The Problem: Three Great Tools, Zero Connection
Most teams don't start with a workflow problem. They start with a tools problem.
Here's how it typically unfolds. A growing operations team uses Google Forms to collect data — client intake forms, internal requests, survey responses, field reports. That data flows into Google Sheets, where someone cleans it, runs calculations, and builds summary tables. Then a report gets built in Looker Studio or Google Slides so leadership can see what's happening.
Each tool does its job well. The problem is the empty space between them.
Every handoff — from form submission to spreadsheet, from spreadsheet to dashboard, from dashboard to the project board where work actually gets done — involves a manual step. Someone copies a form response into a sheet. Someone pastes a chart into a presentation. Someone updates a monday.com item based on what they saw in a spreadsheet. Every handoff is a place where data gets stale, gets mistyped, or simply gets forgotten.
For the operations team in this story, running a mid-size organization with multiple active projects and a steady intake of requests, those handoffs were consuming hours every week. Not because any single handoff was hard — but because there were dozens of them, every day, and each one introduced a small delay and a small risk of error.
The Idea: What If Everything Lived on the Board?
The team was already running their work in monday.com. Boards for every project. Dashboards for every department. Automations handling assignments and notifications. monday.com was the operating system of the business.
So the question became: instead of bringing data out of Google Workspace and into monday.com through manual effort, what if Google Workspace tools were simply available inside monday.com?
Not as links. Not as attachments. As living, interactive, embedded tools sitting right alongside the boards where work was being tracked.
The Stack: Forms → Sheets → Looker Studio, All Inside monday.com
The team built their workflow in three layers, each powered by a different integration from the monday.com marketplace.
Layer 1: Google Forms for Intake
The first touchpoint for any new request — whether it was a client onboarding form, an internal project request, or a vendor evaluation survey — was a Google Form. The team embedded these forms directly on the relevant monday.com boards using Google Forms Integration for monday.com.
This changed the intake workflow fundamentally. Instead of sending a Google Forms link via email or Slack (where it would compete with a hundred other messages for attention), the form lived on the board where the work would eventually be tracked. New team members didn't need to hunt for the right form — they opened the project board and it was right there.
More importantly, form responses could be configured to create new items in monday.com automatically. A client intake form submission didn't just sit in a Google Sheet waiting for someone to notice it. It became a monday.com item with an owner, a due date, and a status — immediately visible to the team.
Layer 2: Google Sheets for Processing
Raw data needs processing. Form responses need to be cleaned, categorized, and analyzed. Financial figures need pivot tables. Resource allocation needs capacity calculations. This is where Google Sheets comes in.
The team embedded their working spreadsheets directly on monday.com boards using Google Sheets for monday.com. Each project board had its own relevant spreadsheet view — the finance board had the budget tracker, the resource board had the capacity model, the client project boards had their respective data processing sheets.
The key benefit wasn't just visibility — it was editability. Team members could update spreadsheet data without leaving monday.com. The marketing coordinator updating campaign budget allocations could do it right on the board where the campaign tasks were tracked. The operations lead reviewing resource availability could see the spreadsheet and the project timeline in the same view.
Layer 3: Looker Studio for Visualization
The final layer turned processed data into decisions. The team's Looker Studio dashboards — already connected to their Google Sheets and other data sources — were embedded directly on leadership and summary boards using Looker Studio Embed for monday.com.
This completed the circle. Data entered through a form on a project board → processed in a spreadsheet on a working board → visualized in a dashboard on a leadership board. Three Google Workspace tools, three monday.com boards, one connected workflow with zero manual handoffs between systems.
How It Changed Daily Work
Before: The Morning Catch-Up Ritual
Previously, starting the workday meant opening five tabs: monday.com for tasks, Gmail for new requests, Google Sheets for the tracking spreadsheet, Google Forms for new submissions, and Looker Studio for the morning metrics check. The first thirty minutes of the day were spent just figuring out what had changed overnight and where attention was needed.
After: Everything on the Board
Now the workday starts with opening monday.com. New form submissions have already created items on the board. The embedded spreadsheet shows updated calculations. The Looker Studio dashboard reflects the latest data. The thirty-minute morning ritual became a five-minute board scan.
Before: The Weekly Report Assembly
Creating the weekly leadership report meant pulling data from Google Sheets, screenshotting Looker Studio dashboards, cross-referencing with monday.com task completion rates, and assembling everything into a presentation. It took two to three hours every Friday afternoon.
After: The Board Is the Report
Leadership boards with embedded Looker dashboards and summary spreadsheets became self-updating reports. The weekly meeting shifted from "here's what I assembled" to "here's what the board shows" — live, real-time, and always current.
Before: Context-Switching Tax
Every time someone needed to check a form response, update a spreadsheet, or reference a dashboard, they left monday.com. Each context switch took thirty seconds to two minutes (find the tab, find the right document, find the right section). Multiplied across a team of fifteen people making these switches dozens of times per day, the cumulative time loss was significant.
After: In-Context Everything
With Google Workspace tools embedded directly on boards, the context switch disappeared entirely. The data was always right there, in the same view as the tasks it related to. The team estimated they saved at least an hour per person per week in eliminated switching — time that went back into actual project work.
The Pattern: Google Sheets as the Hub
An interesting pattern emerged in how the team organized their boards. Google Sheets became the connecting tissue of the entire workflow.
Forms fed data into Sheets. Looker Studio pulled data from Sheets. monday.com boards displayed Sheets as the working layer between raw input and polished output. The team started calling their embedded spreadsheets "the bridge" — the tool that transformed unstructured form data into structured analytics.
This makes intuitive sense. Spreadsheets are the most flexible data tool most teams have access to. They can be a database, a calculator, a formatter, and a staging area. When embedded in monday.com, they become the universal translator between Google Workspace tools and monday.com workflows.
Who This Approach Works For
The Google Workspace Power Stack works best for teams that share three characteristics:
Already invested in Google Workspace. If your organization uses Google Forms, Sheets, Docs, and Looker Studio as core tools, this approach doesn't require you to learn anything new — it just puts your existing tools where they're most useful.
Running operations in monday.com. If monday.com is where your team tracks tasks, manages projects, and coordinates work, embedding Google Workspace tools brings your data layer into your execution layer.
Handling structured workflows with intake, processing, and reporting stages. If your work involves collecting data, processing it, and reporting on it — which describes most operations, marketing, finance, and project management teams — this three-layer stack maps directly to your workflow.
Get Started
Each layer of the stack can be adopted independently — you don't need to implement all three at once. Most teams start with whichever tool they use most and expand from there.
- Google Forms Integration for monday.com →
- Google Sheets for monday.com →
- Looker Studio Embed for monday.com →
Or explore the full suite of Google Workspace integrations for monday.com →