Hey, I wanted to follow-up here as this seems the best place to post about this:
I have been posting across the community about what I think would really get me into flowing with Coda: more referential handling across the app. This post has been referenced in various places, although I don’t have any responses in the post directly. But here is a summary of posts out there that are that I think all are talking about this need:
- In this post, I’m talking about an easy ability to create a relation to anything in Coda, and then have the “originating” row sort of follow the new one. Great for keeping context of how a row came into existence:
- Here the point is to just simply create a reference to any row in a doc, and have the “destination” row pick that up, but also include other info about the “originating” row to full context can be seen. If the reference just contains data out of the Display Column, which is how “@” links work now, you can miss some context. My idea to solve this was to have a column type “row.”
- This one is a common functionality of some other apps where you can convert something you just wrote into a db “entity” - in our case, a row in Coda:
- This is a new one I discovered today that also addressed the issue of lookups/references:
So the reason I’m posting today is I just discovered a new note-taking app called Roam. Has anybody else seen this?
There is a lot of chatter already about it in the note-taking app/nocode community. In that post referenced above, where it won product of the day on PH a few days ago, a lot of people are talking about how it’s superior even to Notion(!).
My reason for posting here is I think if we could get in Coda, one day sooner than later, the ability to more freely relate rows across the app, and visualize those relations, you’d really harness the full power of Coda’s flexibility, and get some amazing capabilities. My personal struggles with Coda are in understanding how to set up relations and hierarchies freely. I feel like as Coda is currently set up, the proper MS tool to compare with is not in fact Excel, but Access. I feel like I have fairly strong Excel skills and I was hoping they would take me far with Coda. But without the DB/Access type know-how, I have been in the weeds trying to do hierarchy/relations. And I believe that hierarchy/relations are the key to Coda, not spreadsheet-like features.
I would love to get some feedback from the Coda product team on how they see a solution like Roam and either 1) how the philosophy of Roam coincides, or not, with the longer-term vision of UX for Coda, and 2) possible pack integration with a tool like this down the road.
And @GJ_Roelofs, as your quote below very elegantly describes in summary what I’m talking about in paragraphs here, would love to get your feedback on this.
Oh and @Paul_Danyliuk, would really like to hear what you think if you have a minute on this overall topic and the Roam app’s approach vis a vis how this would fit in for Coda. Sorry I know you weren’t in on this thread earlier, but if you have a moment…
Thanks everyone!