Hey there! Love Coda so far! My main app is Notion, but I love the design language and automations in coda.
My question is, if I’m creating a table for tasks, is there any way to create a ‘notes’ field that is Rich Text or Markdown?
That’s the big thing i’m really missing, since pretty much everything in notion can be a page, so you can actually have a “page” for notes embedded into your task, inside your table. I can obviously use a text field but that’s not really giving me what I’m looking for.
That’s actually very cool and I didn’t realize coda could do that, but I meant more of a long-form notes field in a cell.
Best way I know to describe it is that in Notion, if you open up a detail view of record/row, you get a large area at the bottom where you can put whatever you want, essentially it’s a page within a page.
Am I missing something or is this still unresolved? There is no long-form field that can be used to keep notes for a given row … that I’m able to get working. Even in layout view, if you press Enter on while in a text field, that field loses focus. You have to press Shift+Enter for every new row. And while it seems that markdown is supported, there are no editing tools available in the UI … what’s the markdown for red text again??
I agree with OP, the “everything’s a page” model of Notion is one area that it seems to cater to more usage scenarios. Notion outperforms in document-centric workflows, like building a knowledge base, whereas Coda outperforms in spreadsheet-centric workflows.
It would be really nice if coda could make pages available as fields.
To me Coda and Notion are two very different animals with different use cases. Coda is an extremely powerful visual database system slash application builder, whereas Notion is more of a rich knowledge portal.
Sure, Notion can notionally (see what I did there?) do relational databases but all the parts don’t integrate to a more powerful whole imo. For example, one of the example layouts is a company portal which provides you a place to enter vacation days and a separate place to manage a team calendar - but can the team calendar show the vacation days from the table? Not that I could see in the admittedly brief time I spent with it.
However, Notion looks to be stronger at attractive page layouts and rich content than Coda, so the two systems compliment each other quite well. I could see myself using Coda applications embedded in Notion - I think that would be really quite nice.
I’m not knocking Notion here. I currently use DevonTHINK for my knowledge-base and am considering switching that to Notion. I guess my point is, erm, horses for courses?
Hi Shishir (or a member of your great support team as you are the CEO after all )
Could you explain to me further how the Layout compares with the Notion method of adding text to the bottom of a card/page? I am hoping to go “all in” with you guys, but really gravitating back to Notion for the Wiki/Notetaking capabilities. I think the primary benefit they have is ease of adding notes at the bottom of an opened card/page, as is described above. If you guys had a rich text capability, or a column that formatted like “canvas” as was suggested in the link referenced below, I think you’d pretty much have just about all that Notion offers! with the exception, IMHO of:
better, but limited permissioning within the workspace
somewhat more capable hierarchy within the workspace/doc, although I’m hoping when linked Docs come out (big ++1 for that feature) you guys will leapfrog them to an even more superior solution.
Keep up the great work and eagerly awaiting your next feature releases!!
Seems that a lot of people is requesting this and no love from the Coda team which I don’t understand.
If you look on Notion discussion boards you’ll see the main reasons people don’t switch to Coda even though in many ways is superior, are the free form editing in a row and multiple column content structure on pages.
I don’t think is extremely hard to embed page content to the bottom of each row above the comments section, basically you’re creating a page editable from a row, all the logic is already there.
@Virgil - I’ve got nothing to do with the coda devs - but I do know that what you are asking for is much much more difficult than you might imagine.
A lot has to do with data-structures (and how coda treats the data in a document). The logic would not already be there. Maybe some parts - but it would be nothing close to just turning something on. I would imagine the effort involved in hours (and what it would mean for other features in development) or simply the product roadmap and where they are positioning coda have meant it is not a priority.
I’m a full stack developer for 10 years, I know it’s not as easy as it looks, especially since you don’t know the data structure, code base etc but I also know that they have already built most of what’s required to accomplish it. It’s more about the product team realizing how important the feature is, because it can be done.
Of course the cell formulas won’t work, but it doesn’t have to be a cell in a table it can simply be a separate entity like comments are on a row, I think that’s the easiest way to implement. It won’t mess with data types, won’t affect the formulas and so on. Just a page associated with a row, added just above or below the comments section, you can call it “Notes”, “Description” doesn’t really matter as long as it behaves like a page. I think this will have a huge impact on adoption and growth.
I see my other thread is ignored, so I’ll try here as well:
Can someone from Coda team give a look at this and please tell us if a “Note” section (that behaves like a page) for a row is considered and can be added this year?
This is still major win for Notion. And this isn’t only about note taking experience. It’s about having more flexibility for everything including task tracking and project managment.
In Notion since every row is a page we can have completely tailored approach for each projects. For a small personal project a short description and relation to couple of tasks is enough. However for big enterprise projects short description in not enough. In Notion we can write down all the goals, phases, etc, create new tables that allow to group in ways unique to that particular project etc.
So in a way Coda is more powerful because of all the features but just by having that “everything is a page” Notion has so much in it. In Coda we’re tied with 1 strict structure for everything. So it’s either manage your big project same as small one or create separate structure for bigger project which will end up messing up the master tasks view by decoupling things in there.
I understand that there might be problem with how the fundamental doc structure is created in Coda but
this is a must have feature
Some response from team if this is even planned to address would be helpful.
I’m bummed totally right now… I completely love this notion-like doc idea that they created however I hate Notion purely by how mismanaged their development is (I mean come on - workarounds to manually create recurring tasks for years is somewhere between funny and pathetic ) so I was super excited seeing the progress of Coda. However realising that we lose all the flexibility the moment we move stuff into databases … deem that’s harsh
Hi @Karlis_Janisels, I’m a member of Coda’s support team. Sorry for the delayed reply.
We appreciate the feedback and insight . Your point about how how a canvas/page type column has applications beyond note taking is true. Unfortunately we can’t share specifics about our roadmap but we definitely do listen to feedback from community members like yourself around how Coda could be a better tool.
I’m also from Notion, and I am exploring Coda as a replacement, due to how much more powerful it is. I hit the same issue as those on this thread. I would also like Coda to add something similar to Notion, but there is a workaround that requires a few more steps that in Notion, but not much. The idea is to have a button to create a new project page, which will be linked to a row in a Projects table.
Create a project in the Projects table, and give it a name.
Click on the “Create project page” button, which will create a new page for the project, and display it.
In the newly created page, click on the dropdown at the top of the page and select the newly created project.
Click on the “Add page link to project table” button.
Once you’ve done this, things are set up so that the button in the Projects table turns into “Open projects page”, which will open the projects page (rather than create a new page). In the project page, the button previously called “Add page link to project table” has turned into a “Open project row” button, which displays the project details when clicked.
I hope that this helps.
PS: This is the first time that I am sharing a link to a Coda doc, I hope it works correctly…
Thanks! The use case is that sometimes, you want to add a lot of free-form, unstructured information to a table row, which is currently limited in Coda. Expanding a text cell allows you to have some formatted text, but not whatever you want (e.g, tables, embedded files, collapsible lists, code blocks, etc.). Examples where this is useful are for example projects, or products, or clients.
Notion solves this quite elegantly by having each row of a table be a page, so that beyond the structured information, you can write anything you want inside the page.
It’s possible to do that in Coda by creating a canvas page, but I find it a bit clunky to associate the page with the row, so I tried to automate the process as much as possible with buttons.
thanks @Eric_Rabbath , the context is thus more note taking and linking related info over pages. I never considered using Coda this way, but I see your point and I guess what you want in this regard is very logical for many others. The solution is btw elegant, I like it.
@Eric_Rabbath this is awesome! Thank you for taking the time to share this clever (and elegant and simple) setup.
You mentioned the use-case for this being “sometimes, you want to add a lot of free-form, unstructured information to a table row.” Is there a specific sort of activity where you tend to use this sort of row-as-page setup a lot? And what role does this setup play in it? (Example: “For an art critique I like to store the image in the row and then write a long essay while including other pictures so I use this setup to do…”)
For anyone else watching this thread: Good news on this front!
We’ve been hearing your requests and have been researching this for a while. It has now become a project that we’re really excited about !
There is a good bit to it, so we don’t have an ETA at the moment, but keep an eye out for it later this year…
If you’d like to contribute to our efforts, feel free to reply with what you would use this row-as-page feature for and how the feature is uniquely positioned to support that activity
I mentioned this post in our company chat and found out that we are looking to ship the ability to get the page link back from the duplicate page action. That could simplify this template even more. I don’t have a definite ETA, but hoping it’s soon.
)
which I don’t understand.
. Your point about how how a canvas/page type column has applications beyond note taking is true. Unfortunately we can’t share specifics about our roadmap but we definitely do listen to feedback from community members like yourself around how Coda could be a better tool.
!
