Migrating from SmartSheet? ClickUp? AirTable? Google Sheets? Plutio? Etc?

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I’ve been watching CODA for over a year. WAY COOL for organizing the interdependent chaos of text+cells+hierarchy.

I’m in deep with task/workflow/project management systems as a power user for myself and consultant for clients. There have been NUMEROUS new apps and tools coming out in the past 3 years and it’s hard to keep up with. CODA is def one-of-a-kind. I’ve watched videos and played with it for many hours now and I think I “get” a lot of it. Even so, to save time I have some features/usability/ease-of-use questions I’d prefer to throw to the community.

  1. Forms? I have many intake forms (embeddable w a custom URL) for clients and staff to input info that goes into our sheets. Is this there now or coming soon? From what I can tell, seems like we have to do a Zap?
  2. Parent/child tasks? I saw that this can be in a text list with like a heading and the text can fold under it - but what about in a table/grid format? It’d seem easy to allow a row to just drag and indent.
  3. Easy foldable row groups? like in GSheets or Excel? Or hierarchy like in SmartSheet? I saw one post on a solution but doesn’t seem built-in.
  4. Comments per row or item or per cell? I love how GSheets has comments and notes on any selection or cell.
  5. Customizable font size and margins? CODA is elegant but bulky. I’d prefer the option of more compact margins when I need to fit more data in. It only seems to have small/large for font and no margin options.
  6. Robust Gantt? I saw some Gannt tuts here but it doesn’t seem very robust. Thoughts?
  7. Drag Gantt range? Can you drag the Gannt range on the grid to change dates? That’s a nice feature in SmartSheet and ClickUp? Or do you need to type them in?
  8. Multiple relatable dates? In some of my SmartSheets I have four date references: start date, due date, workrange start, workrange end. I use the start/due as hard dates and the workrange start/end for the Gantt. Think I can do that here?
  9. Attachments? Only seems like we can do links? That seems like a core features in these kinds of apps today. Am missing it?
  10. Reports? It seems this is doable with the CrossDoc feature? Can I make diff report types for clients? I can now make a project URL for the client that is either only-view, comment or edit per sheet or report.
  11. CrossDoc - is that two-way sync?
  12. Dashboards? Seems like we could create anything we want because data can now be searched in your entire CODA account? Right?
  13. How robust are the formula choices? Seems usable (but works a little differently than the last 30+ years.)
  14. Embed a doc (or section of a doc) in a webpage (iFrame?) or another app?

BIG THANKS to all those who tackle these Qs!

:slight_smile:

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Dear @Michael_Nelson_Rizzo, welcome to the community :handshake:

Like all tools, there is no tool that meets all, Coda gets closer, but…

Coda doesn’t publish a road map on what’s coming up, but is strongly listening to their users/community

Not integrated, but possible to to use an external product of your choice and get the info with Zapier or Integromat in the table of your choice.

Not sure what you exactly have in mind, if it are task dependencies it’s possible

In Coda we use “grouping” possible to do this “left” and “top”, but have in mind it differs form Excel/Sheets

Comments on each row is possible and you are able to reference a person that could receive a message/pop-up depending on the settings made.

Coda is not a text editor, neither a spreadsheet, neither presentation software. It has all and even more inside and therefore has been chosen to limit the choices, mainly to keep it workable and focus on making a doc that has the functionality of an app!

Very basic level at this moment, but personally I expect/hope (no evidence) that this will be upgraded in the near future

Possible, but again it’s basic.

Not out of the box, but quite easy to generate according your needs. Coda is for Makers

Yes you are right, so far only links.

It depends a lot of your own creativity, think also about interactive reports as the doc is an app.

You will need a team plan to get the most out of it.

I see this more as visual reporting (see above) Docs will need to be connected to be able to get up to date info

Yes the formulas have a learning curve and the people with a coding background will catch it faster, but like me without such a background, I managed to get learned, especially thanks for the community members and also the templates have helped me a lot. The satisfaction is BIG, when you see that it’s you that has created it :construction: :building_construction:

Embeding is possible, “Iframe” not yet

Start small and build it out step by step, believe me “You will enjoy”.

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Thank you so much for this fantastic and thorough answer. Very helpful!! If tech support always gave such clarity, the world would be better! :slight_smile:

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