Attach files/images to cells

Indeed, and why I believe this is an example where Makers have a duty to consider the implications of attachments (by value) versus attachments (by reference).

Coda is “container” of information. It has ideal attachment capabilities and in a given scope, this is perfectly suitable for many use cases. However, Makers cannot expect Coda to effortlessly scale to address every scope imaginable.

Granted, there are security issues that arise when creating arbitrary connectors between Coda docs and other documents by reference. But, these are far less problematic with sustained credentials than the idea of pummeling a single Coda document with – say – 250gb of attachments.

My advice - find a way to scale attachments by reference.

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+1 for storage attachments by value vs reference. Its expensive to store things, so charge for it. Having assets in the doc unlocks a ton of potential.

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I agree or even the ability to have an upload feature but that host on either dropbox, one drive or google drive. Just help the user upload easily because people don’t want to copy photo links nor slow down their doc, so making it easier would be another solution and let us choose our hosting platform.

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@nigel - My team currently uses Trello because they prefer the document attachment capabilities that Trello offers. I see that now on How to add attachments thread, the need to link to external documents have not been met. What is the timeframe on providing these to your users?

Hi @Cole_Gabor,

Welcome to the Coda Community!

This is definitely a popular request, and one that’s on our radar, it just happens to be a more difficult one to implement and there are some other features we’re looking to get in place before tackling this one. I don’t have an ETA for you on this, but it is definitely on our list of topics.

Ben

@BenLee - do you have a recommended work around for this? Would using a hyperlink in a text formatted cell be a good work around?

Yes, a hyperlink to any docs hosted elsewhere is a great way to go. I’ve done this for tracking receipts.

I also created a doc where I can log all sorts of links to different resources. This has a per-user search trick as well. Here’s a template version of it…

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It would work for me to enable a link of the form: file://host/path

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Hi @jaime, this feature would take the cake for us. My manager has tasked me with finding a great way of managing and collecting project-related details and documents. He is not super tech-savvy, so his most intuitive way of collecting documents in one place would be to upload them to the space. Notion does this well, but notion does not do tables nearly as well as Coda, so I’m stuck between the two and he is not going to like the idea that we may have both. If you guys integrated with Notion, THAT WOULD BE SWEET! Otherwise, I’m basically doomed to fail at promoting this Coda platform to anyone, despite it’s cool features.

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hi @jaime, today I use airtable to follow up on invoices (in pdf) of some of my clients. I run automations on the details en report back to my clients with an overview. The AirTable take on images is attractive, it makes it possible for every user to contribute and for me to have the overview. I understand that Coda cannot do everything, however since the focus is very much outwards, this would be helpful.

Best Christiaan

Any timeline on this being a possible feature in Coda. It seems like the need well expressed here.

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Hey Ben, I’m not sure if your example would answer this and I am just not following. I actually would prefer to host our files in Dropbox, but I haven’t been able to figure out a way to replace our employees using Airtable yet. This is one of the last things I have to left before we have fully switched over. The employees generally submit pictures but there are enough PDF submissions that I have to have a solution.

I’m thinking about just moving to JotForm and using Zapier to sync with Coda, which is where we review and then push to Quickbooks, but I would prefer to use Coda since we can use the dynamic lookup fields when employees are referencing a purchase order, vendor, etc. That has been working great in Airtable but we would lose that JotForm.

Sorry, long way to ask if there is a way to upload a file in a 3rd party app while someone is filling out a receipt form in Coda. I don’t think it would work to have them fill it out and then tell them to go to Dropbox upload the file, copy the link and then paste.

Hi @jaime and team Coda,
We love Coda, however the lack of this functionality prevents us from migrating our company.
No workaround is truly practical, and this seems like something that is possible with pretty much every alternative solution out there. Users we’ve spoken to were actually expecting it.

Please prioritize and make this happen. I know that my company would be happy to pay for it.

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Any new eta for this feature @BenLee? I’m tending now to use Notion more for my research and wiki needs as they have a sleek extension in Chrome that let’s you quickly save webpages (like pdfs or standard websites) as notes directly linked in your projects or pages (similar to Evernote). I literally use it all the time now to organize my research and I would much prefer to do so in Coda. If I could attach pdfs to my documents in Coda, I could do this much more effectively than in Notion.

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It’s been over a year now.
Not implemented by now = will never happen…

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I keep mentioning it, but it still seems to come up. We’re a growing product so you’ll see certain features added quickly and others where we need to build out more of the foundation of the product to accommodate them. So some might take longer than others.

With what we’ve added and how Coda has grown over the last 12 months, it surprises me that someone would think we wouldn’t continue to grow and improve over the next 12 months.

I don’t have an ETA on things at the moment, but you should all know that you’re heard with your requests.

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I en

I enjoy using my senses to understand pretty much everything I see, and what I see from this comment is a case where this user hasn’t said a peep on this forum for two years. What does this indicate?

Either the user is …

#1 Thoroughly and completely happy with every aspect of Coda and has no issues with the product (besides attachment handling), or;

#2 Thoroughly and completely dissatisfied with Coda and dropping in only to offer a negative sentiment.

It’s improbable that anyone who really cares about using Coda falls into #1, so I can only conclude #2 applies in this case.

And despite the many conversations about the challenges of attachment storage, security, performance, and usability, some users are apparently unable to understand just how many dependencies and considerations are required to broadly support attachments that are sustainable.

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This is definitely my number 1 request.

I agree, this would be so helpful

For anyone still checking this thread out — Attachments are now in beta:

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