Introduce yourself!

Hey! Really excited for this, thanks for putting it together!

I’m an operations specialist and shadow product builder for a New York startup. I’m particularly excited about structured data and automations. Outside the office, I’ve been known to bake a lot of food, eat a lot of baguettes, and run a lot to keep baking and eating. Like Evan, I enjoy a good :tumbler_glass: (or :cocktail:), and I used to do sound design and production for live theater.

I’m looking forward to metrics and more metadata—currently dreaming of charting a field’s historical data for metrics and tracking. Talk to me about relational databases and sub-tables!

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Hi all - good to meet you! I’m a member of our go-to-market team here at Coda. I’ve mostly focused on sales and partnerships in my career, though have spent some time as a corporate consultant as well.

At Coda, I love learning how our product can be deployed in new organizations, and helping teams understand the fundamentals and navigate the particulars of adopting a new tool (including IT reviews, when those are necessary!).

Outside of Coda, I enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction (current: “Team of Rivals,” “The Mother of all Questions,” and “Wind / Pinball”), listening to Rolling Stones records, and parenting my opinionated toddler.

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Hi everyone!

I’m Zoe, Jeremy’s teenaged sister. I am a right-brained person trying to learn how to code in order to balance myself out a bit. I keep a blog called ‘The iPad Artist’ (where I wrote a post about Coda.) You can also find me on twitter @glowz_art, where I post my art and thoughts.

I am super excited about the new Coda Community, to see what all you smart people are making with it! I love to learn, and create, and share, so this community is a dream come true.

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So great to put some faces to names. :slight_smile: Definitely looking forward to seeing how coda docs might embed inside of discourse. I do love iframe problems…

Right, introductions! My name is Jakob, and I’ve been a fan of Coda since a recruiter showed me an mid-stage prototype almost a year ago. When not gleefully deleting Google Sheets, I develop customized training for engineering leadership teams under the Lead SV brand. Prior to that, I’ve lead large teams at Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Some fun things I currently use Coda for include

  • My entire social media pipeline (newsletter to blog post to medium to social sharing and campaign management)
  • Collaborative editing and review of unreleased content
  • All CRM functions (based on the coda template)
  • Training development schedules and project plans
  • Vendor evaluation matricies

I’m excited to chat with all of you, explore the product together, and build a great community.

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Heeeey, this is cool. I’m excited to be a part of this.

I’m Connor McCormick, I’m a part of a start-up tracking parking availability at universities and large companies to make parking easier and facilitate a seamless transition to an autonomous car future.

I’ve been using Coda to manage the hardware and installation costs associated with our projects. Before Coda, I was the only one on my team who knew how to navigate the maze of formulas (and the 9 tabs) of the Google Sheet we were using. I was so frustrated with my document always breaking and the rest of my team’s inability to work on it that I rewrote the sheet twice and the documentation multiple times, I even considered switching to Access (shock, horror, etc).

I now have a bomb-proof, easy to use document to do everything (and more) that I wanted to do with the old one, and the rest of my team can even use it. Wow. I consider myself our team’s Chief Coda-ssuer, and I’m happy to get to participate in this community.

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:wave:t3:What’s good, Coda crew!

I’m an investor, partnership builder, and connector of people and their “why”.

As someone whose livelihood relies almost entirely on relationships, I’m leaning on Coda to act as a knowledge repository and database for my actions and my connections. The product still has a long way to go before it can meet my needs, but the team is on a fast track to change that.

One of the things I’d like to change about Coda is its hierarchy. A Drive-style organization for Coda would be ideal; within docs, I’d like to add more levels of folders. Each doc can act as its own repository for data so I believe the hierarchy should reflect that.

A recent hack I found was using Views to separate information that spanned dozens of columns. Instead of showing all columns in a single table, I hid columns from one table and kept them displayed in a view of that table. This hack allowed me to see all my information at a glance without having to scroll over.

Two technical questions:

  • Is there any way to conditionally format items using formulas in cells?

  • Has anyone found a hack to reference a cell location via URL and use it in a formula?

I’m happy to be a part of this adventure to change the world (of docs)!

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Hi Zach @419 ,

When you say conditionally format with formulas in cells, what do you mean exactly? Could you give an example of waht you’d like it to do?

Edit: Words. Also, maybe this should be in the Ask The Community Section? How ought we go about this, @evan, everyone seems to be enjoying their intros.

Thanks,
C

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Great idea @connormccormick83 Let’s take this to the Ask the Community thread - have the same question for @419 – do you have an example you can share?

Evan

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:wave:Hey Everyone -

I’m really happy to be part of the early Coda community!

My name is Megan. I’m an investor based in San Francisco. I am a bit of an excel junkie but haven’t done that well with Google Docs, so I have been ecstatic about what Coda is building.
I use Coda to manage my never ending to do list, to help my teams collaborate on year end goals, to build a ‘portfolio tracker’, among many other things…thanks especially to Evan, Joe & the Coda team for helping me on-board super quickly! I’m really excited for the forward road map.

Personally, three things I would love to see in the future are: 1) the ability to create a variety of graphs; 2) an easy export function - it would be awesome to export to email, etc. easily; 3) some more formatting options in the tables

In my free time, I love the Cali sun given I’m originally from NY, discovering new music, reading, and my new habit of going to the driving range:golfing_woman:

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+1 for graphics (reporting!)

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Good morning everyone,

My name is Chandler and I work in the construction industry, which is typically slow to adopt new methods and technologies. I’m trying to change that by using tools like Coda, decentralized ledgers, and smart contracts to an industry ripe for disruption. (always looking for people with whom to connect. if you or know someone who is interested in that type of thing, please let me know.)

I’ve been using coda to schedule and manage the progress of my projects and also for a business development database.

I would like to see arrows or connections showing relationships between items on the gantt charts.

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Hi Everyone,

I go by Cole Aspen and I run the fledgling indie blog about Coda (http://usingcoda.com/) and associated YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgQGuKDDYQBDJ462TvWCVUQ). I use Coda to plan the blog and other projects. In my “real” life, I work on project management and UX design.

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:raised_hand_with_fingers_splayed: Hi everyone my name’s Al and I’ve been an avid Excel user since 2007 (learned on Excel 2003 woot woot). I designed an Excel keyboard cover for Macs which morphed into consulting, teaching workshops, and writing on my blog. I’m interested in productivity hacks and had a chance to test Coda when it was in stealth. Looking forward to learning best practices from the community and building awesome tools and apps in Coda.

One thing I would change
I’m a big believer in keyboard shortcuts, so I would add more keyboard shortcuts and rigor around shortcuts for navigating menus and entering data in forms in a doc.

Recent hack
This hack was inspired by this YouTube video by Tom Mohr and I think I saw it used in one of the Coda gallery templates. To create a simple entry form to add data to your master table, you can create a view of the table and set the filter on the view to =Column1.IsBlank() so that the row of data will be cleared out once you enter in the data to your filtered view. I find this filter formula to be more error proof than =Created(thisRow)>Today() because you won’t get a bunch of empty rows in your master table if you just click in the empty filtered view.

Technical Question
Is there a way to get the data type of a value? Specifically, I am curious about the People type. Is it text? Or some other kind of object? When doing comparisons between a person of People type with text of a person (which appears to be a People type) the result is not what I would expect.

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Hi everyone, my name is Ionã Oliveira, I’m a Brazilian Product Design Manager and a Maker :hammer_and_wrench:!
Over the past 10 years, I have helped agencies, companies and startups innovate and develop digital products such as websites and mobile applications.

My main goal is to use Coda.io to every step in my process of building digital stuff. I want to use it to documentation, task management and data base (integrating with zapier, sheetsu, etc).

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Hi Al,

There’s currently no support for reflecting on the type of a value in the formula language. With respect to the People type - when you @ref a person what you’re getting back is a reference to a row in a hidden People table. You’ll notice you can access properties on the person reference such as name, email, avatar, etc. We pull this information from the Google Profile when the user logs into the Coda eco-system.

The People table is automatically populated by all “collaborators” of the document - the simple version is this contains all people who’ve accessed the document or had the document directly shared with them (even if they never logged in). These references behave identically to all other refs you might have to your own tables.

Hope that helps,
Nigel.

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Hi!

I’m Ayo

I am a Front End Engineer but I’ve been using Coda as a way to take notes and track progress, contacts, and follow up actions during conferences, retreats and even job searches. I am finding it to be a great tool for making interactive worksheets for these types of events.

I am always trying out new tech and I like that the interface of coda is simple yet beautiful enough for me not to have to change it. I would like to be able to use it in mobile, and perhaps have a view where I’m not scrolling so far right on big tables (depending on context of course)

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Hi!

I’m in San Francisco too!!

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Hi everyone, I’m Lucas, from Argentina but living in México. I’m an Excel addict in recovery too and just starting to explore Coda features for several workflows. Nowadays I’ve built a custom real state management system.

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Hi all Tim from Toronto Canada. I’m the Executive Director of the charity here. We’re small so I do a lot of the operations/systems work. I am sort of obsessed with Coda and am fighting the desire to move everything we do into it. Right now it’s home to our strategic plan and the related metrics we’re tracking, to a few dashboards that I moved over from Trello and to our living project plan for our 2018 programs and stats. I feel like I could whip up a fully functioning GTD app on Coda in a few days if I really wanted to, and I am far from a programmer. It’s so promising!

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Love this! @tom_mohr love how your videos are spreading!