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[ABp]

@Connor_McCormick good synopsis, there is a lot around the community and you’ve gathered some of the good ones.

I think there is huge potential in using the Coda Rows to create docs: This is one of the great statements on that, much more elegantly put than anything I have written, haha!

@GJ_Roelofs

I absolutely love the fact that I can easily references topics and that hovering over links gives me previews to their contents. It works wonders in a table-centric approach to pages. The added benefit being that I can programmatically use this information to provide an easily accessible way to expose designers to concepts & design that is then used to generate code.

But then @GJ_Roelofs equally elegantly sums up why this needs work in Coda, and to this day I don’t think much of that has been addressed:

@GJ_Roelofs

The Rows-As-Pages approach gives me most of the functionality I need. However, I don’t have good control over the visual structure of a page. Building Block Layouts get me there partially, but, per example, the text column in a table doesn’t allow me to add in images directly. I also lose the ability to comment on parts of the “page” as I can only comment on the page as a whole.

I think the best hope is for Rows to evolve as bonafide structures for till-now untapped ability to create
“Next-Gen” wikis, akin to what Roam Research is doing, which many of us are talking about in here.
The fundamentals have been laid by Coda and I really hope the Product Folks appreciate their opportunity. Coda is in fact much better positioned, due to its inherently superior structure, than Notion to meet this need. To make that point more simply - if I were to say right now if I think Notion or Coda is closer to Roam, hands down my answer is Coda.

Two features right now that aid to this end that are absent in Notion:

• Forward-thinking Rich Text fields with massive speed of use thanks to great keyboard shortcuts. You can 1) keep them fully visible in a table because rows will expand to their size to accommodate all the text within, giving you a very unique outline view of the entire context of text in these fields, and 2) ability to pop out and write in these fields freely. These boxes are essentially a min Word doc of their own, but with all the bonus of being in a row and having all the metadata benefit and structure.

• Coda Grouping. While I poorly understand how this works, one of my most used features when building my Coda doc is grouping in Subtables. You can produce a dynamite view, and again @GJ_Roelofs you had an inspiring example I have lost track of where you were doing some design/feature stuff I believe for some of your video game elements? No chance to do that in Notion, or anything else I’ve seen. And another part of grouping I’m eager to tap into is grouping above the table, for example to create a bonafide User Story Map

I think the role of Sections and Folders would be best to evolve as containers and another type of view within Coda. I think in fact this is also superior to Notion, which has a mangled - IMHO - approach in spite of its popularity. A “page” is also what we’d see as a Section in Coda, but then it’s also an entity and behaves like a row…all while being able to house an embedded table? That is a very confusing set up I have seen many users scratch their head about. And it is very hard in Notion to figure out if your page is a page, or a db, because a page that is only a db behaves differently, while looking to the naked eye the same! Sections and Folders in Coda have a distinct role, and there’s a lot of potential here.

That was long winded and I apologize for that! I get excited when I think about some of these features coming around…and I am always hopeful the Codan Product Team finds details useful. I know they seem to ask for them everywhere!

Cheers!