How to Import CSV Files to monday.com (Without Losing Your Data)
Hey monday.com friends 👋
I'm going to walk you through CSV imports in monday.com — what works, what breaks, and how to avoid the disasters I've seen (and caused) over the years.
If you've ever uploaded a CSV and watched your dates turn into gibberish, your special characters vanish, or your carefully formatted data land in completely wrong columns — you're not alone. I spent 15 years in operations, and CSV imports were responsible for more late nights than I'd like to admit.
The Native Import: What You're Actually Working With
monday.com's built-in CSV import supports two paths: creating a new board from a file, or importing items into an existing board. The updated import experience added an improved column matching UI — but the core limitations are significant.
Here's what most people don't realize until they're mid-import: only 7 of monday.com's 30+ column types are supported for import mapping. You can map Text, Numbers, Date, Email, Dropdown, Timeline, and Phone. That's it.
Here's how monday.com's native import compares to what's possible with TaskLoops:
| Feature | monday.com | TaskLoops |
|---|---|---|
| Row limit | 8,000 | 10,000 |
| File size limit | 10 MB | 50 MB |
| Column types supported | 7 of 30+ | All |
| Update existing items | ❌ | ✓ |
| Subitem import | ❌ | ✓ |
| Rollback window | ~1 minute | 24-48 hours |
Status columns? Partial support at best. People, Files, Links, Connect Boards, Tags, Checkbox, Rating, Country, Formula? None of these can be directly mapped during import. Unmatched columns default to Text, which means you're doing manual conversion afterward.
Other limits you'll hit:
8,000-row cap and 10MB file size limit — enterprise users with large datasets have to split files into multiple batches (for reference, TaskLoops supports 10,000 rows and 50MB)
Only the first tab of multi-tab Excel files is processed
No update mode — each import creates new rows. There's no native "update existing items via CSV" for the general Work Management product.
Where It Really Falls Apart
Dates and times. If your CSV has timestamps like "2024-03-15 09:30 AM", monday.com will often strip the time entirely. You'll get the date, but the 9:30 AM? Gone.
Encoding issues. Got customer names with accents? Product descriptions in other languages? Users report persistent issues with non-Latin characters displaying as garbled text, and upload failures on boards exceeding 1,500 items. monday.com expects UTF-8 encoding — there's no automatic detection or conversion.
Timeline columns. You can't directly import into a Timeline column in a way that works reliably. monday.com exports timelines as two separate columns (start date, end date), but importing them back is a multi-step process involving Date columns and automations.
Status and dropdown values. If your CSV says "In Progress" but your board's status column uses "In-Progress" (with a hyphen), the import fails silently. The cell just stays empty. No error message, no warning.
Subitems. Here's the big one: monday.com explicitly states that subitems from Excel are imported as regular items, requiring manual conversion afterward. Multiple community threads spanning 2020–2025 with thousands of views have requested this feature. It's still not there.
No rollback. The general undo button has a 1-minute timeout and doesn't cover column value changes from imports. If something goes wrong at row 847, you're manually fixing things.
The Workarounds
Over the years, I've developed a checklist for cleaner imports:
1. Clean your data first. Open the CSV in a spreadsheet app. Check for trailing spaces, inconsistent capitalization, and special characters. The 10 minutes you spend here saves hours later.
2. Match your column values exactly. Export your board first. Look at exactly how status labels, dropdown options, and people names appear. Your CSV needs to match character-for-character.
3. Save as UTF-8. When you export from Excel, choose "CSV UTF-8" specifically. This preserves special characters and non-English text.
4. Test with 5 rows first. Never import your full dataset on the first try. Import a small sample, verify everything landed correctly, then do the rest.
5. Have a rollback plan. Before any import, duplicate the board or export a backup. Because that 1-minute undo window isn't going to save you.
When Workarounds Aren't Enough
Look, I'm not going to pretend manual workarounds solve everything. If you're importing weekly from external systems, dealing with complex data types, or managing subitems and hierarchies — the native import will fight you.
That's actually why I built TaskLoops. After years of wrestling with these exact problems, I wanted something that handled the edge cases automatically: encoding detection, timeline column combining, fuzzy matching for people columns, subitem hierarchy preservation, and a real rollback window (24-48 hours, not 60 seconds). TaskLoops also supports larger files—10,000 rows and 50MB vs. monday.com's 8,000 rows and 10MB cap.
But whether you use a third-party tool or stick with the native import, the principles are the same: clean data in, verified mapping, always have a rollback plan.
The Real Lesson
The scariest thing about CSV imports isn't the technical complexity. It's that failures are often silent. Your data looks fine until someone notices three weeks later that half the dates are wrong.
Build verification into your process. Spot-check after every import. And if you're doing this regularly, automate the checks — or find a tool that does it for you.
What's your worst CSV import horror story? I'd love to hear it.
- Nick
