Is there a way to do this? It seems like there must be…
I have several dropdown columns with 10+ options that I want to convert to Status columns so that I can import more items. (Monday.com doesn’t allow Dropdown column imports). Then I’ll need to re-convert to the status column back to being a dropdown column…
Am I making this more difficult than it needs to be? What am I missing?
Hi @colleencass - yes, this easily done in monday - is there a reason you dont want to use a status column instead of a dropdown (so you dont have to convert). Also, if you have multiple values selected in your dropdown, the selected value will not be coverted.
All you need to do is select the option arrow on your dropdown column: Change Column Type > Status. In this example I created a dropdown with the options 1,2,3,4,5:
Once converted (which sometimes takes a few moments) you will have a new status column with your dropdown values:
Once you import your data, you can change the column back to a dropdown using the same function as above:
Hope this helps,
Thanks,
Mark
Sorry - I think I was having a brain freeze moment. I’m having a larger problem importing items with dropdown fields, and thought for some reason that converting the corresponding Monday columns to status columns before trying to import them would help me. It unfortunately does not.
Disregarding the specifics of my original post, if you have any solutions about how to solve the problem demonstrated in the attached photos, of converting a text column to a dropdown column, I’d really appreciate it!! The problem is around categories getting broken up by word, which will require a ton of manual labor to fix when I import all my contacts
Hi @colleencass - No worries, I have about 7 brain freeze moments a day 
If you want to convert a text field with more than one word into a single dropdown option, the text fields should be in quotations, otherwise it will be seen as two options. In the below example I converted a text field “2 words” into a single dropdown option where the one with no quotes is converted into two:
This would require your text fields that have more than one word to be updated with quotes.
Is this closer to to what you were looking to accomplish?
Thanks
Mark
Yes, this is exactly what I needed to know, THANK YOU! Now I just need to adjust in Excel, but that’s a lot less work thanks!
Excellent! Glad this is what you were looking for
If you ever have questions you have come to the right place for sure.
Take care,
Mark
Hi @mark.anley - wondering if you can share some more wisdom. I haven’t had trouble with this in the past but am now! When I try to convert a column to dropdown, it’s only picking up the first item, whether I have other items in quotes or not. Any idea why this is happening?
Hi there Coleen,
Maddie here from monday.com support.
Unfortunately, this is not supported on the platform at this time.
In order to convert multiple items to a Drop-Down column, it would require you to use our API.
If you are interesting in learning how to develop this for your account, here are some resources to get you started with our API and developer framework.
API Documentation
Head over to our API documentation for a detailed look at our API, including a list of the operations to get and update data from your monday.com account.
Webinar: monday.com for builders
You can also check out our recent API webinar here, which goes through some API use cases and basic API calls.
Developer Community
If you need additional support on our APIs or apps platform, I would recommend doing a search for your question in our developer community here. You can also post to the community to get help from other monday.com developers. The community is managed by members of our dev and CS team.
