I’m Glenn, a Product Manager on the Coda AI team. I’m excited to share two new Coda AI feature updates that give you more control over how to use your AI-generated content and share it with others.
Name your AI block to reference it elsewhere.
You can now name an AI block, allowing you to easily @ reference it in formulas. For example, you can create a button to send your AI-generated summary to Slack or Gmail—easily keeping other team members or cross-functional partners in the loop.
The ability to name an AI block also combines well with our second feature update: the ability to create a button that refreshes an AI block or AI column.
Fresh insights, a click away.
Now, you can choose to refresh any AI block(s) or AI column(s) as options within a button’s setting, giving you full control over when to trigger AI calculations. For example, you can press the button before you start reviewing your team’s AI-generated action items, or set up an automation to refresh your data before each meeting.
Try these control and customization updates, let us know what you think, and don’t forget to submit any docs you create to the Coda AI at Work Challenge!
24 Likes
Thanks for the tip Glenn. It’s almost miraculous how AI is integrating with productivity software. Good to see Coda is staying on the cutting edge.
Cheers,
Bruce Elliot
1 Like
Amazing. I was looking for an AI Refresh action yesterday! So glad you implemented it!
1 Like
There doesn’t seem to be the option to refresh a column in a table, as mentioned?
@Karina_Mikhli
Apologies, on the page you can only refresh a block. You have to add the button to a table to refresh a row (and then a button to push those buttons if you want the whole column)
2 Likes
Got it and thanks for clarifying. Will test that out now.
Probably missing something obvious, but, while I can create great blocks, it will not let me name them to use in a button. This link is: https://coda.io/d/_dWtYk-Bwrb_/Companies-AI-Website_suk3D
Hi Doug,e will DM to help you out 
If you mean corporate support, they usually send me to the Community first, bless I’m really in trouble. DM?
Great adds @Glenn_Jaume !
These are two very powerful Coda AI features that came in the nick of time. I could not have produced Promptology as a challenge submission without them.
That amazing love this feature it really helps me.
Sorry. Newbie here. My goal is to have a button have AI summarize one column from a table. I think my AI prompt is good, but I’m missing on how to get the button to only pick one column.
My prompt:
Button example
Ahh, its a slightly different set up for columns. Try creating this as a button column in the table you should see the AI column then. You can then make a button on your page that pushes all of those buttons in one go
Thanks for the response.
I actually want a summary of all rows for a text column.
1 Like
Is there a way to do this?
Hi @John_Faig, are you looking to use AI block to summarize two columns from two different tables? If so, you can type = in the AI block prompt to open up the formula builder, then use the dot notation to select which column. Here’s an example doc with a video demo.
2 Likes
There are some issues with this implementation strategy because a column of texts could easily become very large overstepping the prompt limit of 8k bytes. Ideally, you should filter the rows and concatenate the texts to control the amount of content you are feeding into the summation inference.
In any case, here’s how you do it - as @Katy_Turner said, create your AI Block and prompt and then enter an equals sign at the point in the prompt where you want the column data to be inserted.
Another approach is to summarize each of the texts by row and then use the summarized column to get a summation of the summaries. This will scale little better and improve performance of the column summation process. But, the 8k ceiling is still something to be aware of.
Creating the row-based summaries could also be further constrained to just one sentence or event extracted terms such as entities and keywords. Asking the LLM to summarize based on limited row content will be surprisingly effective because LLMs are designed to fill in the missing words.
1 Like
@Bill_French Thanks for the additional thoughts.
This document is a weekly agenda and I don’t think that we will have over 8K of notes in the table.
If I use thuis in a different document, I’ll test the total number of characters and opt to do a summary of each row’s summary.
1 Like
