Launched: Two new features that’ll give your team more control as you plan your 2025 goals

As the new year begins, many teams are ready to kickstart their 2025 initiatives. And we have two feature updates designed to help you stay organized and divide the work effectively, so you can execute quickly.

Upgraded table groups: flexibility meets visibility.

Whenever a group is created, it becomes both a group and a hidden, ungrouped column This means you can update values such as task status or task owner quickly, without needing to adjust the group settings. That way, your tasks or goals can be displayed as organized groups, while making it easy for team members to keep their data fresh.

Introducing subitems: fresh out of beta.

With subitems, tasks can now be broken down into smaller, distinct pieces, allowing for better scoping, assignment, and tracking. Subitems create a parent-child hierarchy for tasks or goals, ensuring every piece is accounted for and managed effectively, offering clear visibility into progress and deadlines.

To turn on subitems, right-click (Windows) or command-click (Mac) on a row and select insert subitem. Alternatively, open the table display options and toggle show subitems. This will both turn on and display subitems.

Table groups and subitems: A dynamic duo.

When you add a group to a table with subitems shown, child items will remain nested under the parent item, and the displayed group will reflect the value of the parent item. That way, teams can easily monitor high-level progress. But when you want to get more granular, you can also display the column showing the value for each subitem.

For example, in the table below, status is grouped at the parent item level, but statuses for each parent and child item can easily be updated within each row.

For more details about subitems, check out this help article. And a big thank you to everyone who participated in the beta! We’re excited to hear about how these feature updates help your team divide up and collaborate on your 2025 goals.

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I don’t know what you guys changed but now I can’t paste images into a canvas column without it trying to turn it into a link. This completely ruined my doc and how I work and I need support now! I have been fighting with your bot for the last 30 minutes trying to get someone to help me. Please somebody reach out to me you just screwed me over really hard!

Update: Alison is helping me

Update: turns out it’s a Firefox issue. Coda pasting images work fine on chrome.

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Hi Phil, sorry to hear that you’re facing difficulty. It sounds like you are working with the support team (Alison is great!) which would be my suggestion.

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This alone is fantastic - will help our workflows immensely. Excited to check out subitems as well.

Thank you!

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Sub-Items have been a wishlist item for some time. Thank you!

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Sub-items are really nice improvement, and something that was really lacking. Will probably lead to redesigning quite some docs, but I really think its a feature that will make constructing some use-cases much easier.
What I am interested in, which I need to test out in next few days, how do they interact with formulas and how easy is to work with them in that regard? Is there a simple way to single out for example all sub-items of single task (basic use case would be progress bar)? Or they count as “normal” row and we need to figure out a way to filter them out?

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Subitems in Coda work exactly the same way as they do in Notion, where the table includes two relation columns: Parent and Subitems . This means all operations for filtering and aggregation will be done using formulas that reference these relations. There shouldn’t be any particular difficulties with this approach.

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This is awesome @Paul_Wilkins

I have been waiting for one feature which Notion is doing for years. You can create a page from a row entry. Example: We’ve clients and we want each client to have it’s own info page created when the new entry is made in the table and when a client row is removed or the status updated of client the page gets deleted or moved to different location (using automations).

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That sounds very doable in Coda too. Just create a separate topic for it and I’m sure somebody will be able to help you out.

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HI,

Coda’s approach to this is called a Canvas column. It is a table column that opens a “page”. Virtually anything you can do can be done in this canvas column cell, including another table, either linked or not.

You can also pull in different templates. I use it to pull in a template for a functional design document or a Technical design document, depending on another setting in the table. Works really well, and very powerful.

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Whenever a group is created, it becomes both a group and a hidden, ungrouped column

Just a little thing to know: if you want to use the hidden, ungrouped column when you have existing (legacy) groups, you have to ungroup first and then re-group. Then your hidden column will be ready for you to add to your table.

Nice feature!

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Great call out, thank you @joost_mineur!

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Incredible job! Thank you Codans

Thanks @Piet_Strydom. Yes I am aware of that feature and have been using that for hundreds of other things. Your idea start me thinking maybe I can change the approach from having a separate page for each client to have a canvas within their data row.

Regards.

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Any plans to expand the subitem feature so it can show subitems from other tables?

A simple example would be a list of projects showing tickets as subitems. This is already possible in detail view, but in the subitem view it may be more discoverable.

Also, it would be nice to be able to limit the number of levels of subitems.

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Hi @Nikola_Lajic , thanks for the feedback! We do not currently have immediate plans to support showing subitems from other tables but we will keep this in mind for future iterations.

To make sure I understand your example – is the idea that you want a table of projects, but want the ticket subitems to come from a different table?

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Thank you @Kathy_Pan that is correct. There are many cases where the parent and child need to have different data/columns, project/task is just one example.

Here is a quick mockup just so we are on the same page :slight_smile:

EDIT: now that I think about this more, this is basically grouping but more data from the group is visible (besides the display column). So maybe expanding the grouping capabilities would cover the same use cases. It would not be as editable, but the UX would be better.

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Subitems are a great add, thank you!

Regarding groups, I often work with large CSVs at my org to analyse and share Cloud infrastructure billing reports. I can’t help but assume lots of people use Coda to manage financial information, given that Coda’s collapsible row groups feature is very well done, almost unbeatable. It would be immensely helpful in terms of reducing noise if we could have a feature to collapse certain row groups for all users, and not just the active user.

I understand this is likely a challenging UI/UX problem. One reasonable/efficient way I can think about conquering this is to add an ability for a user to save the current ‘rendered’ view as a ‘canvas control’, which could be a button—akin to the existing canvas controls.

Thoughts?

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Nice one on the grouping! Love the updates as of late, keep em coming :fire:

Regarding groups — could you make it so we can easily hide grouped columns as well? Right now, you have to ungroup and then hide.

This is mostly an issue when copy pasting a view for which you may want other columns visible.

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celebrate

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