Buttons & Controls: Stop forcing us to duplicate them and costing us storage quota!

I find it a bit obnoxious that each time we add a “buttons & controls” feature, we are unable to re-reference them in other documents within the same project.

For example, I am trying to use one document as a Meetings Template, where I can fill out a Date (dates and time field), Meeting Type (select-list), and Attendees (Text field) for each meeting. Since Coda has yet to support user-generated templates, I am forced to duplicate the same page for each meeting. Each time I do this, the fields that I use also get duplicated, and this has drained up my account storage.

It honestly doesn’t make sense why we can’t reuse fields. Please consider changing this.

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Hi @Carrie_Fix ,
I have the feeling this can be significantly optimised…

Why you need to create a page for every meeting?
Isn’t enough to just have a Meetings table that you can filter with the meeting of the day?

Could you share your doc (or a sample of it) to better understand your use case?
Thank you

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Hello @Carrie_Fix ,

I assume you have one (1) document with many pages and you like to have one page for each meeting (like Federico says, that might not be optimal, but for the sake of answering your question…):
Make an extra page with the select lists (meeting type, Attendees, etc.). You can certainly re-use these select lists over and over on any table on the same or any other table in the same doc.

Now as to using your table (perhaps with all kinds of buttons and functions): when you copy your table to the same or a different page within this doc, you create a view of the original table. Any changes you make to the rows of fields will be reflected in all tables and that is not what you want, you want to use your original table as a template. There is a small hack to accomplish that.

Make a new doc (not a page, but a doc) and call it (for example) ‘my templates’. When your table in the original doc is ready the way you like it, copy it (highlight it (ctrl-A if you want), Ctrl-C) and then paste it into a page of your newly created templates doc.

Delete from this copied table any content that you don’t need for your next meetings - now you have your template table. Make a copy of this template table (make sure you make a new copy and don’t use the copy you made earlier if that is still on your copy-buffer) and copy this to your original document, as many times as you like, on the same page or different pages. You know have independent tables that use the the same loookup lists (even when the lookup lists change it will use the updated lookup lists).

This sounds like a lot of hassle, but you can have different docs open on different tabs in your browser and it will only take seconds to do this.

However, keep in mind that if you want to change the table layout in the future, you have to do that for any table, because they are now independent tables. This is only to show that you can build template tables. And don’t forget that changes in your template doc will not be reflected in your working doc, so maintenance on your lookup list has to be done in the working doc (which is logical, because the template doc is … well, only a template doc.

I don’t think this is the way to go for your project, but a doc with templates (or template tables) can certainly be useful.

Greetings, Joost

a working sample can be found in my sample doc on the page: Select list and template tables
https://coda.io/@skygliders/samples-for-the-community

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