What makes a good template?

Suggestion Box
1

I’ve been working on building some new templates for the gallery (https://coda.io/gallery) and I was wondering — which templates were helpful for you in getting started? Can you pinpoint why they were helpful? Which parts were confusing/overwhelming as a new user looking through them? Which parts were inspiring?

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I used the CRM table to bootstrap my own CRM but ran into some weird problems

  • A lot of the columns used “Select from List” instead of a lookup of another data table
  • Cloning pages were tricky. Come to think of it, duplicating sections in general is pretty awkward. It makes scaling out coda (and giving everyone their own dashboard) difficult.
  • I’d love a “how to customize” section that explains how each coda doc is set up so people can use them as launching off points
  • Inspiring was simply the volume of solutions out there. It made you see how many different uses coda had
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3

I thought the Product Launch and New Hire Bootcamp were the most helpful.

Product Launch template

  • Gave a complete picture of how a startup or organization would use Coda from start to finish
  • Showcases a majority of Coda’s features

New Hire Bootcamp

  • In my opinion best way to show how the layout of the table can be changed to the Kanban view showing the tasks by day as Trello-esque lists
  • Knowing how to put the day of the week at the top of the list was confusing since the weekday is not a default column in the table. Took some time digging around the table (clicking on the “Group Cards By” option) to get the weekday displayed

Overall, one thing I find confusing about docs with multiple view and tables in the same section is finding the underlying table. For instance, in the Product Launch template on the Mapping Tasks section there is a view that links back to the Tasks table. Clicking on this hyperlink brings you to the “Teams and Tasks” section where you have to scroll further to find the actual underlying table. Perhaps a better way of organizing the data is having one section with all tables or have one section for each table so the user knows exactly where to find the underlying data regardless of where views are published

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