Hi all! Today we’re adding a few new ways to format your text.
Checklists
Coda docs have long had checkboxes in tables, and sometimes in canvas controls. But until now, they’ve been missing in one key place: text.
You can now add simple checklists to any text in Coda (and yes, even within a table cell!). While we were at it, we also added a bit of color to all checkboxes in your doc.
We designed the new checkboxes to be lightweight and fit anywhere you can type text. If you want more advanced capabilities like filtering out checked items, customizing formatting, or annotating items with additional lines, tables with checkbox columns are still your best bet.
Quote styles
Sometimes you want part of your text to stand out from the rest of your content. We’re introducing two new styles built for this: block quotes and pull quotes.
Menu & shortcuts
You’ll find the new styles on the updated text styles menu:
The menu also now shows the markdown shortcuts you can use to directly apply a format on the start of any a new line (And if you select existing text, it’ll show you the shortcuts you can use to convert it to each style).
Here’s a recap of the new ones:
Type [] then space for a checklist
Type > then space for a block quote
Type " then space for a pull quote
Press Command + Enter on Mac or Control+ Enter on PC to check or uncheck a checklist line.
Oh, so that’s why the [] shortcut didn’t quite work for me yesterday (it still created the table but put the cursor outside of it). I forgot to report, and now it seems it was midway being repurposed.
These are not accessible by formulas right now. If you need formulas attached to the checkbox actions, tables with checkbox columns are still the way to go.
Checklist is super handy!
Please, make it easily re-ordable (as rows in table) OR at least copy-paste/select including symbol. Will replace tables for me in a lot of cases.
This is a really great feature and couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m using it to create a column where I write down feedback for a design, and the designer checks it off once it’s done.
Based on this, it would be really helpful if checklists can automatically be created in a text field be created via a button. Since I’m the doc maker, I can easily create checkboxes using " ". However, I’m 100% sure that the non-doc makers will frequently fumble around when they try to make checklists, and eventually they’re going to stop making checklists altogether.
So in this case, I’m making a column where the user adds a feedback, and then clicks on a button. The button action will automatically take that column’s value, and add it as a bullet point in the desired “feedback” column using ListCombine and BulletedList formulas.
However, it would be really great if we can replace the bullets with checkboxes. Is there anyway to create a checkbox list formula now, similar to how BulletedList works? If not, is it on the near roadmap?
Any chance we’ll get a .checklist() formula soon, for filtering and outputting as a simple checklist? Exactly what @Adnan_Ahmed was mentioning. +1 for that.
Can you share any specific examples of how you’d use this?
It’s a bit more involved than .bulletedlist(), since presumably you’d want the ability to check items. We’d need to store the checked state along with the formula content, and keep everything up to date when the results of the formula change.
The use case I had mentioned earlier in this thread has changed a bit - we were looking for a workaround, so we’re now using a separate table instead of a text column with checklist
How I’d see others in my team using this would be pretty identical to how Google Keep converts their text notes into checklists i.e. if I create a new line, it should automatically create a checklist item, maybe with the push of a button. I’m comfortable typing in to create a checklist item, but say my our accounts team person might not be that diligent or might be in too much of a rush to do that, especially since they’re not used to creating checklists this way. They’re more used to Google keeps method, or maybe something familiar as MS word where a button press creates a bullet point.
2nd use case: once the checklist has been switched on, if there’s a way to “force” an item and subsequent items after that to continue that checklist, that would also serve the purpose
3rd use case: say I want to convert everything in a user-editable text column into a nicely formatted, non-editable checklist-column using a formula which pulls all the data from the first column and converts it into a checklist. That way, my accounts guy won’t have to worry about formating, the system will take care of it.
I’m sure your team will find better ways to address these use cases, so I leave it up to you. For the moment I’ve already found a workaround for my initial problem, so there’s no rush for me personally
I see the problem… and indeed it gets way too complicated if you start thinking about scenarios, such as checking something, then having it removed by the filter, then being visible again.
Maybe being able to see a simple checklist (useful in a mobile view where tables often feel a bit heavy), based on an already existing checkbox inside the table? (eg, do something like Tasks.filter(yada yada).checklist(Tasks.Done())), making it mandatory for the list to contain some type of object/row that already has a state.
Examples of usages in my docs include:
extracting a simple list of immediate tasks from a more complicated master tasks list
making a grocery list based on a list of ingredients (to quickly check on mobile while shopping)
having a quick list of daily habits to check out (though I’m still debating how to do that, currently “doing” a habit involves clicking a button that records today as the last date that action was done, and increases a count)
Exactly what