Using Mirrors In Monday.com

Monday.com has a powerful feature called mirrors. So, what exactly are they and how can the be used? We’re going to cover the basics of mirrors and different ways you can use them in your Monday.com boards to achieve workflow efficiency. We’ll use a quick example to demonstrate the ways mirrors can be powerful to truly customise the ways you work.

What is a mirror in Monday.com?

Monday.com has a powerful feature called mirrors. So, what exactly are they and how can the be used? We’re going to cover the basics of mirrors and different ways you can use them in your Monday.com boards to achieve workflow efficiency. We’ll use a quick example to demonstrate the ways mirrors can be powerful to truly customise the ways you work.

When would I want to use a mirror column in Monday.com?

There are countless examples of why you would want to display data from one board in another. One of the huge benefits, no matter how you implement it is to achieve segmentation of data. If you have a core set of information that is used across multiple workflows or multiple boards you can use mirroring to ensure a single change only ever has to happen in one location. It helps maintain data integrity, consistency and the ability to scale. Here are some examples when you could use a mirror:

  1. Display & using dynamic rates in a quote board (we’ll show you how below)
  2. Attaching contact information to a business account
  3. Showing data from a form submission in an operational workflow
  4. Displaying numbers from different boards for a formula or total

What is the connected boards column?

The connected boards column is the starting point to allow you to start mirroring data between boards. You can establish a connection between one or multiple boards using this column in Monday.com. Once connected you can take columns from board A and show them in board B.

What is the 2 way connection between boards?

A two way connection means simply that you can mirror data both ways and once you connect board A to board B, board B also connects the other way to board A. You can then take and display data from each in the other board.

An example of how to use mirrors in Monday.com

Step 1: First we create a board called “Rates”. We’ve got a status column called Rate Type to identify the type of rate it is. This could be used for matching across boards in automations.
Step 2: Next we create a board called “Quote” – this one would be perfect for a template, because we’d likely use it over and over again
Step 3: Start to populate the rates board with details including the rate type and amount
Step 4: Let’s connect our boards. In this instance we want to display rate data in the quote board, but we don’t need data from the quote to show in our rates board so we use a one way connection
Step 5: Now we start to populate our quote board with columns. This is where we start to think about what we can mirror in from our rates board. A rate amount is perfect so we can start to build out how we can auto populate this quote board with the relevant columns including mirrors.
Step 6: To summarise we’ve taken mirrored data (the hourly rate) from our rates board and applied it across one or multiple items in our quote board to build a truly dynamic process. One location to update our rate data that will affect connected quote boards.
Step 7: It is possible to automate the matching of these with columns in each board removing a manual step from the process. Now with the click of a button we can bring in the rate we want, populate the hours, set any discounts and watch our quote start to build itself.
Mirrors are powerful. With this quick example so you can see how connecting boards allows us to really extend the data we’re using in any single board and create a more robust workflow that we can scale. This is a basic example of how mirrors are used, but hopefully it’s unlocked the potential of how Monday.com can be used in your organisation. Planning and testing is always an important part of learning something new. If you’re only beginning to discover mirrors or trying take them to the next level you should start to apply new techniques related to mirrors in basic ways only and then start to try and build your application with more advanced workflows. Mirrors can become confusing for some so start simple and build from there.

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