Is there a way to create docs that can be duplicated without being broken due to Coda Updates

I have a pretty extensive project template that I have continued to improve upon over the last couple of years. I have found that formulas that functioned a certain way in the earlier coda docs, stop working properly when I duplicate the doc to start a new project. On the newly created docs, sometimes it will throw an error message when a formula isn’t working, even though the exact same formula is working in the doc that was duplicated. Other times, there won’t be any error message, just a blank where the results of the calculation should be and it takes some digging to find it. Other issues I’ve had is columns with lookup tables being formatted as select lists on the duplicated doc, instead of retaining the original connections. I think I am going to have to end up re-creating the document from scratch. I am just hoping to get to a point to where once the doc is created, less tech savvy people at my company can simply duplicate the doc for each new project and it will work as expected. Am I the only one who has had this issue?

Hi @Bianca_Adams,
I think that this post title is a bit misleading as it’s not the “Coda updates” that actually trigger the issue.

As a matter of fact, document duplication should work as expected, meaning that if you duplicate the doc you will get the same data and behaviour.

Having a sample of your issues would help to address the problem specifically and hopefully find out a proper solution.
Is it possible for you to

  • (ideally) share something
  • (alternatively) provide some more detailed explanation of the issues?

Thank you!

As a side note, it may be better to have one Page per project, rather than one doc per project.

It turns out that there’s a lot of valuable information that you’ll likely want to access from each completed project (like duration, cost, revenue, who worked on it, etc), and you won’t want to have to set up cross-doc for each of them.

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I was told that when you duplicate a doc, it is created using the most up-to-date version of coda, whereas the original doc is still using the older version for a while, which is why some formulas/functions behave differently. So I guess the issue is actually not just with duplicated docs. It is with any doc with formulas that don’t work with the current version of coda. For example, this formula is what I originally had in one of my docs.

But when I made a duplicate of the doc, it no longer worked the same and I had to re-write it as this:

download (1)

So at the time, both docs were using completely different formulas to accomplish the same output. But now that the older version has also been updated to the newer version of Coda, the old formula no longer works on that doc and I will need to update it to the new formula.

I guess it would be great if there was a way to improve functionality while also maintaining the ability for old formulas to still work.

At this point there are many pages per project, but when I had originally started with Coda, that is what I had intended. The problem that I ran into was that a large doc was really slow to work with. That was a long time ago, so maybe Coda has improved drastically since then in that regard. That would be good to know.

Generally they do pretty well with performance and it’s also something that Coda is focusing heavily on improving