Giving columns labels that help users understand what they are looking at/what they can do
Give columns descriptions that help me keep track of their intended purpose and place in the table logic, and help others who might want to make use of the document schema understand how it works.
If, in the column drop-down, there were an “add description” or “add notes” option that allowed the maker to provide a more extensive narrative, it would be really, really useful in development, document sharing, and in not having to compromise between those two goals.
+1, and possibly add a setting to the table options so that you can choose who can see column descriptions(just the doc maker, maker and editors, or everyone).
+100 here. This is one of the main features I miss from Airtable. This is really important for helping folks on our team that are less familiar with a given Coda on what all the data means and the “right” way to add/edit data.
As a work around, I find myself writing a lot of prose on a page, describing what each column represents and what values someone should put in that column. However, this only works if they find the page I write this one - but we have dozens of filtered views of important tables scattered across many other pages. Most people don’t see our column descriptions and it’s hard to keep table data standardized
Hi, I’m Paul, a software engineer at Coda. Thanks for sharing this feature request with us — I’m happy to announce that we’ve now implemented column descriptions in Coda!
Within the column options menu, select the “Add description” option to add helpful context or reference notes about a given column. We hope this makes using tables in Coda smoother for you and your teams — let us know what you think!
Hi Paul,
thanks for that.
I was wondering if we could use these descriptions to guide our own AI assistants. I may have missed a place where I can access the description via formulas, but that would be a simple solution. That way we could make tables in which our assistant is already “pre-prompted” when we start prompt-designing our new tools.
Is there a way i can access the description formulaically?
Also, the descriptions are missing from the API, I’d really like to be able to use the API to read the column descriptions so that other tools could also have this “longer” text.
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