boards (formerly link to article), Long Text, Numbers, Person, Phone, Rating, Status, Text, Timeline , time tracking, voting, world clock, sub-item names, and the number of sub-items.

Incompatible columns: Auto numbering, color picker, files, link, location, mirror, progress tracking, tags and week.

If you are interested in managing software development projects and processes, this project management-focused course from TechRepublic Academy can help you take your career to the next level.