@Julia-monday.com, I’m going to try to summarize my own frustrations, which echo the frustrations of everyone on this thread: While monday is very good at tracking, filtering, manipulating & searching data items, it is very limited in its ability to track, filter, manipulate & search relationships between data items. Currently, this is entirely accomplished through the linking feature, and the linking feature has serious shortcomings.
—As many people have pointed out, Linked/Mirrored data are functionally invisible on boards. They do not appear in searches. They cannot be “read” by other fields in the pulse. One cannot use the data for notifications, automations, integrations, or formulas. So if you’re on a board and you want to actually do anything with mirrored data (not just view it), you have to hand copy and paste that data from the mirrored field into a new field. There’s not even a way to convert a mirrored column, or to bulk copy and paste a column, you have to create a new column, then copy the data individually, by hand, field by field.
—monday offers a very limited view of linked/mirrored relationships. The only way to see a linked relationship is to be on the linked board. If you are on the parent board, there’s no way to see an overview of the links.
A use case to make this clear: I do video production. I have a board which contains names, phone numbers, & e-mail addresses for actors.
Then, each production gets its own casting board. On this casting board, I track which actors I audition for each role. There are columns which link/mirror to the actor’s name, e-mail, & phone number.
Now, I might audition an actor for multiple roles within a single production. Let’s say I have an actor named Claire. I audition Claire for the role of the lead. But I also audition her for the role of the lead’s best friend. On top of that, I might audition Claire for roles in other productions (each kept on its own board). So now Claire’s name is linked to multiple pulses on multiple boards.
But if I’m on the contact board and I’m looking at Claire’s name, there’s no way to pull up an overview of all the different boards she is linked to. At the very least, this should be a tab in the updates panel— a sort of “view all linked relationships” option.
Better yet, if there were some way to track and run reports on linking relationships, I could get useful answers to all sorts of questions. Questions like: who are the actors I most frequently see in auditions? In the last two years, which actors have I not called in for an audition (and who can maybe be purged from my list)? Across all productions, what are all the roles in which Claire has achieved the status of “called back”? If I could save that report as a dashboard widget, I’d have easy access to it.
And for my pie-in-the-sky dream world-- if that report could be somehow consolidated and saved onto its own smart board, I could have an automatically updating list of my most frequently used actors. I could use that data set to invite all my most frequently used actors to a party, or to my latest screening. I could add an automation to send them casting call notices whenever I had a new project coming up.
