I’m new to Coda and I’m setting everything up for our agency. I’m trying to find the best ways for a user to view all the ‘tasks’ or rows assigned to them from multiple tables/docs? Is there a best practice to be able to pull in tasks from multiple projects into 1 page, mostly likely a page for that user that can display all their tasks across multiple projects? Is the best way to use cross docs and pull in a table each time a project is created or is there a way to automatically do this better?
Welcome to Coda! I hope that it is the start of a good journey.
I prefer to start out with all the tasks in a single table, and then filter them out per project, per meeting, per user, per status, etc.
This document will give you an indication of my ideas:
Whether it is “best” practice, I do not know, but I do think that it is one of the good practices. Barring other a few exceptions, I prefer to have everything in a single doc, and as much as possible in a single table.
Exceptions
security. Everybody that has access to a doc, as access to all of the doc. Confidential information needs to be stored in separate documents, based on who needs to see the info.
size. There is a limit, which is high, to the number of tables that you can add to a doc. There is also performance degradation when a table becomes too large. But something as simple as views can help a lot. I have tested about 15,000 lines in a table, and performance was ok in the table itself. Using views to filter the table, e.g. tasks per person, made a dramatic improvements.
Unless your projects have a security need, I would strongly recommend putting them all in the same doc.
What I would also strongly recommend is to experiment with Coda a lot before you commit to a design and start a serious build. It took me about a year to stop thinking in Excel and in Access, and to start thinking in Coda. But it is WELL worth the the effort.
On the page below I expand on the above. (In the rest of the doc are some notes that I made as I learned Coda.)
Thank you for this. Very detailed. I can see what you mean by taking your time exploring and testing. I’m looking more into combining tasks into 1 table and then separating out by views. Thanks again!