I was excited for Coda, looking at syncing values across documents and tables for a self-updating system, but after a full day of trying to get Coda to do…ANYTHING, I’m disenchanted with its awful incapability. I’m perfectly willing to concede I’m stupid and nascent, but I haven’t even lucked into making a single function work. Literally everything is a dead-end with this garbage system. Create a calendar? Don’t expect to be able to add any items. Import from Google Calendar? Ditto. Following a Lookups tutorial? None of the references you need will load, and get ready to import an entire row as a link instead of pulling the data you actually want to display. I could link to a doc or table in Google sheets if I wanted a static link. What I need is cross-page data displayed.
It’s appalling how deep this deprecation has rotted into the UX. Every single tutorial or template I’ve found is broken in some way. Yes, I read and watched all the documentation. Most of it’s built around a UI that no longer resembles what’s there. Even something as simple as a link to an in-house calendar template is broken, and when you look it up of your own accord, the CTA for the Sync button is missing, leaving you to work out for yourself what to do next and how. I’ve just lost six hours I could have spent doing the job I’m paid for.
I think I’d rather use Monday. At least I know Monday won’t be able to do what I want it to do, instead of chasing after documentation that eventually reveals it, and I won’t have to build most of it myself to reach that state of non-functionality.
No need to reply, I’m not coming back. Enjoy your app, if you can make it work.
@KinshipBHM I am a bit surprised by your post because in all honesty my only issue with Coda is that it does so many great things that I have been a bit over-zealous with what it might handle (trying to pump in a ridiculous amount of data into one doc).
There is a bit of a learning curve though and I have certainly run across a few dated examples but to me that is just a sign that there are constant improvements being made. As far as a calendar is concerned I have recently dabbled with the Google Calendar pack and the built-in calendar view on Coda with success.
You are correct here - it is not possible to add to the imported calendar from the Google Calendar pack. That table does not seem to allow for adding rows because it is a one-way sync. If events are added to a Coda calendar and those events are synced to the Google Calendar, then they do show up on the next sync (see the gif above with an example).
I did have a hard time grasping the way lookups work in Coda at first as I was used to =vlookup() and =index(match()) in Excel. After I did get a handle on it I found that it is very effective and use it quite a bit to make my life easier with some reports I run on a regular basis (pulling in sales rep information related to customers based on customer id). In fact, it took a 2 day process down to about an hour!
I wish you luck in your endeavors - hopefully after some of these frustrations subside you are able to give Coda another chance - the community here is very friendly and I know many of them are happy to provide some guidance if you are hitting a wall.
I’m very sorry this was a frustrating experience. If you’d like some assistance or a walk-thru, please do let me know.
And if you have an idea for a particular doc, you can let us know here and we’ll see if we can get you started. If you have an example to share or can describe what you’re looking for, we can take it a step at a time.
