I have a shout out for @Bill_French, who really breaks things down to core values. I remember when he explained that as makers we should be interested in being able to extract or monetize the schemas, configurations and formulas of our documents, and not just the text on pages or in table cells.
Also to @BenLee and other codans - I love to see the inside scoop youāve given us as well as all the support. Would love to see a 2022 roadmap I loved that feature request document from about a year ago.
Iāve been hooked on coda since the first time I heard the word āschemaā. I use it for everything, but my favorite and most time invested is in creating project and task management systems.
Iām a small business owner but also a student. Right now Iām preparing to write a 10 page research paper.
Yesterday I made a set of tables that Iāll use to track sources, and link relevant references to specific prompts. Iāll be able to use that to then create an outline and put the ideas in my own words, and easily cite sources where necessary.
Iāve tried everything I know of thatās out there : clickup, Asana, Nirvana, notion, Omnifocus, Omniplan, Wrike, MS project, Ms tasks, todoist, trello, taskade, IQtell (RIP), obsidian, Evernote and more ā but I always come back to coda.
I discovered Coda through Zapierās blog, and after many attempts at getting my team on the same page (literally), I was beyond excited to give it a try. Not only did Coda help my team by giving us a place to collect all of our Google Docs, but it has helped our weekly meetings run SO much more smoothly and efficiently.
My love for Coda has been infectious ā we now have 5 Makers and have introduced several of our business partners as well.
CONGRATS on your milestone, Coda!! And a huge thank you for helping me organize my team, my work life, and my personal life.
During my first experience using Coda, I didnāt know it had superpowers. I thought I would use a nice interface, make some notes, maybe create a table or two.
Coming from an Excel background, I was used to formulas being tedious, but Coda made formulas BEAUTIFUL !
I use the sliders to track progress, multi-select drop downs, lookup tables within tablesā¦ I donāt see myself using anything else
Like others have shared, Coda is like Google Docs/Sheets on steroids. I love using Coda. I am always finding new projects to use in Coda. The thing I love the most about it is the ability to use views of tables and have those tables connected so any changes happen in all the views of the table.
Oh! Thanks everyone who mentioned me Iām flattered.
I discovered Coda by accident. I was procrastinating on Product Hunt when Coda announced a contest there. A person whoād build the coolest doc would win a MacBook Air.
I didnāt win the laptop but I won something more ā a niche for me to work in. Soon I became one of the first (if not the first) consultants on Coda building docs for hire and sharing useful tips in the Community. Needless to say, with the money I made I ultimately bought a laptop (and a better one, lol.)
These days Iām not as active as I used to be and Iām not as excited about client work either ā all things wear out and Iāve got a life to live. Besides, the Coda consulting market has been maturing since, giving us new blood like @Scott_Collier-Weir, @Connor_McCormick1, @Christiaan_Huizer, and many more to come soon and take over So lately I decided to return to the thing I was passionate about all my life: teaching. Thatās how I made a name for myself in here, by teaching others how to use Coda to the fullest. And thatās what Iām going to do even better with my upcoming Coda Courses, which Iāve been Maker Funded to build.
Now, onto some answers:
First experience: actually I was confused at first (even I!) But then I looked through some templates and most importantly browsed through the community. And suddenly it got all clear.
First post in the community: fishing for upvotes for the MacBook Air contest with this
First doc ever: the third reincarnation of a motivation technique I had come up with back in 2012. Actually the 4th reincarnation is in the backlog for some Patreon Specials
Who made an impression on me: the whole community as a collective. But if I had to name one person in particular thatās @Phil_Hamilton-Schmidt and his crazy doc experiments. Itās probably Phil whose progress bar tricks I saw in the Community when I first joined. That opened my eyes at the moment, motivating to find more tricks and creative uses, which ultimately led me to where I am now.
I go back to this community post about using the Slice functionall the time. Just one of the many examples of the great stuff you can find in the Coda Maker Community.
My first Coda doc was a content tracker for work. I wanted to take segments of a book and turn them into ideas, then draft the posts directly in coda, track visual creation/sourcing.
My team STRUGGLED with Coda so eventually I had to push the details out to Google Drive, but not before getting Integromat involved.
For me Coda.io replace AT and added the option to explain the calculations I made, however without the community support I would have never been able to understand the CFL. I met users without coding background with the same ambition: building something.
@Federico.Stefanato impressed me most due to his mix of knowledge and communication skills. We donāt see you that often any more and you are missed!
Besides the many wonderful solutions offered in the community I know I can always ask @joost_mineur in my native language to help me out when I got stuck, who besides @Jean_Pierre_Traets is one I talk to often about Coda to improve our understanding of the product.
Coda literally reshaped the way I brainstorm and organise tasks. Docs for me usually start as simple two-column tables and then expand into multidimensional trackers and research databases. Other tools may give me more freedom with regard to touch and inking but eventually, I always gravitate back to structured data.
The first feature I enjoyed from Coda that allowed me to move my data out of Airtable, Notion, and Evernote was the ability to formulaicly refer to data inside of a sentence. Sounds kind of boring but it was a real headache in my old workflow and was error prone. However, now with Coda, I can formulaicly discuss data from a table within an overall narrative. If the table data changes, it will update automatically in the paragraphs and surrounding text. Then a few months after that the pandemic started and I needed a way to manage my kidsā at-home learning. I built an at-home learning platform that we still use. I am really proud that the at-home learning platform I built in Coda is still working for us at home. These individuals continue to make a great impression on me in the Coda community @maria@Scott_Collier-Weir@Nina_Ledid@Rocky_Moon@Paul_Danyliuk and @shishir . Thank you Coda for everything you have done for the community!
I remember your kidsā learning Doc, @adoc_mama, that you showed to us during the Coda Doctorate. I thought it was such a great example of how one can use Coda to make oneās life easier, and so well executed!
I was a Coda fan from day one. Love at first sight, as they say.
However, the real power of the formula language was most clear after translating an Excel doc into Coda:
As I noted in the post at the time:
Neither of these are simple, but you donāt have the slightest chance of understanding the first one and Iāll bet you can figure out what the second one does.
Always felt afterward that if the world were to have had the Coda formula language to power Excel we would have saved billions maybe trillions of dollars of wasted time from so many inscrutable formulas in fragile docs.
I loved that feature request document from about a year ago.
And a huge thank you for helping me organize my team, my work life, and my personal life.
Iām flattered.
So lately I decided to return to the thing I was passionate about all my life: teaching. Thatās how I made a name for myself in here, by teaching others how to use Coda to the fullest. And thatās what Iām going to do even better with my upcoming Coda Courses, which Iāve been Maker Funded to build.
