One of the greatest strengths of monday.com is its accessibility. Navigating the interface is quite simple, and a useful pop-up offers tutorials on how to find your way on first use. Typically, the trial period is plenty of time to accommodate yourself with the ins-and-outs of the platform.

However, even some of the most seasoned users of monday.com can miss some useful features. And there’s four on every monday.com board that are hidden in plain sight that offer some great benefits.

All four tools offer unique purposes for your monday.com workflow, with many related to automation functionality. Here, we’ll show you how to find them, and how they can help you.

Where to find the hidden tools

All four of these features can be configured in the same place on every board. 

At the top, you will see the toolbar where you can do a number of things to your board, such as sort all of the items or filter out certain information. Next to the Hide icon, you will see three horizontal dots. Behind this is where you can find the goodies.

Unlike the rest of the toolbar, these tools are not labeled, but hovering your mouse over each one will show you what they are.

The four tools at your disposal are Pin Columns, Item Height, Conditional Colouring, and Item Default Values.

1. Pin Columns

The Pin Columns tool will act as a pin for any columns on your board that you want to remain in view at all times. Like the item name column, which stays where it is when you scroll along your board, adding a column to the pinned columns settings will lock it into view when you move along your board.

This can be handy for when you’re looking to keep the most important information in front of you. For example, if you’re looking through your leads in a CRM, having certain information in view at all times helps to keep focus on the important aspects of the deal. 

Details such as the deal value, the stage that the lead is currently at, and who is dealing with the sales enquiry can help to know who to prioritise. The pin columns tool will lock it on the page for you.

You can also save these pins to a view, always ready for your day’s work. Simply hit “Save to this view” to create one. 

Also note that the board can only pin to the left, so you may need to move columns that you want to pin to the left of the board if you want to pin one ahead of another to its left.

2. Item Height

One piece of functionality that traditional spreadsheets have is the ability to customise the height of rows. Individually or all together, you can change the heights as you please.

While it isn’t quite as flexible as that, the Item Height option in monday.com does offer your items some breathing room. This offers the benefit of a more accessible look to your boards. If you find reading the board items difficult at the standard height, this presents a solution that will make navigating your boards much easier.

The option allows you to make the spacing either double or triple (shown above) the standard height of an item, and it will save on the board automatically. If you switch boards and then come back, the spacing should remain. However, you will need to make the change to every board that you want this to show on all of your boards.

3. Conditional Colouring

The colourful interface of monday.com makes progressing through your tasks easy. However, it’s not always obvious which of your tasks should take priority without adding more labeled columns. 

This is where conditional colouring can fill the gap, and it is both automated and dynamic, with multiple colours capable of being stacked.

With conditional colouring, when you meet a certain condition, such as assigning a number column to be above or below a certain number, either the cell or row that it relates to the condition will change to a colour of your choice. For example, if you want to highlight all sales deals above £10,000 so you can tackle them as a priority, you can make the condition something similar to the below.

This automates the board to colour in all rows with Yellow when the Deal Value column is showing equal to or about £10,000 for that deal. Deals will then start to look like this on your board.

You can then add further conditional colours, all of which would stack on the conditions above it. This means that while you have the more valuable deals highlighted, you can alert those that also have an overdue meeting date. It would then either show that you need to book a new date, or are waiting on your next meeting. 

The condition would look like this:

With the board now highlighting both colouring conditions:

Like with pinned columns, you can then save these to a view, with it saving to the current view if you’re not using the Main Table.

4. Default Item Values

Finally is the Default Item Values option. This automates a value to be filled in every time a new item is added to a board. This is functionally the same as adding an automation recipe to your board that adds values, but is easier to implement if you’re not used to the way automations are set up in monday.com. 

When clicking the icon, it will show you a pop-up with all the columns on your board. Here, you can choose a column, and give it a value. This is useful for instances where you know that certain values will be consistent across the board, such as a minimum value to every deal or starting at the same stage. 

It also works for people, so if the same person needs to be assigned to every new item, you can simply choose the person from your system. 

From then on, any new values will automatically be assigned to it. 

And that is the four hidden tools for monday.com that we can think can help improve your workflow. We hope that these four options can help you to improve your workflow in monday.com.