Is it possible to tag a text document and use lookup to organize the text into a list based on the tags?

I work in research and would love to be able to tag my research report insights with what area of the product they pertain to.

Ex: User wants to be able to format field text with markdown [Tag: Formatting] [Tag: Message fields]

Then use those tags to pull them into a table:

Insight | Tags | Date created | Value |

This would save me SOOOO much time and human error in manually compiling the table.

Is this possible?

Hi there @Mane_Rodrigues and Welcome to the Community :tada: !

I’m not sure to follow here :thinking: …

Is this what you want to achieve ? (or alike) :thinking:

(It’s the “Summary” from one of the doc I use to share sample here, on the Community)

I’m going to bump this and see if there are any other ideas, since I think @Mane_Rodrigues needs essentially the same thing I’m looking to do. I’ll give two more examples of patterns for any of you experts out there:

For Developer + Coda Users:
You know how you can drop a comment in your code for trivial reminders, maybe prefix it @todo and then be able to search your codebase to get a nice list of refinements? That’s the kind of thing I’d love to be able to emulate within Coda, except instead of code, it’s directly in the canvas.

For Product + Coda users:
Let’s say you have a project management doc, and you open a row into a modal, and full screen your “Notes” field. In your notes you identify three action items, which your document stores in a Tasks table. Without leaving those notes (i.e. directly from the canvas), how can you quickly add that record?

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AFAIK there is no way to parse the content of the canvas directly. The only tool that can do that right now is the search box.

I agree, this would be nice to have.

Until then, you’ll have to put the text you want to parse in a formula or in a table.

Wait but at this point aren’t you fullscreening a text cell, you’re no longer on the canvas, right? Or am I misunderstanding?

Screenshot would help

They’re definitely two different use cases that could potentially leverage the same solution. When you’re in a text cell it acts like a “sub-canvas”, in that I can still slash command but with an allowlist of commands.

I don’t know there’s enough here to play too far into solution-land, but picture something like running /tag in either place, and either the page or the column having additional settings to add a row elsewhere with default values that inserts into a specified table (from your row context), leaving an artifact behind.

Here’s a quick mock:

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Does @ not work for you here? Should just be @[name of your todo]. Basically that’s coda’s way of tagging

@ would likely work if it was extended to be able to create data in context, and not just reference it.

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Ah I got you. You’re looking for Roam/Obsidian type functionality, where mentioning an asset creates it. I don’t think there’s a way to do that yet. Would be cool.

I’m sure next to your meeting notes text field you could create a button with a regex that creates a new row in a table for each tag that doesn’t yet have a row.

Could you share a sample doc I can help you with it

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Did you ever get this working? I would love to se a sample doc where you can click a button that will update a table with all of the tags in that doc.

Thanks,

Jeff

Dan never shared his doc with me

HI Jeff,

I do something similar, but from the opposite approach. My notes/ topics are store in a notes table. If needed, I create a page to store further information. The way I do that is to “duplicate page” a template page. On the template page is headings for various topics, as well as a view of an action item table, where action items can be recorded. (I currently use this to store my own personal info and todo’s. In my day job I use a more elaborate version to gather information for development requests on a software project.

I googled this and landed here. Looking for similar feature. I would like to select the text and tag it. Like you can do it in Productboard insights or Dovetail or Condens. Here’s an easy example. https://condens.io/

In code, I think it would be cool if I was able to emulate similar to how product board does it. If I have docs for product requirements or customer problems, and another set of docs for user research notes, I would love to see if I can tag bits of notes into the customer problems. So when I open my requirements/problems doc (trying to avoid calling them PRD, coz they may not always be PRDs, but jus something during discovery), I would like to see my notes, or text associated to it, and a table of all the relevant lines or quotes from research notes that I tagged.

Hi Sejal,

Welcome to Coda!

I do not know any of the products that you are referring to. However, there is a lot of Coda experience in this community.

Please explain what your underlying business requirement is, and maybe the community can come up with a Coda solution for your problem.

Regards
Piet

I can help with this.

I use Obsidian. The power feature is linking items on tags. Say I’m in a meeting and taking notes. Someone says something and it’s a good use-case for AI.

  • So at the end of that point I just add #ai.
  • Then there’s another point which is #problem.
  • Indeed, I notice that this forum does it #suggestionbox

Then I have another page which has query: tag:#ai and it pulls the element containing that tag onto one page.

The dataview plugin then lets you do lots of supercool stuff with them. GitHub - blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview: A high-performance data index and query language over Markdown files, for https://obsidian.md/.

Have you looked at Connor McCormick’s MeetingPack? I believe part of it was developed to mark meeting notes and then make lists of things to be done from the markings. Sounds like your tags issue…

You’re describing Tana’s SuperTags which does all of this and more.

I think Coda will be forever challenged to meet this obvious requirement until the text canvas is accessible through the API and formulas.

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