Purpose of that first column in Work Management

Platform discussions
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1

I’m brand new to Monday.com, and 99% of the features still don’t make sense to me! So please bear with me as I try to figure this out.

I had mentioned before that I had an issue getting Leads to import from Excel, and Support told me to import it to Work Management instead. That worked, but it led to another question.

The system wants the first column to be a key of sorts, and it’s required. But I can’t find any documentation on what kind of data should be in that column, or its intended purpose.

I have several columns imported:

COMPANY NAME (text field)
STATUS (a select menu)
ASSIGNED TO (people)
CONTACT NAME (text)
TELEPHONE (text)
EMAIL (text)
WEBSITE (text)
LAST CALLED DATE (date)
FOLLOW UP DATE (date)
NOTES (text)

Should one of these be that first column?

2

When importing from excel, it’s asking you to designate which column of your excel should be in the first column of the monday board (Item name). My company uses several boards so this is different depending on the board. - for our data hub - this column is the Name of the facility - If your “company name” in your excel is a list of companies then you would choose that as your first column.

3

Awesome, thanks for the explanation!

Now here’s the trick question:

Once the table already exists, how do I remove the current first column and make another column the first column?

4

Hey Jason, I’m fairly new here also. But, I’m pretty sure you can’t. I had a similar experience when I first started - and what I ended up doing was re-uploading the excel data.

5

Thanks, Christina :slight_smile: I just did the same thing: export to Excel, move the columns around where I needed them, delete the original, and re-import the new.

There really should be an easier way…

6

Hello @GoNC !

Happy that you figured out how to upload your data. I would like to recommend separating your Companies and contacts in different boards, essentially creating a basic CRM.

Currently you may make do with the structure that you have, but it is considered a business and monday best practice to separate these two.

If you have any questions let me know!

Best,
Giannis, Implementation Consultant at thespelas.com

7

This is one of those situations where I really need some dumbed-down documentation.

My business sells ads, and I set up Monday.com for my salesman. He and I both are adding new leads, and it’s up to him to make notes and change the status. Sometimes we have a contact name, sometimes we don’t.

The logical place to put this information was in CRM, under Leads. But that required us to have a Contact Name; when I tried to import a spreadsheet without a contact name, it just ignored the row.

Support said to add them to Work Management instead, but I recently discovered a limit on the number of items there which has become a pretty big obstacle.

What would you suggest to organize this better?

8

Sounds to me that currently your main problem is the item limit limitation. I would suggest moving the leads to another board once they have a certain status, for example failed leads to the failed leads board and finished leads to the finished leads board.

You would still be able to view everything centrally by connecting these boards to a dashboard and using a table widget.

For the importation part for leads with no contact name, I think that was answered @Jordancopper :slight_smile: