Exporting data from Coda

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Hi,

Does anyone have any ideas for exporting data from Coda? The options their FAQ suggest aren’t particularly useful -

  • print the page (but it only prints the current section, so you would have to do them all one by one, and in any case, the data isn’t useable so really, it’s a pointless suggestion);
  • copy and paste (fine for text, but tables with multi-line text just doesn’t paste cleanly into another spreadsheet);
  • the ‘export data’ option in account settings, but you just get a bunch of tab separated text files, and again this doesn’t import cleanly into another spreadsheet. XML or another modern equivalent would be much more useful.

I’ve had a look through the packs and can’t even find a Google Sheets pack.

Just wondering if anyone has a miracle suggestion?

Thanks,

Rohan

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@anon86103599

I currently use the API to pull the table, then create my own html output, and print to pdf. It has been the only way to reliably export full docs that I have found.

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This works fine for table-based data, but fails to protect text and the many [potentially] embedded data and analytics in texts. Then there’s images embedded in texts - a lot to think about and mentioned here.

Here’s how I create a full-text search and also capture important Coda-based texts.

  • Create an automation that emails each important section to a role account in G-Suite.
  • Harvest inbound emails from the automation process in Coda.
  • Transform the section content into a Google Drive document where the name is the section title that creates a new document when one doesn’t exist, and simply overwrites one that already exists.
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Thanks @Joshua_Upton and @Bill_French for your replies.

Unfortunately I have no web development skills so the API is beyond me at this point.

Fortunately I had not committed anything critical to Coda, just a fair bit of data entry on a couple of gaming related docs. I have the text output so maybe one day I will find the time to write a program that will parse those and put the data into another database.

I think other users would do well to consider the ramifications of the fact that there isn’t a practical way to get your data out of Coda. For my own software, if a client decides they don’t want to use it anymore they get a copy of their data in an Access database, making their data readily available to whatever system they are moving to.

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Yep - and there’s the added issue of formulas, filters, grouping, etc. All of the business logic that makes an application work. Making snapshots is easy - just duplicate the document, right? Um, no - there are hidden elements and backing up offline in a comprehensive manner is not so simple.

And Access is probably not ideal either since it is on a fast-track to sunset.

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An option that might work somewhat is to use the Gmail Pack to email sections (using a button I would suggest). The emailed tables actually look decent, and I believe you could copy-and-paste into a spreadsheet in a pinch. Note that this might be included in what @Bill_French suggested?

That solution still does not back-up formulas, so it’s only somewhat useful depending on your use case.

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Thanks @Ian_Nicholson, I will give that a try.

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My backup process does use the Gmail pack, but with an action that happens every night. This is fine for section content, but I do not harvest data this way (even though it is embedded in the section texts).

Instead, I configure the service to acquire JSON representations of the tables and store those in parallel to each document maintained as a complete backup instance in Google Drive.

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Lack of a reasonable export is a big red flag for me.

Many years ago my company put lots of project data into an online wiki system that was proprietary. When the service was sunsetting, we could export our wiki – but only on a page-by-page basis, and we lost all the internal (page to page) links, and all inline graphics.

A Coda doc is much more complicated, but I’d be happy with an export that let me keep all the “content” as a formatted HTML package, preserving internal links, graphics, and table content (if not logic).

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Totally with you here. I much prefer coda over notion but notion has a good export feature.

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Im struggling to pull via api to excel. is there a documentation to help with this. The official documentation does not help me (no coding experience) to link api to excel

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Hey @Rudolf_Enever! I also thought something like that would be useful so I built a tool that uses the Coda api to export tables to excel. The website is codaexport.com. Hope this helps you!

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@Courtney_Milligan1 very clever solution! Just gave me an idea to do it myself as well. Thanks for the tip!

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As an update to my previous comment, I have now also released some Coda packs that allow you to export your Coda tables directly to Google Sheets or Google Drive! They are called Export Tables Pro and Export to Google Workplace. They both have individual functionality as well, but if you combine the formulas from both of them you can export + upload your tables in one button or automation.

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