I have discovered that Coda is great at easily linking a document reference (BatesNumber, serial number) to an uploaded pdf in a short document; easily done with the little link icon. But how do you do this on a large scale: 100 page document referencing 250 uploaded documents? Having to go out and choose the link each time and load it to the icon would be very tedious. Can one use macros of some kind? Push a button and Coda would go find that document number in a table describing uploaded documents and make the link?
I am new to Coda but have extensive programming, macro and database experience. So, I keep thinking there must be a way to do this that I haven’t encountered yet.
Hey Doug, thanks for posting this here. Hmm that’s a good question, and I do think there may be a way to achieve this in Coda – just depending on the details of your setup. Have you played around with using the Hyperlink() formula? If the URLs of the uploaded docs are structured / easy to predict, and/or if you have them listed somewhere in the doc (like a table), then perhaps this formula could do the trick?
If you’re not sure, feel free to share an example doc here and we can dig into the details
Thanks – hadn’t looked at the Hyperlink formula, but I will. The big problem is that, while it is bad enough to have to manually link several hundred documents (referred to in a table called Document Inventory) one time, the legal types keep changing the document and its referrals in Word. It then has to be reimported into Coda and all the documents relinked. This problem could go away a bit in time as Coda’s document editing capabilities improve.
Thanks again – took a look at the Hyperlink() formula.
The catch is, when I do it manually now for an entry in the text report, such as “Joe Blow confessed to bribing the Mayor (BATES 12345)”, the BATES12345 is listed in a table called Document Inventory with information about that document. To get the link, I have to go to the Document Inventory table and get the link url and then either place it in the Hyperlink() formula or give it to the hyperlink icon that comes up in the text report when I right click on the BATES12345.
I am looking into Automations to see if I can create a script that essentially does all that one document reference at a time and then for all the document references it sees in the text report. I have done similar things with macros in excel, but they don’t work, if you then transfer the text report and the document inventory and the actual documents folder to a client on another machine, and it doesn’t work on iPads, which the lawyers often use. What makes Coda so interesting is that all this is inside Coda, so it all works on all machines… I’m just trying to further automate the process, so the lawyers can change the text report (which they will) and reload it into Coda without the troops then having to manually relink all the document references.
