monday.com Tutorial for Beginners: Complete Guide to Get Started in 2024

If you're brand new to monday.com, then this tutorial is for you. I'm going to show you everything that you need to

know to get started. So, let's jump in. Hi, my name is Tara and I'm a certified monday.com partner and the founder of

Simple Day. My goal is to help you build powerful yet simple workflows with monday.com. If you need help with a

custom implementation, my contact details are in the description below. Let's jump into today's [music] tutorial

and make Monday the best part of your week. When you first sign up for a monday.com

plan, there's two things that you need to choose. The first thing that you need to choose is which plan you want to be

on. There's different plans with different features. In all honesty, if you're serious about using monday.com to

manage your business, I would not consider any plans below the pro or enterprise version. you simply need them

because of all the features, the capabilities, and the capacity that those plans have. So, this video is

going to focus on the features for the Pro and the Enterprise plan. The second thing that you need to choose is which

product within Monday are you going to be using. In this video, I'm going to focus on work management. Work

management is where you manage your tasks and your projects. I do want to let you know that Monday has a number of

other products that you can also choose from. They have a CRM. A CRM is used to manage your customers, all of your

incoming leads, potential customers, and your current customers. They also have something called Monday service, and

that's a ticketing service where you can manage any kinds of tickets that come into your company. And finally, they

have something called Monday Dev. And that's where development teams can manage their sprints and their

development activity in monday.com. Now, all of these products work together seamlessly. So, you can start with one

and then add on other products and just connect them. However, for this beginner's tutorial, we're going to

start with work management. Before we get started with work management, I just want to let you know that this channel,

Mastering Monday, is all about Monday. So, after you have watched this video and are learning how to use Monday and

really how to apply it to your business, I encourage you to subscribe and watch our videos so you can learn about all

the amazing features that this platform has to offer. And now, let's jump in to work management.

We're going to start off talking about the structure of monday.com. So, first, just to remind you, I'm in the work

management product. And you can see up here that it's telling me I'm in the work management product. If I want to

change products, just so you know, I can click on these nine dots and you can see that my products will open up over here.

Now I am in a workspace within the product of work management. If I click over here, you can see that I have tons

and tons of different workspaces. But a workspace is kind of like your biggest folder or the largest way to divide

information within each product. So sometimes different companies have different teams or different departments

within different workspaces. Sometimes what I do is when I have completed boards, I put them to a different

workspace. We have finance another workspace. I have my demo boards in a different workspace. But workspaces is

simply a folder and a way to divide the information between your different boards that you're using. Now, as you

can see here, it's pretty empty because we're just getting started. So, first thing that you should note is I can

change the name. I can change the icon. And I can even add a background image. When you first get started with Monday,

they actually do load templates on for you. So, you can start there, or you can start here. And you'll see that I have

the option to either add a new board or start with a template. We're not going to jump into templates right now. But

you can see here that if I click on start with a template, I'm going to go to the Monday template center. And there

there are tons and tons of templates that I can use to get started. But let's jump back to the structure for now. So

here I have my workspace like I said and the next thing that we would add is a board. Now I'm going to add a simple

board in a minute. And this is really the basis of monday.com. Everything's in boards. As I start adding everything,

because there's actually more boards are like the basis, but then there's more. Like there's dashboards and there's

forms and there's docs that we're going to get to all of that. As I start adding all that in, you're going to see that

they're going to show up on my left hand side. This is going to be like a table of contents of what's exactly in my

workspace. So let's start by adding a board. And I need to add a name to it. And here you see that I have the option

of three kinds of boards. A main board is visible to anyone in my company. Anyone who has a seat that I'm paying

for or a viewer, they can see a main board. A private board is for working privately only with people that you want

to share this board and they're only people within your team. A sharable board means that I can share this board

with outside people. So guests can join my Monday account and I give them access to specific boards. So the first thing

you need to do is decide what kind of board you want. And you can always change this later. And then I need to

decide what's the name of the first column within my board. So here I'm going to click tasks. I'm going to hit

create board. So like I said, boards are kind of like the basic building block within monday.com. And you can see here

that I have a basic board that was built. Now, let's talk about the structure of this board. Within this

board, you can see I have two groups. Okay, I'm going to just change this, let's say, to open tasks, and this one

is going to be completed tasks. So, you can see how easy it is to easily change the name of the group. I can also change

the color. I always like completed to be green and open is going to be pink just to make it stand out. Now, you can see

that my board showed up on the side. Remember we spoke about this table of contents. Now what I can also do is I

can actually add a folder. So I'm going to add a folder here. And for now I'll just call it tasks. I personally like to

always change the color because I think it's just easier to see. So here I can have a folder with a board in it. Now I

can continue to add folders to help organize this table of contents of everything that's here. Before we jump

into the task board that we're going to set up as an example, I just want to show you a few more options about what

you have when I click this plus button. If you're on the enterprise plan, there's something called project

portfolio and capacity manager. I'm going to get to that in the next section of this video. So, I'm going to skip

that for right now. We have a board, which is what we created. And you can see here that I can start with a new

board or a template. Monday also has something called Monday docs. I can also create a dashboard. You have Monday

vibes, a vibe app, which is basically apps that you can create using everyday language and AI creates a custom app for

you. I have a form. I have a workflow. A workflow is kind of like automations, which again we're going to get to in a

few minutes in this video, but it's a little more sophisticated. And when we go into automations, I'll also show you

workflows. A folder I just showed you. And here you can see some other information like my installed apps. I

can import data or I have my template center. But essentially again I'm working in a workspace within the Monday

work management product and I'm working on a board. The board is divided into two groups here. Open tasks and

completed tasks. Now every line item over here is called an item. So let's just say I want to create a task of

write a monthly report. Okay. So I've added a line item to this board. Sometimes this is called a parent item

or a line item. Now underline items or items, you also have sub items. So you can see when I click that down carrot, I

also have a sub item. So here I'll just write for my new client. And then let's just make this one for

client SD. Okay. So here you could see that I've had two sub items that I've created under this task. write a report.

So that's how we work like going down vertically within the board. You have groups, you have items, and then you

have sub items. Now, let's work horizontally. The first column is the most important column. There's more

limitations on the first column. This is usually called the name. Just so you know, if you want to change this, like

right now it's called task. This is something that people just never know how to do. So I'm just going to quickly

show you. If I click on settings, you can see here that all of these options pop up and I can click change

item terminology. So remember, it's called tasks. If I want, I can change it and I can customize it. The next few

columns that we're going to talk about are the most critical columns that I see people use all the time. However,

there's tons and tons of columns and I'm going to show you how you can access them. The first column that we have here

is a person column and this is where you would assign a person to a task. You can add more than one person to a person

column if you want or sometimes I recommend having two different columns for different people that have different

roles, but a person column is really important because it tells you who's responsible for that task. Who's the

person that's actually doing that task? The next column that we hear here have is a status column. This is honestly one

of my favorite columns because it's so colorful and for me I actually see colors visually before I read text. So,

I can simply look at a board and be like, "Oh, all of these tasks are green, it means they're done. All of them are

red, it means it was not started." So, here you have a status column. And it's important to note that you can only have

up to 40 status labels. And if I click edit label, I can add a new label. And you can see all the different color

options that I have. But I basically use these to create some type of way to qualify that item. In

this case, we're talking about the status, like what needs to be done or what the status of that task is. I've

used status labels for other things like type. So, for example, if you're a marketing agency and you have different

types of content that you're working on. So, I've used a status column to say like, okay, these are the different

types. Or maybe just in your company, different people are working on different tasks. So, you want to

categorize them by type. So you can have, let's say, admin, HR, marketing, whatever it is, and you can use the

status column. I do recommend thinking about the colors that if you have two status columns right next to each other,

then maybe you change the colors a little bit. Now, this is something that's new within Monday is that you

also have AI built into these status columns that you can automatically assign these labels. So maybe you have

certain conditions that would require you to assign it in a certain way. And you'll see if I click on the AI, I can

automatically assign it. I can add the instructions about how I want to assign those labels. Another reason why I like

the status column a lot is because you could do a lot of automations off the status column. It's just really easy.

Like you can say when status changes to this specific status, then do this. So really I try and use the status column

as much as I can to help my workflows and so someone can easily see where everything is holding. The next column

that we have here is a date column. You simply click on it. You can click on today. You can find your date. You can

even type. So like I can say January 5th and it'll automatically enter a date. You also can add time to this. For

anyone just getting started with monday.com, I highly, highly recommend that you always use a date column

because if you don't, how do you know what you need to do every day? You need a date column to tell you what task is

due. Now, there's a couple more, actually a lot more columns. When I click on this button, you can see that I

have the few of the most popular columns. So, timeline is similar to a date column. A numbers column is simply

a number. I've used this for things like budget or let's say expected time on a specific task. And you can also add a

summary. So let's say we're doing budget. So I can add a dollar amount, you know, and I could just say, you

know, budget. And then if I would just put in $10, you can see that it will add my dollar amounts.

A few of the other really popular columns here are tags, a text column, a dropdown. A drop down is important

because it's very similar to a status. However, you can have tons and tons of drop downs. Like you can have 500 drop

downs while you can only have 40 statuses. You can actually also auto assign these labels using AI. And you

can also actually have AI help you create this column. So, I recommend like let's say you have a lot of clients and

you want to be able to track the clients for the task and you have over 40, you can use the drop-down column. I'll just

give you one example. Let's just write marketing here. So, you can see that I've added marketing and I'll add just

another department. So, I can also assign two things at once. In this column, I can only assign one, but in a

drop-down, I can assign two. Now, back to our columns. a formula column. You literally can calculate almost anything

with this formula column. Again, there is this AI feature built into this column. So here I can have my formula

and you can see like just help me write the formula. So I can take for example, let's say in this board I'm tracking

actual time spent on a task versus expected time. I can calculate the difference. Or if I have actual budget

verse expected budget, I can calculate the difference. Now, if you click on this plus button,

you can click on more columns. And we're going to open the column center here. And you can see that there are tons and

tons of different columns that are available. The first column that I want to point out, which is a really critical

column, is called a connected board column. What a connected board column does is it connects one board to another

board. I'm going to put a link in this video above for you to understand exactly how these connected board

columns work because it's a little bit more complicated than I want to touch on in this video, but essentially what

you're doing is you're connecting information from one board to another. And you can decide where you want to see

the information. So let's just say I have a task board and I have a project board, like a board of all of my

projects and then a board of the tasks. I can connect those boards and see the information on both of them. So on the

task board, I can see which project this is associated with. And on the project board, I can see all the tasks for this

project. Again, this is something that's critical in how Monday works. I definitely recommend that you watch this

video if this is something that you need for your setup. Now, back to some of the columns. Another one that I really want

to point out is Monday has all these AI columns. And this is something that's relatively new within Monday, but you

can see, you can prioritize, assign people, sentiment detection, like you can read, update, and understand what

someone said. You can generate docs, extract information, extract information from a file. There's tons and tons of

different columns that Monday has. I am going to add another link to this video where you can learn about all the

different columns and what they actually do. So, just to go back to where we were holding big picture, we have workspaces,

we have boards, which is kind of our table of contents on the side. Within boards, we have groups and we have

items. And then you can add a lot of different columns. Now, let's look at the boards to see what else we have on

this board. If you look over here, you can see I can simply add a new task or I can add a new group or I can import

information from a lot of different places. I have an easy search option here. So, I can search my whole board. I

can also filter. So if I click on this person, I can filter by me. And remember, there was only one task

assigned to me. So you can see exactly what I was assigned to very easily. This filtering option, the next one that

we're going to cover is something that I think is critical within Monday. Here you can see this filter is a quick

filter. So I can quickly click on whatever I want. Maybe I just want to see the open tasks. And you see I only

see the open tasks that are here. I'm going to clear it. Now, if I click on this dropdown, I have a advanced filter.

And here I can get a lot more sophisticated about what kind of information I want to see. So maybe I

want to see where group is the top group and the person is me dynamic. Me dynamic, by the way, means when I sign

in, I see my information and if someone else signs in, they see their information. So now I'm a little more

complex about what I want to see. And then maybe I want to add a new filter where the date is today. I probably

don't have anything show up because I didn't assign anything. But what I can do is I can use these filters to see the

exact information that I want to see. Now if this is something that you're going to be using every single day, you

can save this as a view. So if I click save as view, you're going to see that over here it created a new view. Okay.

Now, I'm going to just rename this. I'm going to call this my daily view. Okay. Now, let's go back to our main

table where we see everything. And I'm going to change this to be today. Okay. So, here I see everything. And if I go

to my daily view, I only see what's in that filter. So again, for teams that have these filters that they need to use

on a daily basis or weekly basis, you can create these different views up top and then you can look at them. Some

other options down here is we have a sorting feature, a hide feature. Let's say I want to hide certain columns. I

only want to see these three columns. I can easily hide them. The next feature, this is one of my favorite features of

Monday. It's called group by. So group by means that we change the groups of how the information is grouped on this

board. So here you can see I have open tasks verse uh closed tasks. And if I change my group by I can group let's say

by status and here you can see that now my group is working on it and done and everything that doesn't have a status.

If I would add let's say this is not started and another one to let's do one more to working on it.

You can see over here that my groups are now different for how I'm categorizing the information. I didn't lose anything,

but I'm just grouping them in another way. A few other things that you can see is I can pin columns, change the height,

have conditional coloring on the coloring of the items or the columns, and I have a default item value. What

that means is when I create an item, it always has that specific value. So, for example, I can say here whenever an item

is created, always set it as not started. Now, let's jump into views. So, I already showed you this view and

there's a lot of other views that you can add. A table view looks like this, but you may want to have different

columns that you're hiding, different filters. You can also have charts, calendar, cambban. I definitely

recommend checking these out. And of course, you can have a dashboard. If I hit customize view here, you can see

that I'm going to have my dashboard. And one of the newer features of Monday is that I have an AI bot that wants me to

give it instructions to set up my dashboard. So, I will say, show me a chart of

my tasks and how many are in each status. Let's see what it does. So, I'm going to have it create a chart. Of

course, I can also do these manually. So, here you can see it's showing me that 50% of my tasks are working on it.

25% is done. 25% is not started. Dashboards are something that is an amazing feature of monday.com because

you really get to see your information in a different way so you can make data driven decisions. I'm going to put a

link in this video above so that way you can learn all about dashboards if you want to deep dive into dashboards. Just

to show you quickly, if I want to add more, I can add from this widget. And I have tons and tons of widgets in the

widget center. All about different widgets for dashboards. Now, I'm going to move up here. Another really new and

amazing feature of monday.com is called Sidekick. Sidekick is essentially AI that I have on every single item and on

a board level. So, here you can see this is also Sidekick if I have a specific question about that item. But here I

have sidekick for the whole board. So I'm just going to show you a really cool example and I'm going to say create a

drop-down column with all of the states in the US. Okay, so I'm actually using Sidekick to help me create my board with

a column. Okay, I'm having it add a drop-own column to my board with all the states cuz who wants to do that

manually? And you can see that it's working and it's actually building this. So, you can use Sidekick on the one hand

to help you build out your boards, but you also can use Sidekick to ask questions about your boards, like how

many tasks do I have that are open? How many tasks need to be completed today? Or let's say you're running an event and

you need to find a venue in New York City. So, you could say, "Sidekick, help me find an event." And it will help you

find that information. Let's just look at this dropdown that it added. So you can see here it added a dropown of US

states and all the states are there. Pretty cool I have to say. Now over here we have integrations and automations.

Integrations is when monday.com integrates with other tools. So for example, you can integrate with your

email provider. You can integrate with Zoom. You can integrate with Stripe or Mailchimp. There's tons and tons of

tools that you can integrate. I'm going to start with the automations. So if you click here, you can see that I'm in the

automation center. And what Monday has here is they have preset automations. Okay, for example, if I click on this

one, when an item is created, assign the creator as a person. Once I click on that, it will automatically have that

automation on my board. But I'm going to start from scratch because I want to teach you how automations work. The way

that automation works is you need to have a trigger. So your trigger is when something happens. So if I click on this

when something happens I'm going to use the example of the status changes to something. Okay. So when status changes

to something that's my trigger then I want to do something. Let's say move item to group. Okay. So my trigger is

when status changes and my action is move item to group. Now you can see these parts are grayed out and I need to

fill them in. So I'm going to click the status column. I'm going to click the status saying like when status changes

to done then move item to completed tasks. A pretty straightforward and easy automation. Now if I want to get a

little more complicated I can also add conditions. So I can say when status changes to done but only if let's say

the person is me then move item to completed tasks. Now let's check out this automation that we just created.

Automations are amazing because they save you so much time on repetitive tasks that you're constantly doing

within monday.com. So, I really recommend figuring out what you can automate, learning the different

automations, and then actually setting them up. Here, you'll see eventually I'll have a list of all of my

automations. And now, let's just do a test. Okay, so I'm going to mark this task as done. You can see I can mark it

as done and I'm the person on it. And let's see what happens. See, it automatically moved it to the group.

Now, if I mark this task where I am not the person because remember that was the condition. You're going to see that it's

not going to actually move the item. Now, let's continue with our board. You can see over here that I can have a

board discussion. I can have an ongoing discussion with people on this board. So, it's not necessarily something

that's item level, but it's about the board itself. Here you can see that I can invite different people to the

board. So I can choose, let's just say I want to add Siri. So I can add Siri to this board and I can set the different

level of access that she has to this board. If this was a sharable board, so then I will be able to also share it

with external people. Now let's click on these dots over here. And you can see that I have a lot of options for this

board. I can have the activity log where I see every single thing that has happened on this board,

the discussion I showed you. You can set notifications for this board. You can also set permission levels for this

board. I have the different settings like rename the board, add it to favorites, change the board type, which

we spoke about initially, create item via email, a lot of different options. Then I have some actions. I can create

it as a template. I can export it to Excel. I can duplicate this board and I can always archive and delete this

board. So within each board there's a lot of options up here, up here and on these three different dots. You know

this drop down from these three dots. But the point is that we're managing our work within a board within Monday. Now

let's talk about communication. I like to use the update section for communication. If you click here you can

see that I have all the columns. This is a specific view that I have. So, not everyone will see it like this, but I

like this side by side view. So, I have all my columns and then I have an update section. So, here I can write and I'm

going to tag someone. So, I'm going to say at Siri, what is the status of this task? Okay, I'm going to ask her a

question and I'm going to click update and she's going to get that notification seeing that I asked her a question. This

is the best way to communicate within Monday because everything is task level. Everything is associated with the

specific task that you're working on. So that way you don't have some information on a WhatsApp and some on a text and

some in an email. Everything is in one place. And when you want to look at this task and see the history of the task,

you can communicate here. I definitely recommend tagging someone, which is mentioning someone. That's what I did.

You can click this at button or you can just do the at@ and choose a person. You can see that you also have the option

for everyone on this board, everyone on this task. You have different options, but this is the best way to communicate

within monday.com. Now that you understand the basics of how a board works, I want to share with you some of

the other features that monday.com has. If I click on this plus button, so we have other options. We have a document

and here I can create a new document within monday.com. I have different options for privacy and this is kind of

like a Google doc or a word doc directly within Monday. You can see here I have the doc. There's tons that you can do

here. Again, a separate video but just so you know that this functionality exists. The next thing that I have is I

have a dashboard. So I can create a dashboard pulling information from my board that I just created. So if I don't

want to see the information directly on that board or I want to pull from a number of boards, I can create a

dashboard. It works the same way that I showed you in the first part of this video where I automatically add a widget

and it automatically pulls information and then you just need to go in and edit it. Again, if you're interested in

dashboard, check out the video that we linked. The next thing is Monday Vibe. I will

add a link in this video to Monday Vibe so you can see exactly what Monday Vibe could do. That's like a whole another

topic, not for beginners. But once you get comfortable for the tool, I definitely recommend checking out Monday

Vibe. You also can have forms on a board. So I can add a form as its own item. Or if I go back to my taskboard as

a view, I can add a form right here. And this is a form that's going to send information directly to this board. So

here you can see I have my basic board. You can edit it. I'm not going to go into that, but just so you know that you

have the option here. And the last thing that I want to show you is workflows. So here I have a workflow which is

basically a way to manage automations but in a more complex way. Automations are usually onetoone. When this happens,

do this. When this happens, do this. workflows have more complex options. You can say like do this but if this

condition meets this then do this or this or you can have the if then then this. So just as an example um I could

just do when column changes I need to choose the information I'm just going to change when status

changes right so when status changes then I can add and here you see that I have all my options an action an if

else. So I can say like if the status changes to task on hold then do this. If it changes to done then do this. I can

have multibranch conditions wait for an event and delay. I'm not going to do a deep dive into this but once you feel

comfortable with automations and understand what can be done I definitely recommend checking out workflows so that

way you can further build out a more complex workflow for your boards. So that way what you're actually doing

within Monday is really really powerful. Now for those of you that are using the enterprise version of monday.com, there

is a new feature called portfolio. So I'm going to jump into this feature right now. And this is a way to manage

projects. So if I click on the plus button, you can see here that I have these three options. I'm going to start

with a portfolio. I'm going to call it all clients because I'm going to use this as an example to manage all of my

clients. So, I'm going to create this portfolio. And it takes a minute to create it. Now, you can see here that I

have this portfolio. And you can see this little icon. And a portfolio is going to be basically a sum of a list of

boards. And then it has some really cool dashboards on top of it. Now, I can add projects. So, in this example, each of

my clients is going to be a project. So, I'm going to click add your first project. And I'm going to create one and

just do SD. And I'm gonna hit create project. And here you can see that I have the project

plans that's going to be created and a resource planner. I'm going to hit create project. And let's see what

happens. Now my item is being created over here. And I also created two new boards. So I

have what we call a low-level board. This is my actual project board where I manage this project. And I also have a

resource planner based on this board so I can manage different people's resources for different times. So I can

actually understand who has time to work on this project and who doesn't. If I head back to my portfolio board which

I've called all clients, you can see over here it automatically connects to the lower level board. So here's my

statuses. I can also check on the project health. So here I've marked it as on track. If I go back over here, you

can see I set it as on track. If I change it to at risk, you can go back here and see the at risk. The coolest

thing that I want to share with you about portfolios is that you have this snapshot view. And here I can see all of

my projects, how many are on track, at risk, and off track. I can also see information like what percentage of the

project is done, what's planned versus actual time, and who the project manager is. As I said, this is a newer feature

of monday.com, and I'm going to put a link in this video to another video that does a deep dive into this feature. But

if you're looking to manage large projects or multiple projects in one place, you can use this portfolio

feature to have a highlevel or portfolio board and then low-level boards for each project that you can manage. And then

you have dashboards to see everything in one place at a glance to understand how all of your projects are progressing.

We just took a deep dive into the basics of monday.com. But as I'm sure you realize, there are so many different

features that you can use within Monday. So feel free to subscribe to our channel where you can learn all about the

different releases of new features that are constantly being added to this platform. You can also see different use

cases that we've done and learn how you can customize this amazing platform to be perfect for your business. I look

forward to seeing you in the next video. Hit the like button if you enjoy this video and remember to subscribe to

receive tips and tricks on how to use monday.com. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.