Hey! Sorry for my delay. I wasn’t sure if you were asking me this question or the original post. I realize now it was a reply to my comment. I’m new here still haha, not overly familiar with how forums work 
I’ll try to answer your question and not get too convoluted or long winded (lets face it though, I probably will overexplain lol )
As far as resources go - I’ve spoken to a few of the Coda Community experts on here, watched literally every YouTube video I could find, reached out to the Coda Customer Service associates, and am taking the Coda Doctorate Course. All of these have been helpful in their own way. However, ultimately, there was one very small, but very important, concept I was not grasping. I’ll try and explain, on the chance that this is where you are too.
Don’t over complicate it.
Now for more explanation:
My issue was actually 2 primary problems.
- I was complicating it far too much.
- I was not keeping my end goal in mind. I’ll try to explain both without writing a whole novel - unlikely, but I’ll try.
In my world, I sell turnout gear to fire departments in my state. This involves customers being the fire department as a whole, vendors being the companies as a whole, but also involves customers as an individual, and firefighters both as a collective “fire department” but also, an individual firefighter. I also work with various types of Board Associations, ISP service providers (like to clean the gear), on top of the build details of the gear itself, and the regulations from the NFPA for how the gear must function.
There are a lot of moving parts and it creates a lot of chaos in my day. When I sat down originally to create this doc, I’m used to jumping into excel or sheets and making a spreadsheet to contain the data I need to look at as an overview in 5 minutes. Realizing that Coda had all these other functionalities made me excited to build on what I thought was already strong skills to function within a spreadsheet.
However, I quickly learned that was not the case.
I was creating a base database for “Vendors”, “Customer Contacts”, “Vendor Contacts”, “Coworkers”, “Board Associations”, “Firefighters”, “Measurement Data”, “Product Details” etc. I found myself wishing I could combine tables into one drop down menu or something like that, over and over again.
@Paul_Danyliuk made the suggestion that measurement data should be within the people table. I’m not sure if he knew the dots he was connecting at the time, but that one simple suggestion made me realize that Customer Contacts, Vendor Contacts, Coworkers, and Firefighters all have one HUGE thing in common - they’re all people, not companies or products. Once I realized that, everything snapped into place - mostly.
So I took a quick pause and realized I had 100’s of small tables to separate out data like I would in a excel spreadsheet. Except, Coda has far more functionality so I took a step back and created a “PEOPLE” database. Now, if you are a PEOPLE that I interact with for work, whom I need to store any form of data about, it’s stored in the PEOPLE base table database.
Then, same concept with Vendors, Customers, and Board Associations. These are all ORGANIZATIONS.
So if this is your issue too, my suggestion is to pause and take like 25 steps back and try to look at the very basics of the kind of data you are working with instead of looking at it from the perspective of how you use the data. To you, looking at my data, you may have understood that those were all organizations to start, but I didn’t because they hold contextual value to me. It wasn’t until someone who wasn’t connected to the data suggested that, which made me realize what I was doing wrong.
Now, problem 2. I kept running into the question - What came first, the chicken or the egg? Over and Over and Over again when it came to my product database. After trying the Item Schema suggested in this post: Specific Layouts Per Row based on this row selection in a specific column - #2 by Jean_Pierre_Traets, and even though I loved this doc in and of itself, it actually only made things more confusing for me.
I realized that it’s a bit too granular for my particular use case and desired outcome. I wasn’t trying to create a build area or a manufacturing cost for ordering - I actually have a very robust system that handles this for me already. I got wrapped up in the granular details of including every possible thing that I could… because that’s what I do haha.
So, with the help of the lessons within the Coda Doctorate program, I started with the end in mind. What am I actually trying to do? I was simply trying to create a tracking system for the builds I created, instead of having papers all over my desk all the time. I also wanted an easy way to create PDF’s of this data on a whim or be able to easily pull up historical info.
Knowing that, plus the KISS (keep it simple stupid) mentality, I decided to back up again and put the basic easy items into one primary database, called ALL PRODUCTS. Then, instead of worrying about tracking fabrics and threads and pocket placement and blah blah on the gear I build, I created a simple entry form for the ALL PRODUCTS database, which allows me to enter very specific pieces of information that are relevant for tracking the pieces of data which promotes my end goal.
What I’ve learned is that it’s important to strike the right balance between the correct number of base tables to maintain proper data integrity, but also the fewer to keep the schema as simple as possible for your given use case.
Try stepping back, looking at the data for what that data is, not through the bias prospective of how you use it.
I guess there is one smaller piece that plays into this too - end goal matters and is the best place to start, but also, you can’t worry about how it looks on the UI side until you get the data to work together accurately. If the data is working together accurately on the base tables, then you can create 100s of views and layouts and buttons and the like to get it to function the way you want it to function.
Keep in mind, I am absolutely not an expert, and I have no idea what I’m talking about haha. But, this is what I’ve learned in the last few months and until like 2 weeks ago, I haven’t been able to articulate myself even to ask the right questions to get the right answers.
I hope this was at least a little helpful!
I love this, 
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