Is the Tag column underutilized/underleveraged? (Mirror a tag column to link items across boards?)

Feature requests/feedback
#1

A thought occurred to me: can we use the tags column to link together different things, without using linked and mirrored columns? Can we link items across boards using the tag column?

It can get messy if you don’t manage your tags cleanly, but if done right, the tags column is almost like a database unto itself.

If we mirror a tag column, can we reference the mirror? It doesn’t seem like it. Wouldn’t that potentially be super useful?

Is there a way to build automations around tags? Could such automations potentially be really powerful?

Can we use tags to take dashboards and analytics to another level? If not, is it in the works?

Just thinking out loud.

#2

I have extensively tested using tags as kind of reference system. I tried to use tags as a “key” to identify items in another board ( from apps - integrations). Tags are not really globally for your account, you can have more than one tag with the same name (in different boards). Therefor unfortunately tags are not the holy grail for referencing items across boards.

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#3

Hello Bas. I’ve been looking around the community articles and often come across your name. It seems you are very familiar with Monday already as you write apps for it. I’ve just jumped on board Monday in an attempt to convince our management that we should be using this platform for PM. I’m still spending a lot of time trying to workout the best way to structure and fill in all the info we want to track and give management an overall view of what is going on and who is doing what.
I have a an increasingly long list of tags (special parts, suppliers, options etc.) on a shareable board that I want to add to other shareable boards (= our client projects). At the moment I’m working on making templates for each of several types of machines that we fabricate on order (with some variations on each machine type). When a client places an order for a particular type of machine, I copy the template board and move it into a folder “ProductionOrders” and change the name to the client. Then I add the people responsible for that project and the client as a “viewer”. It seems that if tags are already in the original, they are carried over into the copy, but I’ve got several boards in my “ProductionOrders” that didn’t have the tags I need in them. Do you know an easy way to take the tags from one board and copy them to another?

#4

hi @JPinBe, John

Tags are somewhat difficult to understand because they can have different scopes. A tag created in a public (main) board will have a public scope. When you duplicate that board the tags are selectable as they are in any other public board in your account. So, it is not a matter of duplication it is about the scope of the tag.

What I have seen is that tags created on either personal or private boards have a scope to that board (call it a private tag). It gets confusing when you add a tag to a personal or shareable board with the same name of the tag used somewhere in a public board. Now you have 2 tags with the same name and different scopes.

When you duplicate a personal or shareable board tags will “copy over” only when you select to duplicates structure + items BUT only tags that are used in items within the source board are visible (selectable) in the duplicated board. It looks like this is the behavior you are seeing here. The tags you do see (are selectable) are those that appear in any item in your template. As far as I know there in no possibility to copy tags from one shareable board to another.

On the other hand if you use a dropdown column the values of the dropdown are copied over to duplicated boards (even if they are not used in the source board).

I hope this gives you some ideas about using tags. Always open for a chat, just send me DM for a Zoom or Teams meeting

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#5

Yes, I’ve taken your advice and noticed that the dropdown columns are better in that respect as the values created stay in the board even if the cells in the column doesn’t use one.