How to make the most of Coda from day one
Part one of our series on how Coda connects teams by keeping text, tables, and applications together in one constantly updated space.
Rocky Moon
Product Education Specialist at Coda
How to make the most of Coda from day one
By Rocky Moon
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· 9 min read
1. Get to know the map.
If you’re picking up hiking, it’s crucial to learn how to orient yourself. It’s easy to get back to the car on most day hikes, but if you’re spending a weekend or more without cell service? Understanding maps matters quite a bit. Luckily, figuring out the lay of the land in Coda doesn’t require learning how to triangulate your position or understanding topography lines. Here’s a key to get you started.
- When you open Coda for the first time, you land in a shiny new workspace. This is the widest bucket in your new digital office, the structure that stores everything else you do. And your My Docs folder is your space and yours alone, so your personal grocery lists and travel organizers can cozy up to the first draft of a shared work project. The workspace is named for exactly what it is, a digital office set up for endless possibilities.
- You’ll probably want to start a few separate folders (think shelves or filing cabinets in your digital office) to organize things.
- Inside those, you’ll start docs (think notebooks on those shelves). Folders and the docs they contain live on the left side of your screen for easy navigation, and you can always collapse them out of the way for more focused work.
- Once you have a doc or two established, you can start adding pages and pages within those pages, or subpages. You can create as many pages as you need—one for each dream destination or different project initiative. They are vertically nested, but you can keep all of your doc’s pages visible in the side bar and link between pages that don’t live in the same stack to keep your workflow seamless.
Did you know?
Regretting a change to your doc? That’s part of the learning curve too! Luckily, you can drop into your doc history or check out our keyboard shortcuts for the undo button.
2. Possibilities of the table.
At Coda, we care just as much about your structured data as your unstructured data. By that I mean we’ve invested countless hours into making powerful tables worthy of any modern enterprise team.
- The easiest way to start learning your way around Coda tables is to type /table into a doc. You’ll be offered the option to start a blank table or import data, either from other Coda docs or CSV files stored elsewhere. From there, you fill out a new table or edit the cells you pulled into this version like you would any other spreadsheet or database.
- Once your data looks the way it’s supposed to, you can sort through nine different view types to get the right look or tool for your needs. That basic grid table format will always be there for you, but we also have everything from calendars and timelines to word clouds, forms, and Kanban-style boards.
- And what if you want to see the same info more than one way? Just hit /table, choose the data you just added, and pick a different view. This will populate another version, meaning the same table can act as everything from a project tracker and to-do list to a client database, list of sales opportunities, and team sentiment record.
- Once a view has been created, click Options in the right corner of the table to change the way the data is shown using the display. This changes the view type for everyone.
Did you know?
Not all data is meant to be black and white. Here’s how you can add colors and formatting to your tables for differentiation, group your data for added context, and create filters to see specific slices of the same data.
3. Template your way to greatness.
We’ve done our best to reinvent the standard doc, but we don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a new project tracker or client database. That would be like bushwhacking your way through a national forest that’s already full of beautifully maintained trails leading right where you want to go. In short, a frustrating waste of energy.
- Slash suspense and cut through ambiguity with these frighteningly good, system-refining templates. They’re sure to keep your work on track, despite any toil and/or trouble that may pop up.
- Coda’s templates and integrations, which we call Packs, are a fantastic team. These templates all work with Slack to build a seamless collaborative workflow that keeps communication and productivity tied together.
- Need to keep your team aligned across a dozen important dates? Want to see your progress toward those dates in a half dozen different formats? Check out our ultimate list of free project management templates.
- If you’re curious to see how Coda’s templates can help you organize days, weeks, or quarters of your life online and off, take a scroll through this list of our favorite templates for starting your year off organized (which can, of course, be implemented at any point of the year). It has scaffolding to help you build everything from your perfect workout or tidying plan to the ideal team-aligning setup.
Did you know?
Plan to use similar Coda docs for each client or member of a large team? Create your own template for quicker building.
4. Stuck? Give us a shout.
Empowering makers means being ready to offer quick, thorough support. Just like your hiking friend, we’re thrilled you’re here and eager to help you level up in our favorite thing. To that end, we’ve curated an immense library of support options that should get you past any hitches in your Coda journey. There are as many support options as there are paths to building the perfect doc.- We have dozens of Guides focused on specific logistical questions like how to share your docs, transferring ownership of a doc, or getting started with Coda’s AI. Each Guide has step-by-step instructions on how to get through the learning curve that comes with any new tool.
- Our Help Center articles are usually a bit broader and simpler than Guides on their own, but they’re organized by inquiry topic. The accumulation of quicker bites adds up to a lot of guidance. Curious how Packs can integrate other programs into your docs to make them even more powerful? Here are 44 suggestions in the Help Center.
- Even more support comes from makers just like you. Over the years, Coda has attracted a great group of users who share their expertise on the Community pages. Someone on those forums will absolutely have the answer to your most niche “how to” questions, and they might inspire you to build things you didn’t even know you were missing.
Did you know?
We have a collaborative set of day one questions about how to get to making right here. These were generated from a mix of our ideas and makers’ questions.