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Mis-en-place
If you’ve attended one of my trainings you know outside of building beautiful and powerful Coda docs, I love to cook! An important ingredient in French cuisine is a Mis-en-place, French for “putting in place” or “gather”. Gathering all of your ingredients and understanding how they’ll work together is key to an organized process and desirable outcome.
An important part of building docs is deciding what you want your doc to do and how you want to organize it. Docs evolve over time of course and one doc that starts as a small seedling could grow into a fruitful garden 🌱. Before you get building, I recommend drawing out your structure on a whiteboard or using a tool like Figma or Miro to determine what your doc will do, and how the pieces will fit together. Some tips while you’re doing this below!
Below is an example of a Miro board I created before building out a Hiring Sync Doc for our recruiting team here at Coda. Check out for the final product, you’ll notice the doc evolved a fair amount after the original brainstorming 👀
Consider your audience
Consider who will be using the doc, what they will be using it for, and how you want them to interact with the doc. Do your best to shape the path for them to perform the behaviors you desire, in the way you want them to. Want them to add entries to a table? Have them use a button. Is there a particular process they should go through? Outline this in a Loom on the first page. Make it dead easy for them to use your doc.
Utilize an Admin section
You may find yourself creating supporting tables, or pieces of your doc you don’t need everyone to see or use. We always recommend having an Admin section of your doc that is intended for only a select group of people who are using the doc. Pro tip is to hide the admin section (), and bookmark for yourself giving you easy access.
Leverage Page Embeds
Page Embeds allow you to have full pages of other tools in your doc, whether it’s a Project Tracker with a Miro board or a Design Sprint with Figma embeds, you’re able to view and interact with all of your tools in one place - a Coda doc!
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Mis-en-place
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