Hi, I’m new to Coda. I’ve been using it fruitfully and built soe realitvely complex sets of pages and workflow. I love how the tool enables me to treat it like a database.
No I want to do something simple that i usually do with a spreadsheet: back of the envelope calculations. I haven’t found a way to do it yet so asking the community for some help.
What i specifically mean by that is a series of calculations that include both assumptions and formulae. I usually structure them asa 2 column spreadsheet, where the left column is the description of the step of calculation, and the the right column is the actual value or cacluation. For instance:
A, B
number of shares, 10000
acceleration percentage, 0.2
vesting schedule months, 48
months at the company, 30
percentage vested, =B4/B3
number of vested shares, =B1*B2+B1*(1-B2)*B5
Obviosuly the shares vesting is just an example, the point is having a mechanism to do calulations one after the other and refer to the results of previous calculations in each new formula.
It seems like using tables in coda that’s tricky because they behave more like database tables than calculation notebooks7worksheets. Curious if there’s an easy way, or if somethng like this could be a new template suggestion for the Xoda team to implement.
Ah I think this is a pretty typical trap for new coda users, the solution is simple! Transpose your spreadsheet
Generally, making row-specific calculations is not recommended in Coda, if you feel the need to do that then you might want to consider a new data structure. To be honest this makes a lot of sense once you get used to it
Understood! That makes sense! Thank yo uvery much.
Do you believe there’s any way to “pivot” it just for visualization purposes? In some scenarios I may have 20+ columns and reading and scrolling horizontally through them is not ideal.
The closest thing you can get to what you want is displaying this table as a Detail view. It will render all fields in a form-like way, i.e. one page per row (and if your row is a single row, that’s just one page) and top to bottom.
I’d advise not turning your table to a Detail but instead making a separate view for it. That’s because adding and editing columns is still easier than in a detail layout, so you’ll probably want to reserve the latter just for viewing the data and occasionally adjusting some input fields but not adding columns or editing formulas.
As much as I’d love a switch to be able to transpose a table as a table, we don’t have that yet. There are tricks to make a table appear transposed with formulas, but those ultimately are like ‘derived’ tables and not editable (e.g. I’m ‘transposing’ a table in the end of my video here)
