A find and replace feature is essential for large projects with a lot of text. Ideally, I would prefer a such a feature to permit a user to replace specific values across all Coda pages in a project, but at the very least it would be great to have the ability to automatically replace specific values in a table on one Coda page.
For example, recently I wanted to replace all mentions of a specific system that was retired with the name of the system currently in place. I have a table of over 300 rows on a Coda page, with the legacy system mentioned randomly across columns and rows of the table. Instead of being able to search for the old system name and replace all mentions of it with the new name in one fell swoop like I would in Excel, I have to find the term searching with the browser through ctrl+f and manually replace each instance I come across.
This is incredibly time consuming, so I go back and forth copying and pasting CODA data into excel, using the find & replace option there, and pasting the revised data back into CODA. This solution is also not perfect, as I’ve messed up the formatting of tables before when pasting revised data into CODA.
Given that, much of what CODA solves for with its service, Excel does as well, one would assume such an innate and basic feature of Excel would be present in CODA. In my professional opinion, the lack of this feature greatly reduces the appeal of CODA against MS excel.
There are also a fair number of other formulas that you could use to achieve the same outcome.
This misunderstanding is at the heart of your frustration here. If Excel could do 10% of what can be done in Coda I would be really surprised. Coda has a completely different design philosophy, giving rise to completely different use cases.
Simple examples would be the ability to easily link tables with each other, canvas columns and the Coda formula language which is inherently easier to read than Excel functions. Other examples is the whole concept of packs with its ability to integrate with other web applications, and easily add new formulas to the Coda language. Coda is tightly integrated with an AI, and it’s synching and embedding functionality is just not possible in Excel.
I hope that you persevere with Coda and get to see what an amazing, and different product it is.
And I say this as somebody that made a post on the community shortly after I started using Coda defending Excel against Coda. A year later I went back and apologised for my post…
It’s absolutely ridiculous that find/replace does not exist in this product. I mean, is this just a storehouse for data generated in other applications or is this what it claims to be which is a suite of tools for managing projects and large data sets?
If it’s the former, it’s a complete waste of money then if I can’t do a simple find/replace but instead have to copy sh*t out of coda and into (notepad | google docs | word | excel) to do find/replace then paste back into coda. WTF?
If it’s the latter, FIND AND REPLACE should be in it, and it should be ROBUST.
I’m already looking at other solutions as this seems to indicate a fundamental flaw in the design process OR a complete disregard of user experience.
We pride ourselves on having a very positive user community, please mind your language.
While the lack of a find and replace might be very important in your use case, a sum total of 8 people have voted for this in the last 18 months. Hardly a fundamental flaw, and no reason to use bad language.
Other products you can consider are Notion, Fibery and Obsidian. I have tried both Notion and Fibery, still found Coda to be the best, even if it does not meet all of my requirements.
That said, I completely understand your frustration. In traditional documents like Google Docs and MS Word, this kind of text substitution is a standard, expected feature.
While Coda’s pages look a lot like those document builders, the underlying concept is different. The visual similarity creates the expectation that you can just write text on a page (like a contract) and then modify it with a formula.
As you’ve discovered, that direct approach doesn’t work—there’s no function like SubstituteOnPage(PageID, "term", "replacement").
The Coda-native workaround is to use a table. If you place your text inside a canvas column, you can then use formulas like SubstituteAll() or RegexReplace() on that cell’s content.
I agree this isn’t the simple, direct solution you were probably looking for, but it does work. The main drawback is that this method will strip out any existing text formatting. (Solving the formatting issue is also possible, but that would require a Pack.)
I appreciate your suggestions on other platforms. I’ve tried many of them and Coda is the one I enjoy the most.
My understanding of what the goal of Coda is may be lacking. However, I still believe that search/replace is fundamental functionality of any application that is text-intensive, which Coda absolutely is regardless of the fact there are many ways to enter and represent that text visually. To force users to copy and paste text into another application to perform a search/replace operation is, to me, a serious flaw.
I worked as a full-time software engineer at an enterprise software firm from 1995 - 2008 and even back then I could have used basic javascript (it was very basic back then but still had all the fundamental c-based methods to recursively scan and manipulate strings. It’s strange that this is considered difficult or too time consuming or whatever reasoning leads your dev team to de-prioritize this feature.
Also, I wouldn’t conclude that just because only a few people have brought this up that it isn’t something people want. The vast majority of people will never post a request for anything, and some of them might leave due to missing features and never give the real reason during the cancellation process.
Hi @Inner_Light thanks for the detailed follow-up. Honestly, I had the exact same expectations when I first started with Coda in 2020. It’s a very natural assumption.
You’re making some great points. That Google search confirms this has been a long-running discussion, and you’re spot on about the “silent majority”—we never know how many people wanted this but just moved on without posting.
While the why relates to the different underlying structure of a Coda page, that doesn’t change the outcome for you. Your conclusion is correct: for the Coda team, this item just hasn’t been prioritized over other development paths yet.
