Launched: Enhancements to creating & editing links

[Matthew_Tebbs]

The last couple years, we’ve been on a mission to make the experience of copy/pasting a link into Coda as fun and powerful as possible—giving you options to display a URL with a simple card, an embed, or with a live data connection via Packs. But until today, those features were hard to find.

Now any time you paste or type a link into Coda, we’ll ask how you want to display it. A plain no-frills URL? A title and card? Or do you want a full-on embed with a Pack to fetch live data.

We worked hard to ensure that this feature doesn’t interrupt your flow. If you’re taking notes or pasting in lots of links, you can keep working. You don’t need to make a choice as you can always change it later.

Creating a Link

Paste or type a link and you’ll be offered a choice of display types - link, title, card, embed or Pack. Note that the options to display with a title, as a card or using a Pack will not show if not supported. This feature is currently not supported in table cells, but we’ll be adding that soon.

As an example of this interaction, here is the result of choosing each of these display types.

Editing a Link

After you’ve inserted your link you can change the display type at any time by clicking the edit button when hovering over the link or using the hyperlink shortcut (Cmd + K or ⌘ + K).

Using Formulas Directly

As with many features in Coda the link display types are provided by formulas behind the scenes ー we use our own building blocks :).

These can be directly added to the doc’s canvas or to a column in a table. Here are the details.

• Hyperlink(url, displayValue) to display as a link with an optional title.
• HyperlinkCard(url) to display as a card.
• Embed(url, width, height, force) to display as an embed.

Enjoy!

We think this will help you bring more content seamlessly together in one place. Here are just a few examples of what you can use it for.

• Making a central hub of press coverage related to a given topic.
• Track the live status of a pull request in your meeting notes with the Github Pack.
• Use the Figma Pack to embed a Figma design and have it update in real time.

For more ideas and templates to get you started check out the Coda template gallery.

Let us know what you think! Feel free to comment on this post or reach out to our customer support. We’re always interested in your feedback.

[Thomas_Schulz]

Great Excited to try this new features

[Angad]

Thanks Thomas!

A couple of quick tips:

• The “Title” and “Card” options may take up to a second to show up on a slow internet connection.
• For some types of content, like a Google Doc or Sheet, you’ll need to make sure the link is shared publicly.
• This feature is currently not supported in table cells, but that’s coming soon

[Tom_Mohr]

just a small organizational though. the hyperlink syntax is in shape in the coda.io/formulas documenation page. I was just looking through there to try and find something about hyperlinks and just did not at all to think it would be found in shape. I found it through this page.

It may be more beneficial to have it under object or something to that effect. hyperlinks seem more like an object than a shape to me.

glad that it is there, though, because it’s made something I’m working on much, much prettier and easier to work on.

thanks, again, as always!

[111104]

How can I extract a link url?
For example, this a link in a cell, code community, I want to get the url, how can I do?

[oleg]

It’s a bit tricky right now. If the column is a URL, you can use Hyperlink(Column).ToText() to get it. But unfortunately if it’s a link inside a text range, there is currently no way of getting the underlying link. It’s something we’ve looked into and we’d probably have to add a new formula.

[Barry_Nelson]

One thing I can’t quite figure out. In the demo clip and in my own usage, if I paste a URL directly into a doc canvas, it gives me the option to have it display as the target page’s Title (rather than the URL).

If on the other hand, I want to get the same functionality in a table, I’m stumped. hyperlinkCard lets me manually set a URL title, but how do I allow a table to present the URL automatically as a page title?

My use case is pretty simple. I have a “Research List” table that I’ll paste articles into. I use this for a few different things but I want to be able to simply @ mention an item on that table, and if I can’t extract the title from a URL I paste in there I have to – O THE HUMANITY!!! – type the page’s title myself.

BTW I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a simple answer to this that I’m going to feel silly for having overlooked.

[Jean_Pierre_Traets]

Dear @Barry_Nelson,

I think you make a good point, pasting in the canvas gives you the possibility to get access to the page title

With the formula =hyperlink( url,displayvalue: ) the title is not “automatically extracted” from the webpage.

I am sure it will be possible, but I am not aware of how to get it done in a simple way.

Dear @Paul_Danyliuk, @Federico_Stefanato or @BenLee do you have a workaround?
Of course anybody else also very welcome to address your suggestions

[Federico_Stefanato]

Mumble…

@Barry_Nelson unfortunately the simple answer is that - AFAIK - it’s quite complicated.
Even playing around with the underlying JSON (of both URL field or Hyperlink() outcome function), I can’t find a straightforward way, as @oleg and @Jean_Pierre_Traets said.

Allowing to extract what in the underlying is already implemented (i.e. title form URL) in a function would sort it out.
I wish to know from Codans some more info, but I’d expect a “It’s definitely on our radar, but we don’t have an ETA yet”

@Barry_Nelson however if you could share your sample, I’ll try to take out something.

[BenLee]

This is a tough spot with the nicer layout change. I had posted in a topic about doing this, but this ability broke with the update. Since then, I’ve notice more benefits and really appreciate this new functionality, but this is a particular use-case where an extra step or two is involved now. Here’s the other post if you’re curious…

How to Extract Link from a Column?

An update was made to how URLs are handled in order to show much better display options, but it unfortunately meant that this behavior would break. The question has come up before, so we know there is a use-case for it, but not sure of a solution at the current moment. You can read more about the updated URL features here:

[raina0983]

Is there an option to set the document settings to always paste the URL as a URL, showing the actual https://…domain.com/… ?

My document keeps changing these to show the title. I want the URL. Always.