I am trying to migrate from Notion.so and the first significant limitation I encountered was the inability to share only one page and its contents, including subpages. Is there a chance that this feature will be added soon?
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Hi @Nurlan_A , I and many others agree that this would be a wonderful feature for collaborating on docs with sensitive information.
The official solution (so far) is to use Cross-Doc. Cross-Doc is a bit of a pain to use (relative to the extreme ease of use of the rest of Coda) but it get’s the job done when you want to share only certain pieces of data to certain people.
Another (not very secure) option would be my answer to this question over here:
Note: the latter option is only for viewing (not editing) data on pages.
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Maybe I’m wrong, but Cross-Doc looks like an artificial limitation to “motivate” users to switch to a subscription.
Hi everyone! We have what is hopefully some nice progress in this area. Starting today, you can copy a page to a new doc, and adjust the sharing settings of that doc so that your new audience only has access to the new page in the new doc.
Learn more here: Launched: Copy a page to a another doc
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This doesn’t solve the problem of the original request. And I have to agree, coming from Confluence the Coda experience creates a lot of friction in that you cannot just do page-level viewing restrictions (or parent-page level that would apply to all child pages). It’s kind of mind blowing that I would need to create a separate folder with distinct permissions rather than just presuming everyone can view a page, and then you can put restricting viewing (or editing perms) on a per-page basis inside of that master wiki document. Is this something that’s on the roadmap or planning to be addressed?
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at the moment, we can either:
a) Make a PDF (this page + subpages, for example)
b) Do the whole Cross-Doc thing, which is a pain (and means anyone on the team who need to share parts of our design docs with outside sources needs to be a Doc Maker (paid subscription))
Both of these aren’t great, guys.
Would be glad to just have the same options for PDF making when I publish a doc.
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I need this feature bad! I currently use coda as a sales proposal and client tracking system for a design and build residential landscape construction company. I have built several data bases for my customers, products, and things like plant lists and detail drawings. I have made a pretty slick proposal generator that allows me to use drop downs to bring in all relevant information about a customers project.
Problem is when it’s time to share the proposal with the customer. Right now I use the email page button but there are a lot of limits to that. First off the formatting can just look terrible and I don’t get to use the true power of coda.
Ideally I want to be able to share the page and any sub pages and not allow clients to see any other part of the doc. Tables that have hidden columns should remain hidden as well as any links to tables those should only show info linked to that page. I would like the ability for some interaction however. Like be able to add a voting table or a questions or comments form that a customer could fill out. I think also anyone with a link should be able to view the page without having to log in or have a google account as I deal with a lot of elderly that need it as simple as possible.
I have been waiting for this feature since I found coda, I’m really hoping it’s coming soon but honestly I have been looking for alternatives to solve my problem.
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Super agree that this is needed. Also coming from Notion and Confluence and so assumed this was a thing, created my doc and then realized I couldn’t share only pages = extra work to recreate. I’ll look into cross-doc and copying pages but by and large the best solution would be the ability to set permissions and sharing on a per-page level 
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agree this is sorely missing.
I want to have a meetings notes doc, but i dont want everyone to see everyone elses notes. I want to have individual note pages per team member that are private to them and me. And I definitely dont want a brand new doc per person.
currently it looks like i need to look outside of Coda for this… and that kind of sucks because im trying to use Coda for as much organization as possible. The lack of privacy and security is a real buzzkill.
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Hello @Nurlan_A ,
I am not a fan of Cross-Doc functions and I think there are a lot of ways to avoid using Cross-Doc. With a paid subscription come many other useful features, like a locking mechanism. I really don’t believe that Cross-Doc is an artificial limitation for the purpose of selling subscriptions.
On the record: I am not affiliated with Coda and I have a paid subscription myself (and I use Coda everyday).
Greetings, Joost
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Hello @Irfan_Khan ,
Even though I see room for improvements, there are already a few things you can do to make this work pretty good.
- use document locking and only allow for yourself (and/or your developers?) to unlock. Make a table on the page and include a people column and a canvas column (and a date, description, whatever you like) and make sure your doc can’t be copied.
- make a button to allow any logged in user of your doc to make a new row and to open it for editing. Make sure that some fields are automatically populated (like date with now() or today(), people (with user()). Filter the table to only show the rows that are made (owned) by the logged in user. If you so desire, adjust the filter to show all rows to yourself, or create a view somewhere else that is filtered in such a way that only you can see all rows.
Everyone can use the canvas field for note taking and keep their notes private. I think it would be good practice to place a little disclaimer on the page where this all starts saying that notes are semi-private: accessible only for them and for management (or whoever has access.
You can set this up in minutes.
Since users can delete their own notes you might want to make a secured notes log, but that’s for another thread.
Greetings, Joost
PS: this only works reasonably secure for team (and enterprise) subscriptions (because you need page locking to prevent people to tamper your filter settings)
Hey @joost_mineur,
Thank you for your post - at my company we are also facing the problem of managing the privacy within a Coda doc and the approach you presented is very interesting and potentially useful for us.
I see one gap though but maybe you already have it figured out? Namely, if I let only specific users unlock pages within my doc, automatically those selected users become the only ones who can add, move and delete subpages. Our challenge is that on one hand, we’d like to hide some information from the whole audience, but on the other, let everybody develop our doc by adding subpages as deep in the hierarchy as needed.
Have you found a way to address this case? Or do you, in your model, only allow selected users to expand the doc with new subpages?
Kind regards
Adrian
Hello @Adrian_Labecki ,
I work with an authorization scheme with different roles. It was setup as a test to see if I could make it work, where some groups (admins) can access any documents, and other groups only certain documents.
The access is not on a page level, but on a row level (pages can not be properly hidden). Since you can use the canvas column as pages, I use the canvas column.
That said, the canvas pages themselves can’t be protected against (un)intentional alterations (locking does not (yet?) apply to canvas type fields/pages.
So I am not all that certain this can be made to work for nesting.
There is also something else you need to be careful with: if your users make new tables in their canvas, those tables are accessible by making a view on another page.
So, this will work for note-taking, but it does not yet allow for a multilevel secured documentation system.
I have build a couple different solutions and if I have some time I will do some more work on these, but you have to keep in mind that until there is a native (sub)page locking mechanism, the things you build can be pretty secure, but they are not the final solution.
Greetings, Joost
@Coda : is there any update on this feature? Do you have a concrete time line?
The topic has been on the wish list for more than 2years.
The cross doc stuff is complicated and error -prone.
Please come up with a solution with permissions on page level soon.
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@Andrew_Stinger is there any update on this feature? Do you have a concrete time line?
The topic has been on the wish list for more than 2years.
The cross doc stuff is complicated and error-prone (esp. when it has to go two ways)
Please come up with a solution with permissions on page level soon.
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Hi @anon47149808 –
We hear and understand the priority of this request from our Community! As you might recall from our Coda 3.0 announcement (Coda 3.0: The doc that brings it all together.), we completed a massive overhaul of the core technology that powers Coda’s Editor–this includes everything from how content is laid out on the page, as well the infrastructure supporting other “containers” as well, such as pages and subpages. This was a nearly two-year project, which enabled features you’re hopefully already enjoying like page layouts and canvas columns.
As you can imagine, we had to complete this work before we could address how content can be shared at more discrete “container”-levels that go beyond our current capabilities with docs and folders.
Some of our most senior designers and engineers are actively working on this, but to deliver a solution that honors our makers’ needs for privacy, security, performance, and usability will take some time. I cannot commit to any near-term solutions, but expect we’ll have something to share with our Community in the second half of this year.
In the meantime, please continue sharing your feedback on how you’d use this feature. We’re reading every post and incorporating your insights into our designs and sharing model updates.
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Thanks I hope this comes as soon as possible. Coda is amazing but that there are is no decent permission and user rights system is a big problem.
At least you should be able to hide certain pages from some users. CrossDoc is not a good solution for this.
It makes no sense to force people to create additional docs just because there is no decent permission system in place. Not a great user experience. Should be fixed before any new functions.
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New to Coda, shocked to see this isn’t possible. For project management cross-docs is simply not a solution as you can only reference the source doc, not edit it. I’m looking to have one doc with a master “tracker” which feeds views in sub-pages for each of the teams. I’d like everyone to be able to view the master and sub-pages but only team-leads would actually be able to edit the project-mgmt related sub-pages which will essentially be views of the master tracker for their team.
We are well into the second half of the year @Andrew_Stinger , is there any further update you can give us?
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100% agree. This feature would be a game changer for me!
@ Andrew_Stinger - Any update on this?
This is basically what has held us back from switching from Notion and seems pretty fundamental.
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