In this thesis we address the problem of understanding the star formation process in giant molecular clouds in a galactic context. Most simulations of molecular clouds to date use an oversimplified set of initial conditions (turbulent spheres/boxes or colliding flows). Full galactic scale models are able to generate molecular clouds with complex morphologies and velocity fields but they fail to reproduce in detail the effects that occur at sub-pc scales (e.g. stellar feedback). Our goal is to build the bridge between these two scenarios, and to model the star formation process in molecular clouds produced in a galactic context. We extract our molecular clouds from full-scale galactic simulations, hence we need to increase the resolution by two orders of magnitude. We introduce the details of the program used to simulate molecular clouds in Chapter 2, and describe in detail the method we follow to increase the resolution of the galactic clouds. In Chapter 3 we compare our simulated galactic clouds with the more conventional approach of using turbulent spheres. We create turbulent spheres to match the virial state of three galactic clouds. We perform isothermal simulations and find that the velocity field inherited from the full-scale galactic simulations plays an important role in the star formation process. Clouds affected by strong galactic shear produce less stars compared with clouds that are compressed. We define (and test) a set of parameters to characterise the dynamical state of our clouds. To include stellar feedback in our simulations we need to introduce a cooling/heating algorithm. In Chapter 4 we analyse how the different velocity fields of our clouds change the temperature distribution even in the absence of feedback. To study the formation of molecules we need to model the chemistry of H2 in our clouds. We also add CO chemistry, and produce synthetic observations of our clouds. The effect of feedback from winds and supernovae in galactic clouds is studied in Chapter 5. We analyse the effect of winds in clouds with very different velocity fields. We find that the effect of winds is stronger in highly virialised, high star forming clouds, with clouds with weak galactic shear, compared to unbound shear-dominated clouds. The steady and continuous action of the winds appears to have a greater effect than the supernovae. In summary, the inherited properties from the galaxy have an impact on many relevant processes in star formation, influencing gravitational collapse, the formation of filamentary structures, the temperature field of the cloud, and have a considerable effect on the impact of feedback in the clouds.