Launched: Even better collaboration in Coda

[Kelsey_Chan]

When we launched Coda 2.0 in 2019, we did so with a tagline of, “A new doc for teams.” Since then, we’ve seen over 25,000 teams adopt Coda—with many more on the way! While we’re hard at work on a host of improvements to some of Coda’s core features, we made some refinements along the way to make collaborating in Coda even easier.

“Quiet Mode”

Whether you’re drafting OKRs, running effective meetings, drafting product requirements documents, or building out marketing briefs—odds are you’ve run into a time when it seems like every one of your teammates has their cursor in your doc. Sometimes that’s exciting, but in especially large meetings or on tight timelines, it can also be distracting.

Now, when you’re working in the same doc as your colleagues and need a little bit of extra focus, you can hide the cursors of the rest of your team. When others are in your doc, simply hover over the ellipsis next to everyone’s avatars and select “Hide collaborator’s activity.” Once you’ve toggled the setting on, you won’t see any collaborative cursors bouncing around the page or highlighting content. You can toggle the setting off in the same location, or simply refresh the page.

Locking that works with you [Team & Enterprise Plans]

Since we launched locking in Coda, the default behavior for an unlocked doc was to lock as soon as you changed pages. We’ve heard your feedback that this interrupts your processes when you check another page for information or to grab a link, value, or table view, so now we’ll keep your doc unlocked for you as you navigate between pages until you lock it again—or until 10 minutes of inactivity, whichever comes first. Learn more about doc locking.

Link to comments from any part of the conversation

Previously, if you wanted to share a link to a comment thread in Coda, you had to access the option from the first message in the thread. Now, you can click the 3-dot ‘kebab’ menu in any message in a comment thread to access and share the link.

We hope these improvements make it even easier to collaborate effectively in Coda!

[Ed_Liveikis]

Cool! The doc unlock changes are going to be really nice to avoid losing focus. I don’t see it yet in my docs, maybe it hasn’t rolled out yet to all.

[Kelsey_Chan]

Hi, @Ed_Liveikis! You’ll need to refresh your doc for the latest changes to go into effect Let me know if that doesn’t do the trick!

[Matthew_Tebbs]

If you refresh/reload the browser tab you should see the updates.

[Matthew_Tebbs]

What @Kelsey_Chan said.

[adoc_mama]

I am looking forward to the direct link to a comment thread. I am in the process of getting me and my 3 kids set up on Coda to manage our family. I foresee our comment threads getting large for certain topics. Today, I want my kids to make a back to school supply list in Coda with a table column with direct links to the products in Amazon. This way I can just order everything at once. Before Coda, my kids each sent me separate text messages with Amazon product links. So with 3 kids I currently have 27 separate text messages sent to me from each of my 3 kids that contain individual product links … ugh! I’d love to hear how/if other people use Coda for day to day home life family management. Also, thank you Coda for these recent product updates!

[Ed_Liveikis]

It’s working today @Kelsey_Chan , great!

[Blaise_d_Estais]

hide collaborator activity should also hide collaborators’ faces on the top right corner!
I find the faces very disturbing, I currently use an adblock to hide the faces (since a long time), but it would be good to have it by default!
Thank you !

[Susan_M_Davis]

I’m with you on this one! I LOVE your idea. I might add this to my doc. I created a Home doc where I now track EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING. I have vehicles, insurance, subscriptions, extended warranties, vitamins, tasks, books I want to read, videos I want to watch, goals, etc. It has become my life planner. I keep finding more things to organize in it.

I can totally understand your busy momness as I am a widowed mother of SIX! Yep…13 years of being the only parent to six kids so I get it. If we don’t get organized we drown! I thought I was the only techie mom out there who used technology to simplify a busy/hectic life.

I even created a table to track our cats. We have six of those as well, all rescues. I now have a place to know when they had their last shots, when they went to the vet, how old they are (like I’m going to remember how old the cats are? I have to do math to figure out how old the kids are!), when they had their flea and tick treatments, when they were last bathed, etc. I even put a photo of each cat on their row.

I keep thinking I will “finish” my Coda doc at some point and yet I keep finding other things to manage in it.

[adoc_mama]

Oh wow! I tip my hat to you. Thank you for sharing about how you are managing things. I am certain I could learn a lot from you. I am also finding a million things to add to my Coda doc. I am trying to finish it as well and then I think of more things to add. I used to keep everything in Evernote but I reached the limits of it because of their forced notebook/note hierarchy.
My next Coda goal is to get my kids to really adopt it for both their school and home stuff.
Thank you again and feel free to message me so we can stay in touch.

[adoc_mama]

I am copying my reply again here because for some reason I can’t tell if my reply goes directly to you or to the board in general. Thank you for your thoughtful reply

Oh wow! I tip my hat to you. Thank you for sharing about how you are managing things. I am certain I could learn a lot from you. I am also finding a million things to add to my Coda doc. I am trying to finish it as well and then I think of more things to add. I used to keep everything in Evernote but I reached the limits of it because of their forced notebook/note hierarchy.
My next Coda goal is to get my kids to really adopt it for both their school and home stuff.
Thank you again and feel free to message me so we can stay in touch.

[Yuriy_Mykhasyak]

Is there any way to completely turn off collaborator activity for the space? It looks like if you click on the user icon you can see his private content and that is not like it should work in business environment.

[Jean-Marie_FAVRE]

@Yuriy_Mykhasyak It seems that overall Coda takes an “open bar” approach: everybody can almost see everything. See, for instance, the topic ““Search” unfortunately reveals all “hidden” pages, all hidden data”. It is, in practice, quite hard to hide information. Let’s assume that you have some email addresses or some other personal information stored in a table. Even if you try to hide the table, the page, or whatever, Coda search will happily reveal everything to everybody. The global search ruins everything. As you mentioned “it is not like it should work in a business environment.” But unfortunately, that’s how Coda works so far. When you enter an open bar, you can have whatever you want for free, but don’t expect to have some privacy. This is just not the spirit. For many years now, people have been complaining about the hidden stuff. We never got an answer from Coda. It seems that nobody cares. Instead of hiding the global search button, Coda adds more and more ways to improve the search, which is great. Coda is a really great tool, fantastic indeed, but it is built to share information… If you don’t want to share everything, then the tool is far from perfect. Maybe at some point, Coda will move beyond the open bar philosophy. In the mean time I agree, as you say, “it is not like it should work in a business environment”.

[Yuriy_Mykhasyak]

Jean-Marie_FAVRE, thanks.
I was able to hide tables from search by hiding all columns in the table and modal layout, applying a “false” filter to the source table. This also practically fixes access to all rows in subtables.
But after you think you have found a workaround to most critical privacy issues, test with the pilot group, and deploy the document company-wide, you get complaints that you could not predict even with the small pilot group.
Because, you can catch the issue only if someone opens the row or starts writing in a new row after you arrive at his page. And you need many users in the system to catch this.

[Jean-Marie_FAVRE]

Thanks @Yuriy_Mykhasyak for the idea. I will try this ! Coda open-bar philosophy makes the lifes of makers quite hard. Controlling what drinkers can do or not is quite difficult and Coda could be a quite risky place for those not aware of all this. What is strange, IMHO, is that there is no roadmap for the future, or indeed any kind of communication related to this philosophy. I don’t know what to expect in the future.