If it’s possible I would like to have some kind of setup in coda where I can define individual pieces of information and reuse them in other places.
I’m imagining something like a table that would just be called “Essential Information” or “Key facts”. It would basically have two columns: one with the name of the piece of information, and one with the contents.
For example a piece of information could look like this:
Seasonality
Both online and in store sales are seasonal. High-season months about 2x sales at peak than the lowest low season month.
High sales season expected from April through October, low sale season November through March.
here’s an example use case. I’m writing up meeting notes for a meeting and during the meeting, we determined that the business seasonality follows the above pattern. I write the above content in the meeting notes, and I also want to mark it down in the central table of key information that can be reused. I want this to just look like a single inline block in the meeting notes.
I have a lot of different pieces of information like this. The definitions might be 1-10 paragraphs long. I would want to use the information by being able to refer to it, and always make sure the information definition is the same everywhere that it’s referred to or inserted.
I thought about doing this by creating a central table and then inserting a view that has just one filtered row, but that doesn’t seem like it makes sense. is there some more logical way to handle this?
Also I might want to use these pieces of information across multiple documents.
Great usecase!
I am not sure Coda has the right UX for that. I hope someone with more experience will answer.
Maybe look for tools created for note-taking, such as obsidian or mem.ai. They are built around your scenario supporting tags, collections, crosslinking + have nice AI integrations to use all your notes for question answering.
I sometimes create a table called Variables to do stuff like this. You just create your table, and then whenever you need some of the information, you just use a formula. Type the =, @nameOfVariable.content.
This looks great! It doesn’t allow me to input the informatino naturally in the cavas, I have to go to the table to create the row and then go back, but otherwise pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
You can do something similar just by typing = then putting your text into quotation marks, and giving your formula a name.
Then you can reference the formula name on pretty much any canvas or other formula.
But I recommend doing the table thing because it can pretty unwieldy throwing around named formulas like that, and you can also do more with the formatting and stuff like that. You might be able to do more formatting just in the formula panel, but I haven’t figured out a way to do that
