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One table, different views?
Coda is very powerful to sort data, group them and so on. But why would you only use it a static way when you can make it dynamic ! This is very easy to see your day move, and change the point of view according to your needs . Let’s have a little example with my favourite disney movie, shall we !
Let’s meet our little team, that has to deal with different projects and tasks. Let’s imagine you have some project like thoses beside. A classic table will look like this one :
Task
Project
People
Image
Month
Just eat insects
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Pumba
August
Eat insect as well
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Timon
May
Motivating Simba
Fight Scar
Pumba
June
Sing Hakuna Matata
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Simba
May
Lie to Simba
Kill Muphasa
Scar
May
Scar Muphasa about Simba
Kill Muphasa
Scar
August
Be a treator 😈
Kill Muphasa
Timon
June
There are no rows in this table
Project
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Fight Scar
Kill Muphasa
As you know, you can use “group” option to simply group thoses task for example by project, that would render something like that :
Grouped tasks
Project
Task
People
Image
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
3
Just eat insects
Pumba
Eat insect as well
Timon
Sing Hakuna Matata
Simba
Fight Scar
1
Motivating Simba
Pumba
Kill Muphasa
3
Lie to Simba
Scar
Scar Muphasa about Simba
Scar
Be a treator 😈
Timon
Make it Dynamic !
This is great, but very static. Knowing myself, I know that I would love to quickly change this to group by “People”, in order to see tasks for each guy in the team. Rather than going to options, and manually change it, a quicker way to proceed is to create a new column called “GroupBy” for example, that would change according to a select control like this one : ➡️ ⬅️, called here “group_lionsking”. Then, fill this new colum with a formula using function to detect what you want.
Blank
It works quite easily : switchif(X=A, value for A, X=B, value for B, X=C, value for C, ...)
Applied to our example with people, project, month and even image :
SwitchIf(group_lionsking="People",thisRow.People,group_lionsking="Project",thisRow.Project,group_lionsking="Month",thisRow.Month,group_lionsking="Image",thisRow.Image)
And then, just group your table using “GroupBy” Column, and play with the control above 👍
This is our table grouped by [ ]
[ ]
GroupBy
Task
Project
People
Image
Month
7
Just eat insects
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Pumba
August
Eat insect as well
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Timon
May
Motivating Simba
Fight Scar
Pumba
June
Sing Hakuna Matata
Be Cool & Sing “Hakuna Matata”
Simba
May
Lie to Simba
Kill Muphasa
Scar
May
Scar Muphasa about Simba
Kill Muphasa
Scar
August
Be a treator 😈
Kill Muphasa
Timon
June
Group, but not only !
This works also with sort option. Even More Powerful : With CHARTS ! Let’s Consider a bar chart, with horizontal axis with “GroupBy” Column, that displays tasks count. If you play with the select control, it will dynamically move as well !
Hope you enjoy this little trick ! Please visit to leave any comment, suggestion, or see my twitter feed !
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