Why is Month kind of ignored in Coda

I have feeling that Coda developers don’t like Months :smiley:

I find it strange that month as “value” cant be used in many places one would consider normally, such as for example automations (you cant set automation to run once per month every month) or in date/duration operation formulas (for example simple calculate number of months between two dates) where you have days, minutes, seconds and you can convert between each other. It would make life much easier :slight_smile:

Am I missing something obvious?

I think its because months are ‘lumpy’ - they aren’t consistent in their duration, and the inconsistency isn’t consistent. This makes many of the maths to do automations and the like difficult. For example if you have an automation run twice per month, which days does it run on December? February?

Whereas if you tell it to run every two weeks, that is much easier.

I agree with you, but you could set it for example every 1st day of the month :slight_smile:
Also as far as I know you cant even set automations in coda to run every 2 or 4 weeks etc, just every week which is really not helpful for reminding people about important tasks that need to be run every month once.

Also in every other platform I used (Monday, Notion, Airtable for example) had simple formulas that would calculate time between two dates in “unit” you choose including months and even Quarters and Years (In case of Airtable a simple DATETIME_DIFF([date1], [date2], ‘units’)). I don’t know why something basic like this is not “natively” implemented.
I really love Coda and enjoying experience with it, just think sam small improvements like this would make peoples life (who are not really experts on platform and in writing formulas) much easier :slight_smile:

@Marko_Petrovic yes I agree there is a lot that could be done with dates… however Coda does give us all the tools to build the exact functionality you want.

For example, if you want something to run every 2 or 4 weeks, you can have the automation run based on a Checkbox = true, and then have the checkbox formula determine if the requisite amount of time has passed. Does this make sense?

1 Like

Off course I agree there are some powerful tools at our disposal at Coda, and that most things can be done, but I feel some things might be much easier :slight_smile:

For example, to get a number of months between 2 dates, which I needed for some financial calculations, I had to use complicated formula like:

Sequence(thisRow.[ Start date], thisRow.[ End date]).FormulaMap(DateTimeTruncate(CurrentValue, “month”)).Unique()

Instead of just simple formula where you would put start and end date and say „give me months“:blush:

Still I really like Coda as a platform and I hope they will continue to develop and bring further improvements and also along the way implement some new formulas to make our life easier :blush:

1 Like

Hi @Marko_Petrovic

Sorry if the question seems stupid, but why a setup like that doesn’t work in your case?

Screenshot 2020-11-12 at 13.39.33

Where the formula for days passed is:

And to convert to months:

Off course that’s not super precise, and maybe that’s the problem…

Hey @Mario

As I mentioned in post above, I know there are some very powerful formula tools at our disposal, and that most of the problems could be solved using some workarounds (Like your example, which is a way to solve the problem and let me thank you for that idea. And also as you stated its not precise, but it could work as a general solution). But I feel that date calculations including months are needlessly to complicated and not really friendly to someone who is not at least advanced user of Coda (as example in my previous post I had to use to get number of months between two dates or your example above), while some other platforms use pretty simple formula that is straight forward and easy to use.
I just think there is room for improvement here and I wish Coda will address this in future updates to make our life easier, also considering date operations are some stuff that most people use all the time :slight_smile:

@Marko_Petrovic take it up with Cesear! :wink:

Yeah sorry i forgot to say that months could be better supported by coda, also because if we have to squeeze our brains we should do it on hard and tricky subject and not on month and date calculations :smile:

I support your request in the sense that the entire community and future users could benefit from an update in this field, also if that’s not my specific case :slight_smile:

Let’s wait for an official answer from @coda-team :slight_smile:

2 Likes