Boardfeed

Import guide

Import an Excel file into a monday.com board

Boardfeed reads an .xlsx or .xlsm workbook you upload, imports one sheet of it into a monday.com board, and reports what every row did. Legacy .xls files are not read — re-save one as .xlsx first.

Before you plan around it: an uploaded workbook runs when you start it, never on a timer. The app puts it this way — “Uploaded files run manually: a file you uploaded cannot be read again later, so it cannot run on its own. To schedule, import from a URL, a Google Sheet or a connected app.” A sheet that has to refresh by itself belongs in Google Sheets, which Boardfeed can fetch again.

Last checked : the accepted extensions, the sheet rule, how cell values and formulas are read, the percent and currency rule (read off a workbook with those formats on it), and the schedule rule, all read off the code.

Doing it by hand, every time

  1. Re-export the workbook once the source team has edited it again.
  2. Upload it and map every column by hand, again.
  3. Reconcile the rows that arrived twice because the last import created rather than updated.
  4. Chase the cells that came through empty, and work out which formula had not been saved.
  5. Repeat for as long as the workbook stays in use.

How it works in Boardfeed, step by step

  1. Upload the workbook once, up to 100 MB. Boardfeed streams it rather than opening it whole, and refuses an archive that would inflate past 256 MB of XML — a workbook is read, never trusted.
  2. Choose the sheet by name or by position; the first sheet is the default. One import reads one sheet, so a workbook holding three tables is three imports.
  3. Map the header row to board columns. Boardfeed proposes a monday column per field and you change any of them — after saving, the mapping, the mode and the match column are fixed for the life of that import.
  4. Check the values: the check runs the import engine’s own rules over a sample of the sheet and lists each row it would refuse, by row number, field and reason.
  5. Save it and run it now. For an uploaded workbook the schedule control is fixed to manual; every run is listed in the history, and a run that left rows out e-mails you those rows as a CSV.

Field mapping notes for Excel

This is the part that decides whether an import works on the first try. Everything below is handled in the mapping step, before the first run.

  • Formulas come through as the result Excel last saved, not as the formula. A cell whose result was never cached — a workbook closed without recalculating — arrives empty, so save the file before you export it. Cells holding an error value arrive empty too.
  • Dates are converted from Excel’s serial numbers for you: a date with no time becomes 2026-09-03, a date with a time becomes a full ISO timestamp. Neither arrives as the raw serial number.
  • Percentages and currencies are numbers carrying a format, and that format is not read: a cell a spreadsheet renders as 15 % arrives as 0.15, and one it renders as £1,250.00 arrives as 1250. A date format is the one exception and is converted for you. Map these to a numbers column and format the column in monday.com.
  • Merged cells are ignored rather than resolved: the streaming reader skips the merge declaration outright, so only the cell that actually stores the value — the top-left of the range — arrives, and the rest of the range reads as empty. Unmerge a header block before importing, or that row comes through mostly blank.
  • Rich text keeps its text and loses its styling. A cell that is only a hyperlink comes through as the URL.

Excel import questions

Can an Excel import run on a schedule?

Not an uploaded one. The file cannot be read again after the upload, so Boardfeed refuses to save a schedule on it rather than let the job stop working silently in week two. Put the sheet in Google Sheets and the schedule is available: hourly, daily, weekly or a cron expression.

Which Excel formats are read?

.xlsx and .xlsm. Legacy .xls is not accepted — re-save it as .xlsx. A .csv export is read by the CSV path instead, and .tsv and .txt go the same way.

What happens if someone renames a column in the sheet?

Nothing is written into the wrong column: the mapping matches on the header name, not on position, so a renamed header simply stops matching and that field stops arriving. Be aware of the flip side — unless you marked the column required, which makes every row report the missing value, the run will succeed quietly with that field empty. A mapping cannot be edited after the import is saved, so re-mapping means creating the import again.

Can one workbook fill several boards?

Yes, as one import per board, each with its own mapping. The same is true of several sheets in one workbook: one import reads one sheet.

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