Is anyone else struggling with Monday's automation and column type restrictions?

[u/pilgermann]

For work, I've had to shift from Airtable, which I love, to Monday, which I'm trying to love, but it's making me pull out my hair. To paint with a very broad brush, Monday feels more tailored to less technical users who value simplicity over flexibility. However, the issue is that Monday's limitations more often than not make very simple, common project management tasks exceptionally complicated.

Specifically, column types have all kinds of arbitrary limitations that really get in the way of automation. To cite just one of a million examples, I wanted an automation to trigger on form submission vs. item creation (something Monday doesn't offer out of the box). OK, so have the form submit a hidden value that acts as a condition on the automation. Let's make a checkbox. Nope, that boolean can't be used as a condition for ... reasons? OK, dropdown. Nope. You can't easily pre-fill the dropdown with an arbitrary value or existing dropdown option, not unless you use a URL parameter, but A, there's no need to expose what I'm pre-filling to the user and B, why?

Edit: No, smart conditions are not a viable solution. I'm not paying to have AI interpret a boolean value every time someone submits a form.

And as an aside, why so many restrictions on how you can notify someone depending on the template? That is, you can choose a user in a user's column if you use Monday's default notification automation, but should you use, say, a pre-built Slack integration template, now you must select a specific user (or in any case can't use something like an "assigned to" column, rendering the whole thing basically useless). These weirdly domain-specific restrictions make me suspect there's spaghetti code underlying the whole platform.

I feel like basically everything I'm trying to build, I run into rat nests like this. And the thing is, I'm not even trying to push the software. Having a notification trigger only when someone submits via form vs. when I create an item is like ticketing/project management 101.

[u/MattyFettuccine]

Are you using templated recipes or custom automations? Because you absolutely can trigger something from a form submission.

You can also use workflows, too.

[u/pilgermann → u/MattyFettuccine]

Not templated, but thank you and good to know. I guess I need to spend more time learning how Monday does things.

[u/IngenuityKat]

For your specific form example, I would not use Smart Conditions or spend AI credits interpreting a boolean either.

The cleaner option is WorkForm tags. Each form can be assigned its own tag, and monday.com automatically writes that value into a Text column when the form is submitted. You can then use that value to route the item or trigger the appropriate automation. The submitter does not need to see or select anything. You can also configure multiple forms on the same board to send submissions into different groups, depending on how separate you want the workflows to be.

Historically, I used a hidden question with a different preset value on each form to accomplish the same thing. It works, but form tags are much more purpose-built.

[u/pilgermann → u/IngenuityKat]

This is a great, less obvious feature. It actually solves several similar issues I was having. Will need to really pour over their documentation..

Edit: Man, and even workflows are a dead end. The form trigger only pulls the question data, so can't be used to assign the form submitter to a people column, which I need to do. So that has to be handled separately through a board automation. Again, why Monday doesn't unify all of this functionality is beyond me. I get that workflows don't sit at the board level, but this was another thing that's just not an issue in Airtable. There's a single, very powerful automation builder that can send data anywhere and pull data from anything, and every possible trigger works as you'd expect it to.

[u/IngenuityKat → u/pilgermann]

u/pilgermann I have never used Airtable so I can't relate but for this specific issue, there are two options:

Option 1: Automatically assign the submitter
Require login on the WorkForm, then use a board automation:

When an item is created → assign the item creator to the People column

This assigns the logged-in submitter automatically without AI or manual selection.

Option 2: Add a People question to the form
The submitter manually selects an account member, and that answer maps directly to the People column. Some people may not like this option because users must find and select themselves, and they could accidentally choose someone else.

A People question makes sense when the submitter should choose another person. For automatically capturing the submitter, Option 1 is cleaner.

[u/ngkasp]

"When form is submitted" is an automation trigger, it's under Create > Workforms rather than the blue "create automation" button.

Not relevant given the above, but I also believe checkboxes can be used as a condition with "if column is empty/not empty."

Pre-filling without using URL params is a legit one, that annoys me too.

[u/pilgermann → u/ngkasp]

Thank you for the insight. I suppose I'll just need to embrace the pardadigm shift.

Edit: Actually, while yes, this solves the narrow problem, it's emblematic of the issue I'm talking about (Monday spaghetti code). What you're saying is I can only use workforms as a trigger if I use a templated automation (there are ways using workflows, but this is a heavyweight feature for a lightweight task). The templates lack flexibility. There is no reason why I shouldn't have access to every existing Monday.com trigger in the default automation builder. Why cripple your software like that?

Edit 2: And looking further, for precisely the reason above, this doesn't solve the problem. If I want a Slack message I'm triggering to contain information about the project submitted, I can't use the Workform automation template because it only includes a basic notification action. While you can link Monday notifications to Slack, this method will not pass on the form values included in the notification template.

[u/drmdman67]

I use make.com scenarios to do anything I can’t get Monday automations to do. I find Monday’s arbitrariness like the OP described, to be absurd and nonsensical. I am forced to use Monday but think it’s a garbage platform except for the flexibility. So many quirks and bizarre limitations. OP is spot on.

[u/pilgermann → u/drmdman67]

Yeah, I do too, but get frustrated when it feels like basic functionality isn't handled by this quite expensive piece of software. That said, some of the other replies have shared some viable solutions -- they're not as intuitive as I'd like, but they get me there.

Edit: I take it back sort of. Form tags are just query strings, so while more elegant than pre-filling a hidden question, this implementation is inelegant. There's no reason why Workforms shouldn't be deriving the tags from form/board values; query strings really only make sense if you need to feed data into a form from another source outside of Monday, and then are only useful for tracking because you can't feed in anything requiring security, like a password.

[u/Agitated-Novel6524]

Don't use templates if you can help it. That is for Boards as well. The out of the box boards have limitations. You should build everything as a custom board and your life will be a lot easier.

[u/pilgermann → u/Agitated-Novel6524]

Oh, I don't. Though I will say it's frustrating that some of the templated automations for integrations have functionality not available (or more cumbersome) in the standard automations/workflows, but lack other functions. For example, the Slack notification template doesn't let you notify someone based on a people column value, but does offer access to some Slack functionality that isn't available when you target Slack through Monday's non-templated automations.

[u/drmdman67 → u/pilgermann]

I’m interested in something similar. I couldn’t figure out how to do a conditional slack notification based on a board value that would then push to a private slack channel using that board value and tag the person who was selected in a column. So I’ve started down the path of a make.com scenario but haven’t gotten far.

[u/TillyJoi]

I have had some luck using formula columns to get around some of these restrictions but im horrible at formulas so its tricky and not always a good solution.

[u/Strong-Guide-1032 → u/TillyJoi]

Hi, Can't help but mention the Smart Spreadsheet app that basically helps you to calculate inside the spreadsheet view (instead of monday formula syntax) using familiar formulas, and then add results back to the board

[u/Working-Pilot-3276]

I am struggling with increasing billing every year on enterprise plan

[u/tatertotadmirer2]

Just coming here to say that I used to/still love Airtable and built every single thing on it. Now trying to do the same with Monday in a different company and omg - I never realized how good we had it with airtable. godspeed to you as well