Migrating from Excel to monday.com or Jira – how to move off spreadsheets in five stages and not go back

Excel is excellent for analysis, calculations and one-off reports. The trouble starts when it becomes the system for running projects, orders or a team’s work. Everyone has their own copy, no one knows which version is current, and the management board gets data late.

If several people in your company update the same spreadsheet every day, and meetings start with working out “what the real situation is”, it is a good moment for a change. We describe the diagnosis in detail in a separate article on how to tell that a company has outgrown Excel.

Both tools replace spreadsheets, but they are designed for different teams. The choice depends on who will work in them every day, not on the list of features.

In many companies there is a natural split: monday.com for business departments, Jira for developers and IT. You will find a detailed comparison in a separate article; the table below shows the main differences.

Each stage has one specific result. If you do not have it, there is no point moving on, because the gaps will come back as low use of the tool. The times in the table are our estimate for a company moving several teams; with one team, everything goes faster.

In total, the stages take 12 to 20 weeks from the start to retiring the spreadsheets. The spreadsheet review is usually the shortest stage; the pilot and the retirement take longest, because they depend on people’s habits rather than on technology.

Technically, moving the data is the simplest part of the project. monday.com imports an Excel file into a board, and during the import you map the file’s columns to the board’s columns. Some column types, such as statuses, have to be set after the import.

Jira accepts CSV files – a table saved as text, which can be exported from Excel. The bulk import does not transfer links between a parent task and its sub-tasks, and the number of tasks per file depends on the importer’s permissions. Without Jira administrator rights, one file can contain at most 250 tasks, so larger lists have to be split.

Harder than the technology is tidying up the data before the import. Spreadsheets that have been in use for years have different spellings of the same value, merged cells and columns no one uses any more. The list below shows what to prepare.

Most failed moves have similar causes, and they have little to do with the choice of tool. Each of the mistakes below can be avoided if you know about it before you start. Our case study of a furniture manufacturer, which brought orders, costs, production and sales together in monday.com, shows what a successful move from several spreadsheets to one system looks like.

People are rarely afraid of the tool itself. They are afraid of losing control over “their” spreadsheet and of their work becoming more visible. Good communication addresses these concerns directly, before they turn into resistance.

Instead of general slogans about efficiency, show the cost of the current way of working using your company’s own data. For example: how many hours a week three people spend re-keying data between spreadsheets, and how many meetings serve only to establish the status. You will collect these figures in the first stage.

The cost is made up of the tool’s licences, work on designing the structure and configuration, and your people’s time. monday.com licences are bought in seat packs, while Jira is free for up to 10 users; above that number you pay for every user, not just the extra ones. Check current prices in the vendors’ price lists.

Employees’ time costs the most: the person leading the move, the champions and the pilot participants. Count it like any other labour cost. For example, the operations manager spends one day a week for 12 weeks, i.e. 12 working days.

The cost is affected by the number of spreadsheets and teams, the state of the data, the number of connections to other systems (e.g. accounting) and how much manual work automations are meant to replace. A narrow initial scope lowers both cost and risk.

Set the measures before you start and take the baseline while you are still in Excel. Without a reference point, after six months you will only have impressions, and those are easy to challenge.

Good measures are simple and relate to everyday work. The list below contains the ones that are easiest to collect without additional tools.