Suggestions for improvements

Suggestion Box
1

Hello everyone, I barely joined the community and already here suggesting things :roll_eyes:

I guess I wouldn’t even bother if I didn’t like Coda so much and after reading @nathan 's post somewhere about the team valuing customer opinion, I thought why not contribute :grimacing:

But let me just say that Coda is far far superior to anything I’ve used by a mile, from Notion to Fibery to Airtable and so on, the logic and mentality behind the product as well as the design are all incredible, well done!

It’s unfortunate that I can’t move my company completely to coda just yet, mainly because of what I’m outlining below. At the moment we’re using several different apps and will most likely continue to do so unless Coda catches up on a few things, one day I hope!:slight_smile: , but it’s definitely the future to create customized internal tools for businesses that aggregate it all.

I guess Coda wasn’t originally meant for the media production industry, but if a few things are improved it can surely take this industry by storm!

Would love to hear suggestions for the below, maybe I haven’t found a few of these features:

  1. Customize Layouts / Set Views Width / Perhaps create Div Blocks like Webflow
    All views are amazing at the moment, but a big part of what we do is having to send neat documents to clients, even though you can manually resize columns by eye, it would be nice to be able to standardize sizes throughout all Docs and have internal elements like columns resize automatically. I guess this is mainly talked about as having more control over layouts.

  2. Define Print Page
    Similarly to what I described above, it would be amazing to get the option to know where each print page ends so that I can neatly distribute views and they don’t get eaten up/cropped halfway. To the point of customizing layouts again

  3. Calendar View improvements
    Calendars in Notion are quite good in comparison and the fact they have infinite scrolling is great. Again if I press on designing documents for clients, there are a few improvements that can be made that would make it amazing for production as well

  • Option to define which week days to show (like taking out weekends)
  • Option to define the range of the calendar and it resizes in height accordingly, eg. March 1st - 5th September and you’d have one long calendar that we could print.
  • Year view option.
  • View milestones, just having the option to add single dates into calendars
  1. Gantt View improvements
    I believe Gantt is quite new in Coda and to be honest I wouldn’t have looked into Coda if it didn’t have Gantt in it, it’s already great but I’ve read a few overall suggestions, here are a few more. Fibery’s gantt at the moment is quite superior:
  • Define Viewable date range and/or Zoom - at the moment you only have options to jump from weeks, months, year and can’t fine tune - this is for document designing also, you can check what teamgantt.com does when you need to print a gantt chart.
  • Milestones as well
  • dependencies
  • Have labels be written next to the bars instead of getting eaten up if the bar is too small
  • Customize layout a bit more, so that we can change width/height, specially height since the gantt seems to take a lot of height space at the moment
  • Have each gantt bar be defined by the row itself and not by dates. That way you can have multiple columns with start/end dates and milestones, instead of having to create 1 row per milestone, or if some part of the project has a gap (let’s say someone is taking a holiday of a month) the bar can just continue after the gap instead of needing a new row. Tom’s Planner is amazing for Gantt’s.
  • Display other columns (for example having the amount of days next to the display row)
  • Have an option to fill the bars based on another cell’s contents, for example a percentage.
  1. Tables
  • Cell formulas
  • Have the ability to give a column name, a type. For example make a column name a date, a button or a formula that changes based on something else - this would make things a bit more customize-able like spreadsheets
  • Corner Handles on cells to duplicate and extrapolate content
  • Group Colors
    This is a bit silly, but it goes back to the neatness and creating beautifully designed documents. When you group by column in a table, the group doesn’t follow the colour applied to that column via conditional formatting. It’s only when you ungroup that you can see the colour

Anyways sorry for the borderline spam, I’m just really enjoying Coda and I’m one of those people :sweat_smile:

cheers
Rick

3 Likes