Hi guys, along with the post I just did re: more ability to use rich formatting stuff like embedded images in Comments, wanted to also request that comments are indexed in Global Search. I believe they aren’t right now?
This is related to @Ryan_Martens your discussion here:
I also find comments the natural place to track this kind of stuff, and not in rows themselves. My team is used to this too from a host of other tools they use like Jira, Asana, etc. etc. and I imagine a lot of other users are as well.
As you point out in that thread, if you start to do too much in Comments, and they would expire as you are wondering, I am likewise hesitant if they can’t be searched on because as you start to write into comments stream and those can’t be found later, it can be detrimental to the integrity of the system for the team using it.
I think another great way to think of this is the importance of search in Slack. That is basically a bunch of comments in teams, but Slack really lets you search around in them. I’d much rather have those conversations with my team inside Coda, so I can keep central both my overall data around management, work, tasks, all the good I have in Coda, and the communication around those items. Especially in our era of WFH and asynchronous communication!
Wouldn’t we need rows to be indexed before it would make sense to index comments?
I’m not able to search for a row in the main search bar on coda.io, were you thinking inside a particular doc?
We researched ways of adding utility to comments and even had hackathon projects on this. We still have more exploration to do on this, but it’s a topic of interest and getting attention.
Search is also discussed and search from the account page across all docs is different than search within a doc. This turns into a fairly big topic when it comes to how to implement this best. It’s also something we know there is a want for, but there’s more to figure out first.
Hey, actually I have to admit I’m not fully versed on what is and isn’t indexed right now. As I explained my use above, ultimately I’d like to be able to liberally use Coda for all sorts of ways of handling Team work - be it within Rows, comments, Sections, etc. And ideally, whatever is presented in those formats should be able to be “found” at any point down the road.
My use case is a CRM of sorts and comments happen to be the easiest way to quickly jot down notes about interactions with people. It is important for us that those jot-notes are both timestamped and user-stamped (is that a word?) and still accessible years in the future for when we interact with the same people again and need to review what happened in the past. Having those notes searchable is less of a priority, but it would certainly be nice to have.
This is something that we’ve explored and that we keep researching. It’s not a project as of right now, but as we make more improvements, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s revisited regularly.
Comments are being looked at on a few fronts, most recently with the differences in what’s shown between a regular doc link and the published doc link, so we have our eye on it. This also means there are some more dependencies to consider when making comments available to formulas, so it’s not 100% straight-forward.
Sorry that’s probably not the most straight-forward answer, but I want to emphasize that the request is not forgotten, I think a few more things need to be in place before we address it.