Setting to make editable columns easier to see at a glance

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I’m preparing to release my Coda-built project management doc to my team. I think it’s going to be tough for my co-workers to get familiar with the doc at first because of one major thing: It’s hard to tell what’s editable and what’s not at a glance.

I’ve done a lot of work to lay out my tables so that it all feels fairly logical, but it is still admittedly a pretty intimidating tangled spiderweb of formulas. Having that glance value of what can and can’t be touched would be huge to making the onboarding process a lot easier.

Currently you need to hover your mouse over the column and see the “f” to realize that the column is formula based, or otherwise click into the cell to realize that it is not editable. It would be nice if there was a little bit of “conditional formatting” that you could turn on (doc-wide, page-wide, or table-wide) that helps distinguish what you can edit from what you cannot at a glance. Maybe shading formula-determined cells in a light grey?

I’m considering doing this myself manually but it’s going to be difficult to upkeep as the doc continues to evolve.

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What you describe is what I’ve done so far: use Conditional Formatting to add a grey (typically) background to any formula columns, and leave the editable columns white. This gets cumbersome when I add columns though. I’d love to see a way to automatically highlight formula columns (or vice-versa as you want). Upvoted!

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I’m also wishing for an option to specify grayed out hint text for editable table cells so users can see at a glance what data is expected for the empty cell.

The options could be nicely placed within the existing Visual category of the column options etc.

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