Page level sharing

[Tobias_Feistmantl]

Most important feature right now in my opinion. Is there any update on this?

[C.R_Rowenson]

This! 10,000% This! I’m sure it’s tricky and complicated. That doesn’t change the fact that this would solve some MAJOR problems for me and lots of other users.

Here’s why it’s such a big deal for me. I’m a freelance writing coach and the databases and page structures with in Coda are perfect for helping me track my clients, their purchases, and our session notes (not to mention all the other ways I can use it for my writing and business planning). But as it stands, there is no easy way for me to share a single client’s information without them having access to all of my client information, which is not acceptable for my business model.

So currently I would have to create a separate Doc for each individual client and put these cross-docs and other links in place every single time I get a new client. That’s a lot of manual steps and at that point I might as well stick with google docs.

I didn’t fully understand how the sharing worked when I got my subscription. If there’s no solution by the end of my year-long subscription, I may have to end my account and find another tool to use.

[Paul_Danyliuk]

To anyone finding this thread with the sentiment that “Oh but Notion does this!”

Recently I learned it doesn’t.

Or actually, in Notion you can share your text (“wiki”) pages individually — but not database views!

They just don’t get shared… unless you also share the whole table, which — yes — means that whoever sees this page with a view can EASILY see the rest of the base table, i.e. it all gets leaked.

Or, in other words, Notion doesn’t solve the “I need to share a page with a client only containing tasks for that client” either!

This was honestly a shock to me because I was sure this was the one thing that Notion could do that Coda didn’t, and hence so many users were asking for this so fiercely. I thought Notion had server-side calculations to support that safe page-level sharing with all of the data, and that’s why its formula language was so primitive compared to Coda’s. Turned out Notion actually did nothing of that! Sure, I agree that sharing individual wiki pages with a single click is cooler than Coda’s “Copy page to a new doc” feature. But Coda is not so much of a wiki as it is for interconnected tables, and when it comes to tables, Cross-doc is far more superior than what solution exist there with Notion (replicating rows with Make etc.)

Sorry for the rant but actually had to defend Coda on this one.

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As a hacker who’s been reverse-engineering Coda and deeply exploring how it works, let me just assure you that sharding a doc into pieces so that you could share a portion of a doc and not leak anything related is an extremely hard feat to accomplish when an app is built like Coda or Notion. It would’ve been a completely different product if it had that separation in its foundation. But as an insider I know that Coda is putting a lot of effort on figuring it out though, so please have faith and patience.

[Paul_Danyliuk]

P.S.

@C.R_Rowenson

So currently I would have to create a separate Doc for each individual client and put these cross-docs and other links in place every single time I get a new client. That’s a lot of manual steps and at that point I might as well stick with google docs.

As for this, I have a solution, which is not ideal but should help with a lot of pain setting that up:

Preview: Cross-doc Plus (codenamed) — My opinionated take on Cross-doc

If I could build just one pack in my lifetime, it would be this. Almost all my clients asked for this. There’s a dozen threads in this community where a fair hundred of makers asked for this. I asked for this. Now I built it myself. I called it Cross-doc Plus. This is a code name and I would easily change it if Coda tells me to. The pack includes some features that the original Cross-doc couldn’t include. It will be a premium pack (tentatively $3-5/mo per maker) and I’ll launch it as soon as …

[M_Gohar_Shafique]

This should be top priority for coda team. We cant share pages with our clients and current solutions mentioned below are not solving this problem

• creating separate client folders (we have 50+)
• cross doc (we want them to edit)
• copy page

Alot of people will shift back to notion or other solution just because of this restriction.

[Brian_Klein]

Thanks for the feedback. Secure content sharing is one of our top priorities. Emphasis on secure.

~Other~ tools content sharing methods can leak information, which isn’t acceptable when your work depends on it. So we’re designing with security in mind from the get-go. I’ll point you to Ayuba’s post below, in which he outlines our roadmap for content sharing.

There are four steps outlined in the bullet points that build upon one another. We’re already to the third by launching editable Coda page embeds last month. We know the community is excited about this feature, and we’re looking forward to bringing you a solution that is as secure as it is useful.

Launched: New ways to integrate your toolstack into Coda

Update — We’ve launched Coda sync pages and shared an update on our broader roadmap, learn more here! @Bill_French, @Bas_de_Bruijn, @Astha_Parmar and our maker community, I’m the product manager working on various projects in the content sharing space, including page/sub-doc sharing and full-page embeds. We know how crucial this topic is to many of you, so I wanted to share some of our thoughts and plans. I want to acknowledge that we clearly hear your frustrations. It’s not lost on u…

[M_Gohar_Shafique]

Airtable has solved this problem.

[Paul_Danyliuk]

Airtable doesn’t have the formulas that can take inputs from anywhere in the doc. Either those are formulas that can only access thisRow and rollups, or those have to be calculated through custom code (basically APIs that write calculated values to non-formula cells). In any case, in airtable each row is sufficiently encapsulated and therefore it’s easy to share databases in pieces there.

With Coda and how everything can be interconnected in a Coda doc, not so much.