Why create the Advanced Formula Booster?

by | 2023-10-20

Since I started using monday.com a while back, I’ve been thrilled with many aspects of the platform, but keep being disappointed with the calculation possibilities, unfortunately limited to the formula column.

What’s wrong with the formula column

The formula column offers some calculation capabilities and it may satisfy a minority of users, but this feature is not up-to-par with the other features of the product, which are often fantastic.

Although monday boards are not spreadsheets, many users need the ability to create calculations between columns. Of course they can do this with the formula column, but the possibilities are very limited.

Formulas have to be a one-line instruction. So as soon as you want to create even a slightly elaborate calculation, you’re in for a rough time. Need a simple scenario like “if-then-else”? Be prepared to insert functions inside other functions (that’s called “nesting” functions) and more often than not, you end up forgetting a parenthesis or putting it in the wrong place.

At that point, don’t expect the formula column to provide any help. It just displays the “infamous” red icon” indicating the formula is wrong without providing any explanation as to what is incorrect.

The other big issue is that you cannot use formula columns in widgets, calendars, automation recipes, etc.

There had to be a better way

Earlier this year, I said to myself there had to be a better way. However I couldn’t figure out what this better way could be within the monday.com interface. So I started thinking about creating a formula editor outside of monday. Exponenciel has been the leading developer of add-ons for Act CRM since 2001, so I knew we could develop a product from scratch, no matter the efforts required.

Creating an application for monday.com is not a small task, especially if you want your app to run outside of that of monday.com. It requires a significant amount of work to understand how to interact with the monday.com API (the interface provided by monday for developers to communicate with their service). More work even to explore its possibilities and limitations. This is without mentioning the design of the app user interface.

We pulled it off!

Six months later, we pulled it off and are proud to announce the release of the Advanced Formula Booster, a radical new way to create formulas for monday.com.

  • The Advanced Formula Booster breaks free of the formula column. The app allows you to write the results of the formulas to any type of column which means you can use it in subsequent formulas and in any monday module.
  • Instead of being confined to a single-line environment, you may create formulas with up to 100 lines.
  • Formulas can write to many columns at once.
  • They can include variables.
  • They can be written with a simplified syntax without ever nesting any function if that’s what you prefer.
  • And, of course, we took the opportunity to add tens of new functions to make it easier to obtain what you want.

Coming up next: tutorials and other training materials

The possibilities of the product we created are almost limitless. We’ll demonstrate it in the coming months by releasing tutorials and other training materials. We already have a comprehensive documentation available at https://docs.mdboosters.com.

We will also further develop the capabilities of the product while listening to your feedback.

I hope you’ll be thrilled to try out the Advanced Formula Booster, the first product of our new endeavour at https://mdboosters.com. If you have any question, encounter any problem, do not hesitate to contact us.

 

NOTE : “md” in mdboosters.com stands for monday. These 2 letters symbolize our commitment to make monday, the greatest OS platform in the market, even greater.