Hi there,
I am trying to merge 5 different Coda Tables from different orgs to create a Primary Tracker with all the initiatives/jobs to be done for the half.
- Each team has their own Coda with their own trackers and different columns / column names
- I want to import their Codas into the main Coda and then use the tables there
- I’d like to create a joint tracker where I pull data from different column names from different tabs (coming from cross-doc) so that I can build a consolidated Primary tracker
- I’d like all info do dynamically update if the teams update the Primary tracker, their tracker on my Coda, or their tracker on their original coda
In Excel, this would’ve easily been done with an index match.
– The best I got to so far is (across two tables as an example)
[1] Either the following formula, but it puts everything in the SAME cell, not one item per Cell.
ListCombine(
[E&S Initiatives].Initiative,
[Sales Training and Enablement Tracker].Item
).Unique()
[2] OR An “ADD” Button, but it adds one table’s initiatives in 1 cell, and the other’ tables’ initiatives in a second cell.
ListCombine(
[E&S Initiatives].Initiative.ToText(),
[Sales Training and Enablement Tracker].Item.ToText()
)
.Unique()
.FormulaMap(
AddRow(
Table,
Initiative,
currentValue
)
)
Any advice on how to proceed?
I’m not sure the Add Button is the right approach as I will also want to pull over deadlines, owners, etc., so I think that the formula per column is key.
Thank you so much!
This is a tricky one for sure, as Coda doesn’t have a way to merge tables (even if the columns were identical). The “Coda way” to do something like this is to have a single giant table with everyone’s data, which then gets filtered to the relevant team (so for example, if I’m on the Sales team, Coda knows who I am and will just show me tracker items from the table that are relevant to Sales). But this means that
- Everyone needs to use the same column names
- Everyone needs to trust each other enough to be in the same doc (all data in docs should be assumed to be viewable by all doc users, even if in practice you can tuck some of it away somewhat out of sight)
If you really want to aggregate things based on the architecture you have today, I think the only way would be creating a custom Pack.
- The Pack would create a sync table in your aggregator doc
- It would pull in data from specific docs and specific columns that you’ve defined in the Pack code
- Each row would have a column keeping track of which doc it came from
- 2-way edits would be enabled to allow you to push edits back out to the individual docs (and, based on the “source doc” column, the Pack would know which column to update in the individual doc)
And yes, as you saw, formulas are really just for populating a certain column’s cells on a row-by-row basis (they can’t create/update a set of rows).
Buttons are more useful for editing multiple rows at once. Come to think of it, maybe you could implement something like the Pack I was describing using buttons?
Something like this (copy the doc to get at the formulas): Aggregator
(And then you’d add a button for going back the other way, from aggregator to individual docs - lmk if you need help with that)
Thank you for this!
Let me investigate further and see if I get stuck / need more help.
I also had a go with Buttons to add/modify into a central tracker and it looks like it’s working, but I’m not 100% confident on how reliable they are at updating, and they are definitely one-directional for now (from individual to central).
Hoping I can get everyone’s buy-in for the same data source and create views they’ll use instead haha.