Launched: Custom templates: drag, drop, and slash your way

[Steve_Won]

Many of us joined the Coda team as spreadsheet aficionados looking for a more powerful language or as database experts seeking a smoother experience. It seems that our makers — and our Community in particular — share that DNA. We’re all productivity and process nerds here. So we know what it feels like to have that perfectly formatted gantt, impeccable formula to automate away the mundane, or glorious two-page meeting agenda that gets things done.

And we also know what it’s like to lose it. To find an outdated version. To copy and paste and lose hours of precious edits. Or to find one in the wild that’s a shell of its former self.

It’s why I’m so excited to introduce custom templates — because we know every team has their unique way of working, hard earned lessons from years of experience. Now, shared knowledge can be a scaled process.

Starting today, you can templatize your best creations and share them across your workspace. Your custom template will appear as an option in the new doc dialog as well as in-doc. Simply go to the right-hand Explore panel to search for it — or hit the / command to find it, just like you would any Coda-official template.

A few quick tips and tricks:

1. Creating: You can create a template from any doc, new or existing. See a more in-depth tutorial here .
2. Sharing: Templates can be private or shared with your entire workspace.
3. Finding: You can choose how your template is accessed: from an existing doc, when creating a new doc, or both. Learn more here.
4. Pro tip: Templates come auto-populated with data (photos, text, dates). Use it as a way to standardize information and knowledge across the team!

Our hope is that you’ll do a little less copy-pasting and a lot more making with this new feature. We can’t wait to see what processes you ritualize with Coda’s custom templates. And as always, thanks to the many beta participants who provided us great feedback and support throughout the development of custom templates!

Looking for some inspiration or want to learn more about the rituals that helped us build this feature? Check out this doc from the team that built it or head to this webinar where we’ll walk you through it all!

[Juan_Manuel_Perez_Lostao]

Love it! You rock

[Jason_smith1]

THIS IS SO EPIC!

The-speed-at-which-the-flipping-cool-team-at-coda-ships-things-makes-me-re-evaluate-how-fast-I-should-be-working-my-own-personal-goals.

Coda is my sensei, and I his loyal student.

[Daniel_Velho]

Incredible and powerfull, as everything in Coda.
Now we only need paired lookups (as in Notion) and do natively have rows as pages (as in Notion).

[juergenheise]

This is a game changer. I have already implemented it in my workflow. A big time saver. Also helps to standardize structure and content. Keep going to make Coda the best app ever.

[TSStrickand1]

I’m guessing it’s not possible to share custom templates publicly (i.e with doc editors who aren’t members of a workspace)? This feature rocks, though.

[Juan_Manuel_Perez_Lostao]

Hi there @Steve_Won , there is a use case scenario for templates i discuss here:

Advance use of templates

Hello fellow friends, I’m requiring some Coda magician here. I think i saw once a post relating this matter, but I wanted to ask if you have a better way to achieve this: Scenario: You handle your projects from one, maybe bunch of docs, where you handle work in progress, consultancy results, functionalities and so. In those documents, your team update their work results, their ongoing tasks, customers information… You want to share part of that work with the world. Maybe you want to crea…

I think it is probably a common scenario, but maybe it is my consultancy bias.

Anyway, relates to create cross doc connections in template, where you clearly will probably need to change origin source filter when applying template… is that possible, or do you have such kind of functionality in your roadmap?

[Steve_Won]

Hi Juan. Thanks for sharing this scenario. This hasn’t been on the roadmap, but we will take this into account for future planning!

[SpencerChang]

If anyone is interested in the behind-the-scenes of how we thought about and built this feature, I wrote a piece on our blog diving into the juicy details!

Rituals at Scale: How we remixed templates

Also, today we launched multi-page drag-and-drop template support. See more details here.

[Connor_McCormick]

Great writeup! Thanks so much for sharing!

[Shariff]

some custom templates don’t show up on certain docs

[Evgeniy_Mamontov]

Yes, I also found the same problem
and the same applies to copying tables, can not be copied completely and correctly

[SpencerChang]

Hey Shariff, this is a known issue in a small percentage of cases with certain doc / template combos. We just made some improvements so that you can see when a template is still being made available for a doc and are continuously investing in this area to make the chances of running into this even lower. If you’re consistently experiencing issues, please write in to support, and we’ll do our best to get you sorted and apologies for the inconvenience you’re experiencing!

[SpencerChang]

Hi Evgeniy,

Could you write more about the issue with copying tables into support@coda.io? We haven’t heard about this kind of issue before so would love to learn more and get to the bottom of it

[TSStrickand1]

Hi there Why is that I am not given the option to use some of my templates within existing docs? Please see screenshot below for reference.