Hi all, thanks for your feedback on user-specific views. We oftentimes call that functionality “sub-doc sharing” or the ability to share a specific page.
Transparently, sub-doc sharing is a very common request, and one we’ve discussed at length (we’ve even Hackathon-ed potential solutions to it). The biggest challenge with Coda is that docs can be very interactive, and so defining how a “subdoc share” should operate can be tricky.
Some questions we have to answer:
- What should happen to views of tables that are not included in the share, or formulas that refer to other parts of the document?
- And how should we handle security for users that are creative at seeing everything that comes across to their machine - should we not transmit unshared data?
As we looked at some comparable products to Coda, many of them took shortcuts on these expectations, which we weren’t very comfortable with.
This is why we’re tackling this request in a few stages.
First, we launched cross-doc (with cross-doc actions) as a way to handle this for table data. Then, we started with what might seem like an unrelated launch, but is quite foundational: progressive loading of docs. We launched this as a performance improvement, but it’s also a key building block that allows us to start separating docs into parts, and not send all of them to the client. More to come as we build on this concept.
While we continue to think through this challenge, we’d love to know more about your desired use cases—please sound off in the comments! Key questions we’d love your feedback on:
- What types of docs would you like to share subsets of, and how would you describe the shared subset?
- How interactive would you want it to be (e.g. is read-only ok? would you want it to update when other parts of the doc updated?)?
- And if you’ve already tried cross-doc, which cases did that solve vs. not?
We’ll keep you posted on our progress here, and hope you’re as excited as we are for some big upcoming changes to our editor and overall product performance that help us get further down the road on the request to enable sub-doc sharing.
Thanks!