If you’ve been using Coda for awhile, we hope you’ve seen the improvements to copy/paste! Personally, I’m really excited because I use copy/paste a lot to build docs out faster by “borrowing” content from old docs and gallery examples.
So what’s new?
Pasting content across docs is much higher fidelity. As an example, we don’t lose buttons, column formats and formulas when you copy / paste across docs.
Whenever you paste a range, we maintain relationships between all the copied items. If you copy a control and connected view, the pasted control and pasted view will be connected to each other!
We give you options on what to paste:
You get to select which rows to bring: the visible ones, all of the rows (including hidden rows) or none of them
Inside the same doc, you can decide whether you want to paste everything as views or if you want to duplicate the range.
Psst… We also added a duplicate section option. Right click a section name to use it. Would love to hear how this helps with your docs!
It still not working very well… it forgets the dependency for a view to their needed table. It needs an option to copy/move alle needed dependencies and relink associated views.
Maybe a global copy/move option to move sections/tables to a different doc would be also helpful
You bring up good points and these are things we hope to get to in a future pass at copy/paste.
For now, we focused on making sure that we brought over the content within the range itself in full fidelity. We’d like to give users the capability to bring dependent content outside the range in the future. In the short term, if you include the dependent tables are in the copied range, the links will be maintained when you copy across doc.
We will also look at supporting bigger ranges (like folders) and relinking across docs over multiple pastes in a future version.
This addition is fantastic, and I’ve already used it several dozen times! My question is - is there (or will there be in the future) a way to duplicate a single column, or group of columns within the same table? And is there a way to copy a table (or selection of columns) and add the columns/rows/data to an already existing table? I’m mainly asking this for table building purposes - not actual user interaction.
Background: I’m currently building a training database for a small chain of restaurants used to keep track of several hundred employees and their completion of about 160ish ‘tasks’ that they must complete when they’re hired. These tasks are broken down into 7 blocks. Every week our Director of Training sends the managers a sheet of all 14 shifts for that week which, based on the schedule, has which employee needs to complete what task. The managers after each shift - simply click the corresponding button to the employee’s task they actually completed - and it starts a chain reaction of tracking that task and when all tasks in one block is completed - it triggers an alert letting our Director know they are ready for a test and can move on to the next block.
So the master table will eventually have 160 plus columns of buttons for all 200 plus employees. Every button is exactly the same with the same action once pushed, the only difference being the column name for the button itself and the column name for the set value. It would be amazing if I could copy the button and then simply go in and change the names instead of having to build each button from scratch. Is something like that possible now? Or could be in the future? Or is there another way of doing something like that that I’m just missing?
The ability to copy columns is a great request and is coming - I’ll let the team respond on that.
On your specific scenario, I wonder if there’s a way to model this with a smaller number of buttons. I could imagine using the User() formula to have the button do something different based on each user, or using a SwitchIf() condition in the button logic. If you want to post a sample of what it’s doing, perhaps I (or someone else in the community) could offer some suggestions?
Is there a way to duplicate a section with sub-pages? As in, making copies of the tables instead of views? This would be really helpful for the template I am making right now-- a huge bonus would be a button behavior that lets me set which pages(s) are duplicated so that I can make sure my users get it right every time.
I’ve just spent an hour drag-n-dropping 54 columns into a Layout… They snap and jump around and it is not a very smooth or pleasant process.
Now I want to use that Layout as the starting point for a new layout, same table, and there’s no “Duplicate Layout” functionality? Clicking “New Layout” just creates a brand new layout, with no rhyme or reason as to the column placement?!
Surely there is a way to duplicate an existing Layout, in the same Table, and we don’t have to start from scratch every time we want to create a new Layout in the same Table???
I have a table with 100+ columns, 3000+rows in DocA
I needed to make a ‘throw-away’ copy of values only 5 columns/100rows to a separate DocB. Some of the columns in question are calculated by formula.
I duly made a view of the table that only shows the relevant columns and rows, ctrl/c and ctrl/v into my other doc… and: What I expected: That I would get a “paste values” option and get a copy of only the the visible rows and columns in the source view. What I got: The only two paste options are whether or not to copy the rows. Without given me any choice, Coda :
1) copies the formulas instead of the values (which immediately break because they depend on other tables in DocA) and
2) copies all the 100+ columns in the original table and just hides them.
I can maybe understand how this could be the desired behaviour in a small minority of cases, but it is in no way a reasonable default. We should at least have the option of copying only the range in view as values only as a third paste option.
@Agile_Dynamics , that’s what I ended up doing, with the extra-step of having to make the ‘copy’ in DocA and then actually copy-pasting it into DocB.
It just feels horribly convoluted for what should and could have been a simple ctrl/c + ctrl/v.
I fully support this feedback