I'm embarrassed to ask: What is the "Canvas"?

I’ve looked all over the Coda Community for an answer…I see a ton of references what you can do on the canvas, but I still don’t know what the canvas is or how to find it!

Can anyone take pity on me and help???

(And how come you all know…and I don’t!)

Thanks!
Greggt

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The canvas is where you type. So if you place a button outside of a table, you place it on the canvas.

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Ok! I thought so, but wanted to be sure…thank you!!

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@Piet_Strydom answered it, but here’s some additional information.

Think of the whole situation as this.

In Coda, all data can belong in two places: in tables or on the canvas.

As of Feb 2021, you cannot reference data from the canvas (i.e. you cannot reference the text that you type in a page). Maybe Coda adds this capability in the future. At the moment, you can only reference data from tables.

(small addition: each page has an ID, each object has an ID, and each line has an ID too, so you can link to them in a URL. Yet it still won’t let you actually read the contents of that page/object/line)

Views are tables.

Canvas controls (buttons, checkboxes, selects etc) are also tables :slight_smile: Those are hidden “Global” tables that you cannot read directly from, but you can reference controls by the names you give them.

Canvas formulas are also tables, but again, you cannot reference those tables directly. You can only reference them by formula name (named formulas only, obviously)

And yeah, when I say “canvas control”, “canvas formula”, “data on canvas”, I mean a control, a formula, and any text that is placed directly in a page outside of any view or table.

Canvas formulas / canvas button formulas don’t have thisTable or thisRow reference because logically there’s no table or row those are placed in* (technically there is and you can use them but the results will be undefined)

Oh, and also when I say “canvas” I mean collectively all pages. It doesn’t matter which page an item is placed in — it’s purely visual matter that the doc’s canvas is split into pages and you choose to place certain items visually closer to each other

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Thank you!
That helps a lot!!
Gregg

If Coda staff are reading, please help make the canvas easier to reuse, reference please : )

What do you mean with this question?

Do you want to be able to craft templates? For reuse in the same doc?, Or another doc? Do you want to create an email template?

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Apologies, that was a hasty post.

I was echoing the comment from @Paul_Danyliuk, especially

As of Feb 2021, you cannot reference data from the canvas (i.e. you cannot reference the text that you type in a page). Maybe Coda adds this capability in the future. At the moment, you can only reference data from tables.

For me, I would like to reference blocks of text, similar to ‘block reference’ in roamresearch.
And ‘transclusion’ in MediaWiki, I previously created a related forum post.

In general, would be great if everything created everywhere was reusable/referenceable. Ideally with ability to add labels or ids. For example, could add an id and labels to sentences, paragraphs etc. Without having to define them within formulas.

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I amke a lot of use of RoamResearch so can relate to this. If Coda could provide this, it would be wonderful, it would save me a RoamResearch subscription.

Could you add this as a request to: image