This is where you store your operational data, in our case one table for “Projects” and one for “Tasks”
You can now copy the data from the spreadsheet “Prepare for export - Projects” and paste it into the table “Projects” and proceed accordingly for Tasks.
Next up, revise the column formats as necessary. Feel free to check out how I have set these up here
One more step that’s essential, is to make sure that the two tables are synced bi-directionally. That means, we not only want to see which project a task belongs to, but we also want to see which tasks are related to each project. To accomplish this, we’ll insert a column in the Projects table, that we’ll call “Related Tasks”. We’ll set it to be type formula and will set this as follows:
Tasks.filter([Project Name]=thisRow)
(ie “Hi Coda, please go to the Tasks table, and filter out those items, were the project name equals this row’s project name”. Because we’re fine with Coda returning the display column of the Tasks table (ie Task Name), we don’t need to specify which column Coda shall return. If we’d prefer a different column, we’d simply add eg .Task Owner after the closing parenthesis.
We’ll set up conditional coloring to make the data be more intuitively understandable. For this, we’ll assign colors to the individual status.
Step 5) Create Views
Now that the housekeeping has been taken care of, it’s time to get started on the good stuff.
Remember how we said that it’s a downside of spreadsheets that the data is always presented in the same way? Well, not anymore!
We’ll start by setting up one view for Charlie. We’ll reference the base table Projects, choose layout “Detail” and filter it to only show those projects where the project owner is Charlie.
As we’ll want to make sure work is split evenly across our team members, we’ll bring in a chart view to visualize the current allocation. We’ll reference the base table Tasks, choose layout “Charts” and set up a pie chart by Team members.
Step 6) Sky’s the limit
And that’s a wrap 🎉. We’ve successfully moved our spreadsheet data into Coda. And now, we can unlock the real magic by making use of:
Attachments
A spreadsheet limits you to text or numbers. A database know no such limitations. Attach a file, embed a picture, show a slider, ask for a thumbs-up, etc.
Automations
For example: every time a task status is changed to “Ready for approval”, the corresponding manager will automatically be pinged in Slack, and asked to review the content by clicking on a link.
Button Actions
When the managers opens the link, they will be able to share their approval by pushing a button. That button action will automatically inform the task owner that the task has been approved, and the cascade continues.
Native Integrations
Bring in a Google Drive Folder containing all of a client’s files, to attach these to a project or task.
External Integrations (Packs)
Connect to a separate tool that is being used (for example a third party CRM tool like Copper). Integrate this into the Coda doc to operate out of a one single interface (no more switching between 7 browser tabs!)
Templates
Save it as a template. Next time you’ll have comparable use case, you won’t need to re-build everything from scratch. Rather, you can hit the ground running!