10 tips to maximize Coda’s search and sharing features

Find the information you need quickly, keep your workspace organized, and share docs securely with the right people.

Vidhya Bhat

Product Manager at Coda

10 tips to maximize Coda’s search and sharing features

By Vidhya Bhat

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Productivity · 7 min read
Coda brings teams and tools together for a more organized workday. And for the past year, many teams within Coda have focused on simplifying the product so that effective organization is an easier goal to achieve. My team specifically improved some of the ways that you can search, share, and collaborate with your team. Drawing inspiration from my previous work at Google (leading Google News story understanding on the Search team) and Pixel (working on system intelligence), we leaned into the insight that having the right tools—or information—at your fingertips leads to better organization, which in turn leads to increase productivity. Whether you’re a seasoned Coda user or just getting started, here are 10 tips to help you make the most of Coda’s search and secure sharing features.

Give time back to your team with universal search.

 If you’re in a large workspace that has hundreds of documents, Coda’s search bar is the place to go to locate the information you’re looking for. When you search for a term on Coda, we scan the docs, pages, and content within tables across all of your docs to find the best matches.

Tips for using the new universal search feature:

 1. If you’re already in a doc and want to search your entire workspace for something without leaving your place in the doc, type your search term in the in-doc search bar and click on the All docs tab. 2. Use quotation marks around the specific phrase or terms you’re searching for to find the exact phrase or terms in docs or tables. You can also click on the Exact match filter to do the same thing. 3. Use Coda search to find data from other tools. If you’ve synced data into Coda via Packs, the data is stored in sync tables within Coda docs. When you search for a keyword, you’ll not only find doc content that matches your search term in the search results but also synced table data from Packs. For example: You no longer need to leave Coda to search for a specific Jira issue. If you’ve synced your Jira issues into Coda, you can search for those issues from within Coda! 4. To narrow down the search results further, you can use filters such as:
  • In: Choose the workspace(s) or folder(s) to search within.
  • Type: Choose whether you want to see docs, pages, tables, or any combination in your results.
  • People: Filter docs owned by or shared with specific people.
  • Date: Here you can filter by either the date the doc was Last modified or Created. Then you can select a date or date range.
  • Packs: Use this filter to see results that are synced from specific Packs.

Give your clicking finger a rest with workspace-level sharing.

 We know that teams work in docs, and a key ingredient to effective collaboration is ensuring the right people have access to your docs at all times. When you’re collaborating on a project, you might need to share the doc you’re working on with other stakeholders. The number of people that would need access to your doc can quickly grow and become hard to manage. You can share your doc with anyone in your workspace and give them the right level of access to your doc to make collaboration seamless.

Tips for workspace-level sharing:

 This is especially useful if... 5. You’re in a workspace that has users from multiple domains. 6. Your organization has multiple workspaces and you want to limit access to the doc to just members of your workspace. 7. You’re in an edu workspace and don’t want the doc to be shared with everyone that shares the .edu domain.

Get the right info into the right hands with folders and group sharing.

 As you and your team start using Coda, your workspace could have hundreds of documents. While search is great for finding what you need when you need it, you may sometimes need to organize related docs for easier sharing. This is where folders come in handy. And now you can share folders with groups, making it even easier to share collections of documents with large numbers of users.
For example, imagine you want to organize all docs—such as your team wiki, project design docs, OKR docs, etc.—into a single folder that’s shared with everyone on your team. Now, you can share that folder with a SCIM group or a Google group containing all your team members. This means that any new team member added to the group will automatically have access to the folder and all the docs within it—hopefully we can help reduce those “need access” pings! Folders and groups are also really helpful for targeted collaboration, such as when you’re working with external vendors or contractors on a project. You can quickly grant access to specific docs or folders to specific groups, ensuring that sensitive information is only visible to authorized individuals. By leveraging folders and groups in Coda, you can maintain a well-organized and secure workspace that promotes effective collaboration and information sharing.

A few additional tips to consider:

 8. Define group membership clearly. It’s important to clearly define who should be a member of each group. This will ensure that only the appropriate individuals have access to shared docs and folders. It is common for our enterprise customers to have groups based on projects, departments, teams, and even reporting chain. 9. Use shared and private folders appropriately. Consider creating shared folders to organize docs that you want everyone in your workspace to have easy access to. For example, creating shared folders for your team is great because anyone in the workspace can join and see what your team is working on. Whereas, creating a private folder might be better if you’re working on a special project that only some users or groups should know about. 10. Pin key documents in your folder. It’s possible for folders to quickly have a long list of documents within them, especially if the folder is shared with a large number of people. You can pin key documents to the top of the folder that are often accessed by folder members or documents that every folder member should easily access.

And we’re not done yet.

 My team is actively working on supporting granular permissions on folders that would allow you to invite users to a folder with view, comment, or edit access. We’re also exploring ways to organize docs using tags, allowing our enterprise admins to create data classification tags and our users to add one or more tags to their docs for easy categorization and discovery. Stay tuned—there’s much more work coming to help you find the information you need quickly, keep your workspace organized, and share docs securely with the right people.
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