Any hacks for more info in Calendar

I think he means the Format() formula, which you can read about at the link. It explains the ‘template’ parameter.

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Many thanks! This makes much more sense than where my head was at!

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the format() formula is awesome and will help me a tonne. It doesn’t help with adding in line feeds into the selection of a table display.

Unfortunately another of my ideas isn’t working either - which is using the undocumented _color("#xxxxxx",“text here”)
It works in a table, but the color does not work in the lookup column (the menu I guess) of a table display. I’m just trying to get information to be viewed in a clearer way in this column.

Can anyone suggest other ways to get this column (menu) displaying info better?

I can confirm however, that using unicode character 160 as padding DOES work for formatting. Its not perfect, but I’ve been able to format it to look like this :
(The line feeds are not unicode 10 - they are just the result of some careful padding)

How are you using the non breaking space char(160) @Brendan_Woithe?

Here’s part of the formula to show whats going on.
Essentially, I know that the job number will be 5 characters long, so I just add enough padding to ensure that the next bit of info goes on the next line!
Screen Shot 2020-01-30 at 1.17.52 pm

So in this case, I’m saying the whole thing needs to be 20 characters. I’m in the middle of changing it up - from memory it was 34 characters to work properly with the display view.

There are downsides. Since this is the display column, using it for other views means it looks horrible.

I’ve gone back to working on a calendar view again… and using a bunch of colour and icons to represent information - since we only get 1 short line to communicate whats needed.

Screen Shot 2020-01-30 at 1.23.00 pm

So in this case, pencil for a pencilled (not confirmed) booking, or a smiley for confirmed (and tick for completed), microphone if it involves recording voice (we do sound for tv mainly), and people icon for if there are clients attending. Background colour shows which studio its in… grey, purple or light blue.

Unfortunately, when displaying 3 bookings at the same time, things get REAL tricky, and almost impossible to communicate. So I have filters to turn the different studios on/off etc.

TIP : I’m sure this has been covered here many times, but I discovered that the roll-over text is in the order the master table presents the columns. So I’m re-ordering that to help display the most important info in the roll-over before one needs to scroll.

Here I was thinking getting the underlying structure / logic done was the hardest part. Not at all - it getting a usable UI/UX thats the trickiest. Kinda opposite of notion… but the power of the formulas / automations / zapier integration is just TOO good to ignore!

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Oh - Another quirk I discovered has to do with using dates in formulas and formatting.
If a column ISN’T a date (ie, uses it within a longer display formula) it ALWAYS seems to revert back to MM/DD/YYYY - which is not what anyone in australia is used to. Its why in the formula above you can see I’m formatting date myself… its messy but it works.

Are there any other approaches to this?

I’m not sure if there’s a coda-wide solution to the date format (like a user preference), but you can use your newofound format() to modify the date display format on the fly.

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You can nest a format() in a format() fyi

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@Johg_Ananda thats exactly what I’m doing :slight_smile:

nice! I’ve gotten deep into format; maybe my framework would help you. In each doc I create a section _templates and use this table structure:

Then when you use format() you can ‘at’ the @task-info row, so use:

format(@task-info.template,first,second,third)

Keeps things very organized and easy! Good luck

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Oh I need to look into this some more. I feel like there’s a world of possibility / organisation that will really help me. Unfortunately I’m about 85% thru creating my doc system… it all works now (I think) but just struggling making it usable for others! UI and UX.
But this might help there too…

Any chance you could share an example with me… its sometimes much easier to figure things out that way?!

Thanks anyway for showing this idea!

@Brendan_Woithe yeah I get it, its kind of abstract so an example should help:

Hopefully this really inspires you! Let me know if you have any ideas on how to improve it.

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Hey this trick from @Paul_Danyliuk might provide some relief to your problem:

Fun fact: was looking into Coda’s calendar view for the first time today… aaaand it sucks :frowning: Very limited indeed; you really want to use something else @Brendan_Woithe

Yeah its tricky.
I’ve ended up creating a bunch of coloured emoji to help communicate whats going on for a booking!
Unfortunately, working with gcal is not seamless enough for us at the moment. So we’re stuck with the cal view that coda provides.


This is where we have got to.
(Its from last week so all the sessions are marked complete… thus the little tick emoji
We use things like the people emoji to show a session has clients coming, change the colour of the first emoji to red if its an urgent session, use a microphone to show we are doing a recording etc.
And then just rely on the roll-overs to show more info.
This is kinda ok. Where it really falls down is when our producer is out on the road with a phone. We don’t have ANY solution for that right now. She’s really finding it hard to schedule things when not in the office, and I’m not sure what the solution for that is.
Ah - fun right???! :slight_smile:
(Calendar views was one of the few things that notion REALLY had some advantages in for us. In the end, the formula implementation and lack of API made us jump to coda, but this really does just help demonstrate that there is no perfect solution for anything! Just making the right compromises / choices along the way…)

You can also have conditional formatting to control calendar bubble background FYI. Just need to select “all columns” to apply formatting to.

What is the calendar bubble background? Not sure what you mean.
I’ve got our bookings showing up as three different colours depending on which studio is booked (light blue, grey and light purple… we’re really just trying everything out on one studio, which is why they’re mostly all blue right now!)

I’m secretly hoping you mean something else…it would be useful to have more colours come up.

No, not something else I’m afraid. Event color was what I meant.

Hi All
Just wondering if anyone has found a solution to getting more information into the calendar view? That single line simply doesn’t work…especially if you are trying to print a copy…

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Anyone else had any new ideas on this? I would highly value being able to include more info in the calendar view!

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