Much of monday functionality is tied to groups. There is obvious utility in this construct. However, as other community members have pointed out in the past, there are times when the rigidity of the group implementation gets in the way. For example, it would sometimes be beneficial to be able to look at a board as though all items existed in a single “group”.
I believe that monday functionality would be greatly enhanced in this area by implementing two ideas:
Provide a view level option to ignore groups. Simply, this would treat the entire board as though it has only one group.
Provide “sort grouping”, “soft grouping”, “virtual groups”, or ???. From a user perspective, this could be as simple as allowing the user to specify a column to “group by” when defining a new sort. Once defined, the board would be displayed using “soft” groups in a fashion similar to the way the current groups work, i.e.: display format, summaries, ability to expand/collapse, etc. The group name could be something like: {field name}: value, e.g.: Priority: High.
The first of these ideas is relatively simple from both user and development perspectives.
The second, is a much bigger issue. I believe that adding the functionality as described above would provide SIGNIFICANT improvement to functionality and flexibility. This concept could be expanded greatly; But, you have to start somewhere.
I’m looking forward to seeing additional thoughts on this topic from the rest of the monday community.
I have shared a similar idea to your second point called “dynamic groups” - much like your suggestion, this would allow the user to dynamically customise how content is grouped. The main difference here is that you have tied the dynamic grouping to the sort functionality whereas I have tied it to the saved views functionality. I see benefits in either approach! Would love to see something like this.
It’s all connected. In my mind, sorts/filters are functionally a sub-function of views. From that perspective, I think we are basically in agreement. Your description is a bit more wholistic.
By the way, I think I like your “dynamic groups” moniker better.
This would be extremely helpful to me. We have a project for eight departments. We maintain an Issues Log where each department is identified as a group. Each department enters their issues into the log. The overall project manager wants to view all issues in one list. I’m new to monday, so if you know an alternate solution to provide this, please let me know. I’ve tried mirroring to a higher level board but there are drawbacks when users remove entries and I haven’t found a dashboard widget that meets this need. For now, I do it with Excel exports. Hope others will see the value of your ideas.
I’ve never heard any whispers that monday even might be considering this as an option. Sorting is much better now. Still, I personally think that the idea of “dynamic groups” would be helpful in so many ways.
@JCorrell Any new ways to temporarily suspend groupings (like the first idea you suggested here), so I can order all of my deals by a single column (like creation date)?
Not in base monday. There may be a Marketplace app that provides this; but, I don’t think so.
However, depending on the specifics of your situation there may be some workarounds that could help. Here are 3 in headline form:
Export the board to Excel
Duplicate the whole board. Then move everything to the same group.
Create a status column and set it to the group name. Move everything to the same group, do your thing then move them back to the original groups based on the status.
The third one could potentially be combined with automations and/or Integromat to provide a sort of ungroup/regroup function.
Still not the “bigger, badder more better” but maybe something.
Sadly this feature has gone away again. However the fact that grouping exists but isn’t flexible/adjustable is in my eyes a big design flaw. And the feature being withdrawn suggests, the obvious solution direction has not been chosen. Looking at any grouping within a data-table (e.g. the group by clause in SQL, the group by/subtotals option in excel or even the group by function in Outlook), the groups are always just data fields in the table that it is grouping. Now in Monday a board works like just one table, defined by the fact that all groups have the same columns across a board. Grouping not being dynamic however, suggests they wanted to allow multiple tables on one page but where caught in the middle sticking to one board = one table but at the same time wanting multiple tables so introducing a kind of table header to allow splitting but hardcoding it as if these where hardcoded headers.
I’d love to understand the actual design and thinking behind grouping both in the current situation and how it will be made dynamic…
How would I go about asking support to turn this on. I have built boards for a client on a separate account that uses it but when I copied the boards to the client account “Group by” is not activated for them and they would really like to use it.
Hi @sgriggs - I wish you luck kind sir. I have tried to have this added to multiple client accounts with no success. This is likely due to the solution being rearchitected.
That is exactly what happened. They are sorry for my inconvenience but no, they can’t enable it. Sadly, my client doesn’t seem 100% invested in Monday as a solution and now I get to let them know the demo I gave them of “Group by” is now unavailable to them.
Hey @sgriggs, that’s unfortunate. I got bit by this in the past, so now I always ensure not to include any alpha/beta features in demos as monday has a history of removing them.
I am glad to see that others are having the same issues with displaying gathered data that I am. (Sorry, but it is good to know that you are not alone!)
There are many uses for something like this. Information on any project is dynamic - being forced into utilizing permanent groups from the beginning seems a little backwards to me. Sure, I can start out with making it easy to see my tasks grouped by project stage, but there are times when I want to display them grouped by priority, or completion, or owner: these often cross pre-set “groups”. I love the “virtual groups” or whatever they choose to call it in the future, it would make reporting much easier.
For my use, the data captured and stored in monday is great for my use, but I’m sure I am not the only one who has to share the information with people that aren’t in monday, and will never utilize it. (Think C-Suite staff, executives, etc.) Creating reports for them is nice, but not dynamic. Project data, indeed, any data, should always be considered as dynamic. If we just wanted to send out stale information, I could track everything in spreadsheets. Many people I’m sure use monday and similar tools to store data that gets added to, updated, and built-upon over time.
Watching @JCorrell 's video only convinced me of two things: we either REALLY need this function or, I should just build out all my boards without any groups, and just use views and filters to achieve my goals. The groups may be “nice,” but they aren’t “useful.” I always side on functionality.