I created some new automations. Obviously, each automation occurs the next time the trigger happens. But is there any way to “run” the automation against items already in the board? For example, in Outlook, if I create a new rule, I can “run” that rule against emails already received (i.e. move them to a folder, etc). Can I do that same type of thing here? I can’t find a support answer that discusses this.
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Not that I’m aware of. I’ve looked for the same feature myself but to no avail.
As far as I know, you have to trigger each item individually e.g. existing Done items need to be re-set to another Status then back to Done for the automation to kick in.
I’d love to Monday to prompt me to run a new Automation on existing items on a board. Bonus would be all boards, account-wide.
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Hi @southeasternlaw and @JohnW! The recipes do not run retroactively on previously created items. Does that help clarify? Cheers!
@lauralev Yes, that’s my understanding. They need a trigger.
It would be a major step forward for automations if new automations could run against existing items when the automations are created.
As per the original post, when you create a new rule in Outlook, it asks if you want to run the new rule against existing items. Be great if Monday automations did the same when they are created.
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Agreed and noted! Will pass this along to our automations team for consideration! Appreciate your input and ideas 
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@southeasternlaw Maybe you can use integrations. With Integromat for example, you can solve that specific problem. You can program an automation using integromat and monday and run it considering older items.
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Have the automations been updated since this thread to apply to items retroactively?
Hi, @pwright - No, automations still only run going forward in time since you create them. However, if you want to catch up on old data, you can trigger mass automations by manually recreating whatever triggers it.
For example, let’s say you trigger an automation when Status changes to “In Process”. You can filter your board down to just the items marked as “In Process” and select all of them with the checkboxes on the left side of the item name. Then you can mass change the status to the default gray, and back again to “In Process”. The automation will kick off.
It’s a bit manual but since you are only doing it once to catch up, not a huge deal.
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Hi, did this ever come to be?
I’m also interested to know if this feature is still in the pipeline?
It would also be helpful to have a preview of the scheduled notification message or a diagram of the expected automation flow rather than waiting for the automation to kick in
Agree this would be incredibly useful.
I found an ok workaround for me to avoid the need to set everything up from the scratch. It is not ideal, but after adding the automation, I went into the items I wanted to apply the automation to and just made a small change which I then reverted. This way monday seemed to recognize it as new and applied the automation. E.g., I wanted to apply an automation that would show the status of an item as complete if all subitems were complete. To apply this to an item which already marked all subitems as complete, I just changed one subitem to a different status briefly before setting it to complete again. As soon as I did that, the item status changed to complete, thanks to the automation.
+1 Bringing this back. Seems like a good feature to consider. I would have used it several times in my short time using monday.
+1 here, this is a needed feature
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Hey @justmyhead & @Leigh_73 and everyone else,
Would you mind sharing a few examples of how you would utilize it? In which cases? What’s stopping you right now?
As an example, it’s a bit of additional work but you can create any logic you want based on “when status change”, add another status column to the board, make the change for all items (using batch actions) get the automation working, delete the column and that’s it.
Has this been fixed? I need a way to manually run automations.