Allow Excel Imports to Update Existing Board Items

Currently, when importing from Excel, there is no way to prevent duplicates or to update existing items on a board. It would be ideal if upon Excel import you could select an option to update existing item column values if the item name matches.

We use a board to track collaboration with external parties around a sales pipeline and need to regularly update the status of the items from our sales system on a regular basis, but would like to keep the updates from the collaboration. Currently, there is no way to do this (outside of using the API).

@PegaChris It looks like this is possible via “New Item” > “Import Items” on a board, but I have not been able to make it work properly during my testing. Each time I try the option to “Create New or Update Existing Items” and “overwrite existing items based on (blank)”, it just adds my excel data as a new item/pulse/row.

This is would be extremely useful for my team as well, so if anyone has had success or a Monday.com rep could chime in it would be appreciated.

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It looks like this is working now! I imported a mix of items that had a few new items, lots of existing items with no changes and lots of items with changes and it all worked (at least for the fields that can be imported).

I just had to have a unique field (column) to identify if an item already existed in the board. Then I chose to overwrite existing items (which really just overwrites existing item’s fields if they are different), and it worked.

The “overwrite existing items” method of handling duplicates could be more clear and this element could be added to the instructions for importing (currently at https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000219209-Excel-Import-and-Export).

Thanks Monday!

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