Option to update calculations on columns hourly (batch) instead of automatically for big documents

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I’ve got a big document. 100s of users, all of our team members in my Organization (200+), and 100s of projects, which all have audit trails attached to track milestones and goals and changes to who is on what and what changes on the project. 10s of thousands of total rows in the doc.

The problem is, things are slowing down. Doing calculations, I learn it’s often some of my audit trail columns. For example, I’ve got a “Goal Date” audit that tracks as we change a launch date. In the main Project row, I want a “Goal Date History” column that shows how we’ve changed the goals for that project. A minor change might cause a pretty big lag due to the audit column including concatenations and multiple full table filters.

I’ve started to resort to making these columns Text (instead of Formula), and doing an automation to update them ~hourly.

I’d like an option built into columns themselves for “Automatically Update” versus “Update every hour/2/4/8/etc” so for the ~50+ columns that really don’t need to be updating constantly for my Portfolio Management tooling, I save all those calculations for the background

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Hi @Chase_Schwalbach,

This is a good point.
Seeing your project could help to have a deeper look on what is causing the slowness, but I understand this could not doable.

Anyway, what I would do - giving this scenario - is an hourly (or whenever) automation that triggers a button that contains a dynamic filtering logic based on your discriminants; e.g. priority, time since last update, status, etc…
The buttons then triggers the computations/changes only in those rows.

At that point you have delegated the computation demand to a scheduled time only for the affected number of rows.
Let me know if you need some more details.

I hope this helps.
Cheers!

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Yep, this is basically what I do. I have it just add text to the columns, with the text being the output of the formula. So instead of the column being a formula, it is plain text, and the formulas live in the automation. All I’m adding is the suggestion to make this more native. An example would be, when I finish the formula, and Coda sees “oh this took >700ms to run” it suggests that we move it to batch/automation hourly instead of constant updating. Then I just click a button on the column to do that, instead of having to go through the automation panel. The backend would likely use all the same automation functions, you’d just bring a simple “Update Every X Hours” UI element into the column details

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