Hey @GJ_Roelofs, I have been reading your posts today as I saw you commented in a few areas I have visited re: challenges with “user friendly” aspects of Coda naturally linking and referencing data across docs. Today I created what is probably a simple-minded suggestion in comparison to some of your posts, but I think we are talking about similar functionality:
I am very pleased to see @Al_Chen_Coda posting here:
that the Coda product team is working on some solutions you were asking for.
In my particular case, I am probably getting most bogged in Coda with challenges associated with these related issues. I am a manager with minimal technical skills, who has been responsible for selection and implementation, on a basic level, of a Project or Task Management app in my software development start-up. I am pretty easily able to get around Jira, Monday, Wrike, Teamwork Projects, ClickUp, etc., even stuff like TargetProcess and Pivotal Tracker, and I’m fairly adept with AirTable. But it has been a huge challenge for me, not being a developer or db expert, to get Coda to a point where it is user friendly enough and simply “working” as I’d like for me to introduce it to my team.
I am curious, with Coda 2.0 in motion and a growing userbase, how much a user of my limited skill is going to be a target Client/Maker growth-wise for Coda, because right now due to limitations such as the ones you highlight I’m not sure I can manage to accomplish what I’m after. It remains overly daunting for me to get to the finish line pieces of my Team Management doc that I have been working on for months. In order for me to effectively set up Coda, even with the mass of assistance I’ve gotten from their team - which I have to say provides the best support I’ve ever seen - I think I would need some of the functionality you speak of to be present. That is, a lot of relational functionality, including hierarchical set up with concepts like subtasks, that can be used in a more “digestible” way for less technical users as myself. As it stands, even the solutions the Coda team provides to me usually turn out to be too complex for me to take forward on my own without ultimately getting stuck again.
And I did want to point out that Notion, which a lot of people consider the alternative to Coda, does actually automatically offer up creating a lookup in the destination table.
Generally I think Notion is far lacking when compared to Coda for most of what I’m looking for, but this handling of related data I’ve found much more user friendly.
I hope I’ve made sense, and I eagerly await the future iterations the Coda team comes up with, hopefully allowing beginners like myself to more readily build what they need on their own!
Cheers and thanks for all the great commentary.