Objects in Column Titles / Formulaic Access to Column Titles

I know this is a stubbornly Excelian/Google Sheetsian sentiment, but how great would it be if formulas could access column titles? E.g., a column formula might read…

[Tasks].filter([lesson]=COLUMN TITLE AND [task]=thisRow.[task]).status

(See example: https://coda.io/d/Example-Table_dovs_GOg5tt)

And this is way down the slippery slope, but what if we could put objects—like rows from a table of lessons in the formula above—in the titles of columns?

What if we could drag to auto-fill column titles from, e.g., Lesson 1 to Lesson 100?

What if we could format those columns en masse as Look-ups or text or Percentage columns or anything?

What if we could set conditional formatting to cover a range of columns, so that, with a single rule, we could instruct Coda to set any column with a “Completed” status to green? E.g., instead of multiple rules like

CONDITION: [Lesson 1].Contains("Completed")
FORMATTING: Lesson 1 column turns green for that row

We could write:

CONDITION: [Any Column].Contains("Completed")
FORMATTING: That column turns green

This is a world I want to live in.

1 Like

Hello @DSB!
I know this is not the point of your suggestion but if you group your master table this way, you can generate the Overview of all lessons automatically!

4 Likes