We all love Canvases. They really help in compacting a ton of data into a tight package.
But canvases are actually so powerful that it tends to overshadow another great thing about Coda, which is its page and sub-page structure.
Counter-intuitively, especially for new users, every time you’re writing something out on a Coda page without getting tables involved you are actually losing out on a lot of potential because you’re forfeiting a lot of Coda’s ability to work on that text as data.
This is especially important in knowledge base applications, where I think most people find the page/subpage structure ultimately more intuitive and functional rather than constantly operating out of a table pop-over.
I think it’s really important that Coda find a way to bridge this gap between pages and tables more fully so that the intuitive route of typing on a page doesn’t feel wasteful. One suggestion would be to have an option where you could flip a switch on a table so that for each row it creates a corresponding page in your document. The canvas columns in that row become structured pages/subpages, the status columns show somewhere in a customizable header on that page, and when you make changes on each of these pages that info is reflected in the main table.
Slite.com does exactly this, and it helps a lot not only in the readability of your documents but also in the upkeep and maintenance of them. I believe Notion has the same approach, although I’m not super familiar with it.
You could manually approximate this in Coda by adding a Compose column and then add a formula to the page that spits out the information you want, but obviously this is a one-way operation. The info on the page would be solely read-only. This in combination with Scott Weir’s Doc Explorer is going to get me 80% of the way to where I need to be. But I still think it would be a good move for Coda to take a look at this with an official implementation because of the aforementioned counter-intuitive nature.