Hello, I’m having some issues with dates and would like to share ideas for potential improvements.
Charts and Dates
How to create engaging dashboards and reports in Coda | Guides
In this guide, the last section, “What to do with a funky x-axis,” suggests adding a list with each day. In my case I wanted to use the original table so to implement this, I would need to create an automation that adds one row per day, resulting in empty values that don’t correspond to any real data, such as seller, client, etc.
An alternative is to create the separate table containing only the dates and then reference the values from the original table. While this prevents the original table from being affected, it still requires automation. Moreover, if I want to add a sale from a past date, I would need to manually backfill each date from today to that past date, one at a time.
A better solution would be if date-based graphs could automatically handle missing dates by offering an option to consider these “imaginary” date values between real ones.
Group by Weeks, Months, or More
When grouping by dates, more advanced options, like grouping by weeks or months, are lacking. Currently, you need to create an additional column to extract the month, quarter, etc. However, this becomes more problematic when dealing with weeks, as defining the start and end of a week (e.g., Monday to Sunday) can get tricky—especially when weeks span across year boundaries.
Additionally, sorting can become complicated if you try to concatenate extracted values (e.g., month, week number, year) into a single column for grouping or use in charts, because now those are text values not dates.
It would be fantastic to have built-in options to group by weeks, months, quarters, or other custom periods.
Aggregate Values in Charts by Months, Quarters, Weeks, etc.
Similarly to the previous point, aggregating data in charts by weeks, months, quarters, etc., requires adding extra columns. This becomes particularly challenging when working with weeks due to the complexity of defining consistent time frames.
It would be a significant improvement if we could aggregate these values directly in charts—by weeks, months, quarters, and beyond—without needing to create additional columns.