How to chart individual items from a column that has multiple selections

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Hi! I’m Brian, the social media manager at Coda. When I’m not trawling Twitter, I make fun Coda-themed memes for everyone to enjoy. But today I wanted to share a simple solution I came up with for an issue that one of our Twitter followers had last week:

Problem
The user had a lookup column that allows multiple select, and wanted to generate a column chart with each option charted individually. In this instance, Coda automatically rolls up the two selections into one column, as shown below.

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Solution
While it may not be sophisticated, this solution uses something that you have already built: the table that the lookup column is pulling from. It already has each option in individual rows, so it just needs a new column; I named mine “Total”.

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In that column, I added this formula:

Projects.filter(Media.contains(thisRow)).Amount.sum()

And it’s that easy. Now the Lookup table can be charted with the right values :slight_smile:

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I know this is really basic for most of you, but if it can help just one person I’ll be stoked. And if you want to play around with my test doc, you can check that out here:

Until next time, find me on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook :wave:

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Hey @Brian_Klein, thanks for this solution. I guess other people like me find it so I wanted just to say that made a slide change to the formula, that might be useful to someone else too:

Instead of sum(), I use count(). This way you don’t need to have number value. Here is the formula with count:

Projects.filter(Media.contains(thisRow)).count()

Best,
Eli

1 Like
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Thanks for sharing your solution and update, Eli!