ClickUp Custom Fields in Google Sheets: What Each Type Becomes

Dropdowns arrive as ids, dates as milliseconds, relationships as joined names. What each ClickUp field type becomes in a cell, and how to write it back.

8 min read
Title card showing ClickUp custom field types mapped to spreadsheet columns on a dark background

A sync that "works" can still leave you with a column you cannot filter, a date that sorts alphabetically, and a dropdown that reads as a UUID. Each method of getting ClickUp into Google Sheets makes a decision about each field type, and the decisions differ.

This is what each type becomes, why, and what to do about the ones that arrive unusable.

The short version

ClickUp field Arrives as Safe to build on?
Text, Short text Plain string Yes
Number Number Yes
Money Number, currency symbol dropped Yes, if you know the currency
Date Depends entirely on export format Only with ISO
Dropdown Option id via API, label via export Only after resolving
Labels (multi-select) Comma-joined string No, needs splitting
Checkbox true / false string Yes, with care
People / Assignee Comma-joined display names No, names are not unique
Relationship Comma-joined task names Relationship is lost
Formula Computed value at read time Yes, as a snapshot
Rollup Computed value at read time Yes, as a snapshot
Progress (auto) Percentage number Yes
Files / Attachment URL, or nothing Rarely
Email, Phone, Website Plain string Yes
Rating Number Yes
Location Formatted address string No, coordinates dropped

Here are the ones that cause real trouble.

Dates are the field that decides everything

A date is the field most reports depend on and the field most likely to arrive as text.

Through ClickUp's CSV export, you pick the format yourself, and the default is the wrong one. The 3 options are Normal (Mon, Aug 11, 2026 3:00 pm +02:00), ISO (2026-08-11T15:00:00), and POSIX (1786554000000, milliseconds since 1 January 1970).

Google Sheets parses ISO into a real date value on import. It parses Normal as a text string, and text sorts alphabetically, so April comes before January and your Gantt-style chart is nonsense. POSIX arrives as a 13-digit integer, which is at least honest about being a number; convert it with:

=A2/86400000 + DATE(1970,1,1)

Through the ClickUp API, dates always come back as POSIX milliseconds as a string, with no option. Any Apps Script implementation has to divide and offset, and has to decide what timezone to render in, because the API gives you an instant with no local context.

A subtlety worth knowing: ClickUp stores a due date with a flag for whether the time component is meaningful. A task due "on Tuesday" and a task due "Tuesday at 5pm" are both a millisecond timestamp; only the due_date_time boolean tells them apart. Sync tools that ignore that flag show every all-day task as due at midnight or at 4am, depending on the timezone they picked.

If your dates already arrived wrong, why ClickUp dates land as text in Google Sheets works through the repair.

Dropdowns arrive as ids over the API

This is the single biggest gap between a CSV export and a homegrown API integration.

The export resolves dropdown values to their labels. You get In Review, and that is the end of it.

The API returns the selected option's id, something like c9c4e12a-8b7d-4f11-9a01-2f8e4b6c1d33, plus a separate type_config object on the field definition that lists every option with its id, name, color, and order. Resolving one to the other is a join you have to write. Skip it and your spreadsheet has a column of UUIDs.

The same applies to Labels, ClickUp's multi-select type, except each task carries an array of option ids and the resolved result needs joining into one cell or spreading across several.

If you are building on Apps Script, fetch the field definitions once per List and cache the id-to-label map. Fetching it per task is how you burn through the 100-requests-per-minute rate limit.

The same ClickUp dropdown through 2 routes. The CSV export writes the label In Review into the cell. The API returns an option id, with the matching name held separately in the field definition's type_config options list, so resolving one to the other is a join you have to write

Relationships lose the relationship

A Relationship field points at other ClickUp tasks. In a spreadsheet it becomes their names, joined with commas, in one cell.

Acme migration, Globex rollout is a string. There is no id, no link, and no way to know whether "Acme migration" is one task or 3 tasks that happen to share a name. If your report needs to follow the relationship, you need the linked task ids, which means the API rather than the export, and a second column carrying task.id values you can VLOOKUP against.

The same is true of People fields. 2 people named Alex Chen produce identical cells. Match on the user id, never on the display name.

Formulas and rollups are snapshots

A ClickUp Formula field is computed inside ClickUp. Whatever crosses into Sheets is the value it held at read time, frozen.

That is usually what you want, and occasionally a trap. If the formula depends on today() or on a rollup over child tasks, the number in your Sheet ages while the number in ClickUp does not, and the 2 disagree until the next sync. If the number matters, recompute it in Sheets from the underlying columns rather than importing the ClickUp result.

Attachments mostly do not survive

An attachment field carries a file, and a spreadsheet cell carries text. What you get is the attachment URL, if anything.

Those URLs point at ClickUp storage and require a valid session to open, so a URL pasted into a sheet you shared with a client is a link to a login page. Free Forever workspaces are capped at 60MB of attachment storage in the first place, so the field is often empty on the plans most likely to be exporting.

Treat attachments as "there is a file, go look in ClickUp" and build nothing on them.

Checkboxes and the string true

A checkbox arrives as true or false. Depending on the route, that can be a boolean Sheets recognizes, or the literal text. COUNTIF(A:A, TRUE) against a column of text strings returns zero, silently.

The reliable test is =ISLOGICAL(A2). If it returns FALSE, wrap your comparisons in =A2="true" instead and note it, because the next person will assume the obvious.

Money drops the currency

A Money field arrives as a bare number. The currency lives in the field's configuration, not in the value, so a workspace tracking deals in both EUR and USD produces one column of numbers with nothing distinguishing them.

If that describes you, add the currency as its own Dropdown field in ClickUp before you build a report on the amounts. There is no way to recover it downstream.

Writing a custom field back to ClickUp

Reading is the easy direction. The moment you want a cell edit in Sheets to update the ClickUp task, every type above reverses, and the reverse is stricter.

One endpoint does all of it, POST /api/v2/task/{task_id}/field/{field_id}, with the new value in the body. What goes in the body depends on the type:

// Dropdown: the option UUID, never the label
{ "value": "c9c4e12a-8b7d-4f11-9a01-2f8e4b6c1d33" }

// Labels: an array of option UUIDs
{ "value": ["uuid1234", "uuid9876"] }

// Date: Unix milliseconds, plus the time flag if the time is real
{ "value": 1667367645000, "value_options": { "time": true } }

3 things catch people here.

A dropdown will not accept a label. You have to resolve In Review back to its option id before you send it, which means the same type_config map you needed on the way in. ClickUp's own reference is explicit that new dropdown options cannot be created through this request, so a value your sheet invented is rejected rather than added.

The date flag is the same time boolean, in a different place. Send a timestamp without value_options.time and an all-day task gets a time it did not have, or the other way round.

Removing a value is not sending an empty one for Relationship, People, and Files fields. Those take a { "value": { "rem": ["id"] } } shape, because the field holds a set rather than a scalar.

This is the work a two-way sync does on every edited cell, which is why it sits on the top plan in ClickUp to Sheets rather than being free everywhere. If you are writing it yourself, the ClickUp API guide has the fetch wrapper and the rate-limit handling it needs.

ClickUp-side limits

A field that never arrives is sometimes not a sync problem.

Free Forever caps a Workspace at 60 Custom Field uses, where one use is one value set on one task. Creating fields and adding options are free; filling them in is what counts, and adding 2 labels to a Labels field on a single task spends two. The total accumulates across the Workspace and never resets, and past 60 ClickUp refuses new values on every Custom Field. In a sheet that reads as a column that fills in for the first stretch of the List and then goes blank, with nothing anywhere saying why. The rest of the free plan ceilings are on their own page.

A field only appears on tasks in the locations it was added to. A field created on one List is absent from the API response for tasks in another, and an empty column across half your rows usually means exactly that rather than a lost value.

Your workspace checklist

Rather than trusting a table, run this once:

  1. Make a ClickUp List with one task and one field of every type you use, filled in.
  2. Sync or export it by whatever method you are evaluating.
  3. In the resulting sheet, put =ISNUMBER(B2), =ISLOGICAL(B2), and =ISTEXT(B2) beside each column.
A spreadsheet running ISNUMBER, ISLOGICAL and ISTEXT against 7 ClickUp field types. Number, Money and an ISO date return TRUE for ISNUMBER. Checkbox, Labels, Relationship and a dropdown returned by the API all read as text, so COUNTIF against TRUE returns zero on a checkbox column

5 minutes of that tells you more than any documentation, including this page, because it tests the exact combination of your plan, your fields, and your tool.

If you would rather pick fields and see what arrives before committing, that is what the field picker in ClickUp to Sheets is for: you choose the columns in the sidebar and the tab shows you what lands, before you build a report on top of it.