Now that I understand Coda a little better I revisited this discussion on using it to store notes.
On one hand the ability to tag notes and surface them anywhere in any view through words clouds and other things is amazing and wish we started this years ago.
But on the downside, we have a standard note form today and when we go to meetings we write down our attendees, our client attendees and the people we are visiting. Beyond the notes, collecting the contacts is so critical.
As far as I can tell, Coda breaks down here because I can’t see how to easily combine notes with a table to collect all the contact details. For example, if I need to collect attendees I have to have a ton of fields on a form. If there is 10 people at a meeting it could be 60+ fields (first name last name, email, ect and so on). So if I used a form it would be crazy. And if I ask people to manually enter names into a database then I have to worry about connecting them to the meeting notes. Again not ideal.
Am I missing something or is their a way to add a link or embedded table somewhere that does this. I would use a detailed display if I could have a similar submit function. I hope I am wrong because this would be very useful. Best and have a great weekend.
Hey Chris - I don’t understand your use case. Is this an instance where two related tables would solve your issue? A Notes table and a Contacts table, where the two are related via a relation column? What functionality are you missing?
Please see whether the Meetings page in the below doc gives you some ideas. It contains a meeting canvas column. The Canvas column contains two views; one of a contacts table from whihc you can select attendees, the second is a tasks table in which you can record specific tasks. This table has a link to the same contacts table, from where you can assign responsibilities to specific people.
The tasks table can be used elsewhere to view tasks, by person, by meeting, etc.
A form and table is the ideal. Today we used a word document with fields where the contact is added into a table at the top of the document and then notes below. We add every person up top. The problem is we have to manually scrape the contact information since adding 100 fields to a document would look terrible. So with Coda, the form is great for most items but not for the contacts if the meeting has 10 people (it means every form would have tons of fields which is not efficient or pretty. A detailed display with an embedded table might work but then I think we cannot submit the content (not just the contact data). Is that more clear?
Why do you want to have a hundred fields for Contacts? You should have a contacts table, and use that table to store your contacts.
Someone else suggested on another of your questions, that you should first get used to how Coda works before you start building complex docs. I agree with him - Coda is different from anything else you have worked on before. If you try to replicate what you have in Word, Excel, and even other no-code tools like Notion, you are repeatedly going to bump into frustrations.
There are several meeting templates available in the Coda environment, first experiment with one of those.
And I think Coda “forms” are a diffent concept to what you mean when you talk about the existing form that you use for meetings.
I am not here just to play and I need to get something done so I cannot just make things that I will not use. Despite the challenges I am making good progress and have completed my first use cases that I am rolling out already and the team loves it - so that is good so far - and it is taking a lot of data without breaking. So I think I am beyond the basics already. As for my question of why 100 fields. I think it is a terrible idea too. My point was that if I have 10 people at a meeting and 1 person has 10 contact fields with them it would be great to just create a field with 10 columns and then just add them. I get that. But I really like the concept of the form and having people submit a form for the entire meeting notes (all contacts and meeting notes in one submission). But to use a form I cannot figure out how to attach the contact table or links to it so at the top of the form I could have someone hit a button to add a contact.
I had a similar problem with something else I was creating and I solved it by first by asking the team to fill out the form which then went to a detailed display where we can discuss the items and then added a table to the detailed display where they could add info into a table. In this case it worked because the table data was secondary to the form.
However, for meeting notes we want to make something where someone is able to fill out both at the same time and in one place. I have to believe people have created useful work arounds. I have attached our paper version so you can get a better idea. I think one thing that is different for us is that we hate the old world started by Salesforce of attaching notes/forms/docs to contact fields since this is not reality. We like Coda’s approach of attaching tables to note/forms/docs instead - just can’t figure out how to combine it into a submission ready form.
Here is a rough example of what we do. We collected limited contact data because we were also limited by fields - this is what I am trying to solve
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
― Mark Twain
I personally won’t be responding to your messages anymore. You’ve created a lot of similar posts and when you share stream-of-consciousness writing, you’re transferring the mental load to those who would help you.
Consider experimenting more, writing less and, whenever you have questions, spending some time thinking about how to ask them.
You asked me to repost the question so I did. But fair enough. The biggest problem with the community board is that questions get answered but the “how” disappears since everyone turns of the permission to share their solutions. So I have seen many questions get asked but the answers are mostly inaccessible.
So I have seen many questions get asked but the answers are mostly inaccessible.
a lot of the docs arent shared (to avoid manual maintenance of sharing) or editable (to preserve the validated content) but are you aware of the making your own copy of the doc so you can dive under the hood/study them?
Go to 3 dots on doc title, scroll down and select copy.
please note, not all of the docs are able to be copied (depends on owner of doc) but majority would be.
second - to address your issue of form collection and meeting notes, apart from @Piet_Strydom solution, these may also help guide you into implementing your desired outcome
and as you can see in screenshot below, a simple search yields many threads of the same issue.
im not sure if its because of your initial hang up of inaccessibility or simply the lack of utilization of search bar, but i think doing this will help in what @Pablo_DV was referring to when he stated
whenever you have questions, spending some time thinking about how to ask them.
lastly - to try and keep orderly and good vibes of this great community… some background context -
a lot of us here started from the same place as you now. and others in the community shared and helped us become the makers we are today. Thats why i think you see so many of us try to give back / volunteer our own free time.
I dont think its too much to ask but to give the same respect and courtesy in return by (and BTW this applies to everyone and not singling you out by any means)
searching forumn first
if no answer/solution, then create a post but include a example doc or video. Also please be specific with your ask.
when we do reply, please acknowledge the help given and address/reply back to said person.
i’ve seen on a few of your threads now of this (#3) occurring i.e. @Pablo_DV@Piet_Strydom offering a solution and its like they are having a one way conversation with themselves.
I experienced this as well.
There was a thread that after a solution i provided, you went off on a tangent with another question. Then i requested for you to start a new thread because its a different topic and you replied to that with another question. Then to my surprise when i came back to reply to it the next day, that last question was deleted and previous post edited to not include the question i asked you to start a new thread on.
overall we just ask to try to help us out as much as we try to help you.
im not sure you fathom in some instances of @Pablo_DV providing you complex solutions the time and mental load it would have taken to considerably read / reread/ mind read your issue/s at hand and to create an appropriate doc solution/s.
In hopes of you not feeling welcomed or that we are an unfriendly bunch, im still happy to help. but because a lot of your asks are conceptual and to coin term off Pablo “share stream-of-consciousness” - i think a better approach would be to provide you with the resources you can digest in your own time and intrepret to fit your use case
I appreciate the response and I appreciate Pablo’s feedback. My learning background is not in tech beyond some basic programming classes back in DB2, Fortran, Basic a lifetime ago. However, over the last 15 years my work life is deeply in tech. It makes me dangerous because I know a lot behind different solutions, how they work and the logic behind them. But often little around the coding. So once I get the fundamental logic it opens up a world of possibilities and I want to make useful things. It also means I usually jump right to difficult questions. Often they are interpreted as newbie questions - and sometimes they are - but many times I am thinking ahead and have read every post out there and haven’t see the answer that applies to my case (or the solutions no longer are accessible). So I am not upset with Pablo’s response at all - he has been helpful. People are volunteers. Usually people think I want them to do my work. This is not the case. I am asking conceptual concepts because then I don’t have to waste my time or others with things that are dead ends and I also think there are many others out there like me that come from low code backgrounds.
Thanks Melanie - now I will take a look at the example Piet added.
Thanks Piet for what you shared. So it did help and it shed light on the fundamental issue I was missing that can help others that asked the same question. My tables and connections were all set up properly and referring to each other and working.
The “wow” solution used by Piet was very simple and all I needed. It was just to use the OpenRow to have the “psuedo form” fields for easy entry versus using a Form.
It still is not as secure as a form but I moved the underlying table to another page which helps.
Personally I think Coda should still have the ability to add a submit button since it feels a bit unnatural to have the text being written to the underlying table real time. When I am done filling it out I am always looking for the submit. But maybe just old habit here.
Thanks again. You started me on the right path. I was using forms to prevent certain fields from not being overwritten. Now using the detailed display I created related columns in the same table and used these columns as read only for the ones that I wanted to prepopulate and protect in the detailed display which works well.
