Calling information from multiple tables in a table

Hi, I’m trying to call information from multiple tables and collate them into one summary table, but I can’t seem to pull information from multiple tables into one table.

Here’s the set up I’m building for example:

  1. I have multiple products. Each product has its own table to track info everyday.
  2. I have a overview table that lists each of the product. I want to use this table to pull in info from tables from #1 (such as the last price).

So the way I’m trying to set up table #2 is calling each table in its own cell then using that reference to pull info:

Product | Reference Table | Summary Info

Product 1 | @table_for_product_1 | info pulled from Reference Table column
Product 2 | @table_for_product_2 | info pulled from Reference Table column
Product 3 | @table_for_product_3 | info pulled from Reference Table column

Hope that makes sense.

Unfortunately because I’m trying to call multiple tables, I can’t do a Lookup column type for the Reference Table column. I’m currently using the Text column type, which seems to only yield a link to the @table. So the Summary Info column isn’t working and I can’t call any info from the tables.

I also tried the Lookup() formula to no avail.

Thoughts on how to best go about solving this problem?

Hello @Michelle_Huynh1 ,

I think I understand what you are trying to do, and even though it might be possible with a lot of work arounds, I think you need a different approach.

  1. get all your products in one table
  2. for getting a ‘separate table’ per product, create a view and filter so you only see the rows belonging to a specific product. Make as many views as necessary, or use a control (text box, single or multi select) to show the product you want to check. You can ad new rows to your views to add more data and there are different ways to add default values to new rows so that they have the correct ‘key’ field values (the ‘key’ field is what you would use in your filter

If you have a limited number of products, this is the way to go. If you have hundred or thousands of products with many updates per product, this is not going to work in Coda, because when you have a couple thousand of rows in a table it becomes probably to slow.

Since you can do calculations per product in one table, I am wondering if you even need to have a separate summary table, rather than another view on the same data.

A sample of your project is going to help people in the community to help you further.

Greetings,
Joost

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Hi @joost_mineur

Thanks for the feedback. I actually did also attempt to put all products in one table. Unfortunately, because of Coda’s limitation on its ability to auto iterate, I had to go with the multiple tables route.

What I mean is that for the table for each product, I’m tracking daily numbers. I have a formula to auto iterate the date to a new day based on the row number. As you can imagine, if you have many products in a single table, that makes it hard to auto add a date for each product. I considered doing it in different views so for each product where I have the date added for each new row for that product. However, this doesn’t work because the date advancement is dependent on the row number, and if it’s mixed with other product rows, this messes up the iteration.

That’s basically why I’m trying to do this splitting of tables even though it’s not ideal. And the problem with summarizing each product table separately is that those are all separate. And I would then have to manually add each summary table on a single page. It gets messy and looks really ugly to have a bunch of 1 row tables on a page instead of pulling them all on a single table in aggregate.

Hope that clarifies the needs I’m looking for.

Hi @Michelle_Huynh1 ,

Would it be possible for you to share your document or a sample of it and better understand if there are alternatives for splitting tables.
From a data modelling perspective, this raises some suspects, so having the overall use-case and actual limitations would help a lot to understand.

Thank you!