Hello, I am trying to create a chart to show “Done” Items and Subitems that were completed this week. I added a date column with automation to set the date to today when the status changes to Done to allow for a date stamp when the item or subitem is completed.
I cannot get both item and subitem on one chart, and I am also not getting the chart to pull all days in the week.
Any suggestions to get what I am looking for, or a different way to accomplish it?
Hi Andy,
I think that your approach is quite common. However, you’ll need to use a workaround in order to produce this as a chart.
Add formula column called “Done Check” or something similar to both parent and subitem with the following formula:
IF(
{Status}="Done",
1,
0
)
This will give you a 1 or 0 result depending on whether or not the item or subitem has the status “Done”.
Then you’ll want to configure your chart as follows:
That should produce the result you’re looking for!
Let me briefly mention why I wouldn’t usually recommend working in this way. This is also related to the reason that you need a workaround for this chart.
Items and subitems should generally be different entities with different purposes. If there are tasks to complete, it would generally be better to have them all as items or all as subitems. This defines a consistent data element (the status column) across all tasks. It will then make it much easier to produce things like charts and automations to work with your solution.
Monday.com is a database and it uses boards to define data structures (essentially what combination of columns are present in that board). The reason that items and subitems don’t automatically have the same columns is because they are different data structures. If something is like, you’ll generally want it to have the same data structure.
So I’d advise thinking about why you use items and subitems. Perhaps you don’t need to use subitems at all. Perhaps you can define all tasks as subitems and use items as a holder rather than a task itself (maybe you can always include a single subitem, even if there’s only one task for that item). Perhaps you can use the group feature to group different items together if that’s what you’re looking for.
In taking a different approach, you might find that things like charts and automations tend to play a lot more nicely as well!
All of this might seem idiosyncratic now, but as your journey with monday.com continues, you’ll find that it allows you to use monday.com in more powerful ways.
Hopefully that helps and feel free to reach out to me or to monday.com if you want some professional assistance structuring your solution.
Do we know why subitems don’t act like regular parent items? We use the subitems to track hours on a project, by person, by date, by status and can’t seem to consistently report on this.
Hi MW,
I’m not sure what issue you’re facing exactly. However, I would generally suggest using subitems to represent something of a different hierarchy to items, rather than a group of items. Groups of items can be modelled using groups (although there are disadvantages to this) among other things.
If you’d like to, please go ahead and share some screenshots to illustrate what you’re having trouble with.
Francis
Example.
We track billable hours.
Let’s say we have the Elliot job (parent item). In the subitems we track our design hours. We could have one set of design hours tracked or 24 depending on how many times we worked on that project.
Within that subitem line we track the designer, amount of hours, date and then was it billed, not billed, held…etc.
To try and pull this information in a dashboard is next to impossible. We can never figure out how many hours have been billed with one designer, how many hours total a designer put in on all of their jobs, during a specific week how much work was done by one designer.
Interesting. From your description, it sounds like your data structure is sound.
Let’s use the example of “Hours in a given week”. You might dashboard that in a bar chart as follows:
X Axis:
Main Item (No Selection)
Subitem (People Column)
Y Axis:
Main Item (No Selection)
Subitem (Hours Logged)
Filter:
Date is Between (Week Start) and (Week End)
Some screenshots (ignore some of the irrelevant naming):
In the above example, the chart will show more bars as I add more individuals. Currently there is just one, as I didn’t create the additional data.
Have you tried something like this? Is the issue that you’re expecting something more like a table?
I wonder if the missing element is the filter. That’s important, as you’re tracking data in 3 “dimensions” (Hours, Person, Date). The filter slices the data and gives you a 2 dimensional view that can be easily presented in a graph.
If you’re looking for something like a table, you could try the pivot board (pivot chart). This allows you to aggregate data across 3 dimensions. It’s more challenging, and you might need to use formulae in the subitems for something like a “Week” value (this will allow values to be grouped and summed effectively). As you can see below, I just have the dates, but with a Formula field, I could allow multiple dates to be summed together in a single week.
