4 real-time collaboration features that save time

A look at how your team can be more productive with Coda’s Fantastic Four.

Kay Diaz-Ferrigno

Growth Marketing Manager at Coda

4 real-time collaboration features that save time

By Kay Diaz-Ferrigno

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On October 4th, we launched Coda 4.0, and it’s packed with big additions and subtle refinements that help you get organized while collaborating more effectively—ultimately improving productivity. 4.0 delivers more end-to-end solutions, extending Coda’s ability to be your “single source of truth,” and unlocks an AI work assistant that can truly understand each person, team, and company. Our hope with Coda 4.0 is for you to get more (of the right work) done. In homage to our team’s love for comics, we thought we’d assemble a “Fantastic Four” of our favorite 4.0 features, here to save your team from wasted time and low productivity.
"Fantastic Four" Coda 4.0 features
  1. Full-page embeds
  2. Sync pages
  3. Universal search
  4. Compose with Slack

1. Full-page embeds: Eliminate unnecessary wayfinding.

 Before Coda 4.0, cross-functional teams lacked a simple way to integrate related information from multiple tools into a single pane of glass. This made problem-solving at work a problem in itself––with teams trying to solve puzzles made up of pieces scattered across different rooms. Increased tool sprawl only made it harder to reconcile the pieces from every team together into one cohesive picture. So we asked ourselves: What if you could staple anything together easily by embedding the surfaces of any tool as a page in a doc? The answer to this question became what we now know as full-page embeds. With full-page embeds, you can reference the content you need without leaving your Coda doc by embedding live pages from thousands of applications.
Your team no longer needs to hunt across dozens of tabs to find their most important information. With full-page embeds, you can easily append your Miro brainstorm, Figma mock-ups, and Mode dashboards together in one place. And you can @reference these embeds in PRDs, writeups, or marketing briefs without tab-switching or forgetting your place.

2. Sync pages: Eliminate copy-and-pasting by giving the same document multiple homes.

 Beyond tool sprawl, there was something else we noticed: doc sprawl. Documentation would often move around or get recreated to inform different teams. It would also grow beyond its initial shape to have subpages to expand upon ideas. While full-page embeds helped bring information from multiple places into one document, people also needed a way to share one document in multiple places––without copy-and-pasting. Content sharing is so much simpler, thanks to sync pages: Sync pages let you have the content you need—everywhere at once—by allowing you to add a page, and all its subpages, into multiple docs.
Sync pages are essentially full-page embeds of Coda pages, including any sub-pages. Using sync pages, you only have to make an update once, and it is reflected everywhere. No more worries about copy-and-pasting tables or having to jump from doc-to-doc to ensure everything’s in the right place. For example, let’s say you’re a manager setting up 1:1s. With sync pages, rather than creating sprawl by having docs for each member, you can use sync pages to pool the individual docs into a personal “manager hub.” You’ll be able to manage all of your 1:1s from one place.

3. Universal search: Give time back to your team.

 While full-page embeds and sync pages lessen context-switching by consolidating important information into fewer places, sometimes we still need to hop between multiple docs. But often, we spend way too much time searching for those docs across our workspace, meaning less time getting things done in the docs themselves. To fix this, we’ve introduced universal search, a single search bar at the top of your page list that allows you to search in-doc and across all your documents.
Without needing to leave the doc you’re working in to search for content that might live somewhere else in your workspace, you can avoid additional context-switching to efficiently create and find what you need in Coda. For example, maybe you can’t recall which doc or page your team was using to discuss that new feature. Instead of Slacking your team, you’ve now got a fast, powerful, connected search function inside your workspace to make it feel less like finding a needle in a haystack.

4. Compose with Slack: Put personalized updates on autopilot.

 Previously, sending personalized messages about the same update often felt tedious. Instead of staying focused on the project at hand, a manager had to spend time stitching together extraneous formulas to create mail-merge functionality within a Coda table. To make things easier, Coda released a new message builder: the compose column. With compose, create dynamic text in a table with a free-form editor that lets you write and format text, including references to columns and formula results, without needing formulas like Concatenate() or Format(). Compose columns can also be wired to messaging tools like Slack and Gmail, to auto-remind your team to provide progress updates.

Automate progress updates by combining a compose column with buttons wired to Slack.

Compose combined with the Slack Pack is a powerful duo for freeing up brainpower while keeping your team moving forward. For example, let’s suppose that on every Monday, Manny the manager would put 20 minutes on the calendars of everyone in his sales team to ensure they gave an update on their books, asking everyone to individually fill out a Google Sheet. After the launch of Coda 4.0 however, Manny can eliminate the meeting altogether (and a few headaches) by quickly recreating this process using a simple template to automate progress updates.

Give your team more superpowers.

 Our Fantastic Four––sync pages, full page embeds, universal search, compose with Slack––come together to save your team time. And redundancies. And headaches. Coda 4.0 includes dozens of updates beyond the ones covered here, all of which were developed with the aim of eliminating busywork to make room for your most important work. Dive deeper into Coda 4.0.
Meet Coda 4.0

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