4 unexpected ways you can use Coda
From data cleanup to event planning, discover how Coda can help consolidate your tech stack.
Harshita Yerramreddy
Product Manager at Coda
4 unexpected ways you can use Coda
By Harshita Yerramreddy
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Tool consolidation · 7 min read
How to consolidate your tools.
The good news is that some of the tools you already use can likely do more than you realize—and Coda may be one of them. Coda is, of course, perfectly suited to your core, easily identifiable use cases: project trackers, team hubs, OKRs. But once you scratch the surface, you’ll find that it can be used for so much more. Because Coda brings your data, words, and workflows together, it can easily enhance, reduce, and replace dozens of tools across numerous categories. We’ve heard countless stories from customers who end up using Coda for things far beyond what they originally planned. For example, Outsource.Digital started using Coda for task management and knowledge hubs but quickly discovered they could build entire custom apps to replace tools like Jira and CRMs too—saving them $20k per year on SaaS subscriptions.
4 unexpected ways to use Coda.
This is a story we see time and time again: customers start using Coda for one thing but quickly expand to many other use cases. A CIO at one of our enterprise customers puts it best: “Every time someone wants to bring on a new software vendor, our procurement team asks: ‘Could this be done in Coda instead?’” To demonstrate just how flexible Coda can be—and for a little fun—we’re sharing four of our favorite “unexpected” or unusual use cases. Maybe you’ll discover a new way to use Coda yourself!1. Speedy Salesforce updates.
There are, of course, some tools that are simply a “must-have” for your business. When that’s the case, you want those tools to work together as seamlessly as possible, so integrations are key. For many businesses, Salesforce is one of those must-haves. And if you’ve ever used Salesforce, you’ll know how time-consuming it can be to manage your data in there. We found our Customer team spent countless hours looking up titles for contacts and manually updating their records. Luckily, Coda integrates with Salesforce (and 600+ other tools!), so we built a doc that enables them to update that data in just a third of the time. Rather than going back and forth to find and update each contact one by one, they can simply add titles in the Coda doc and then sync them over to Salesforce in bulk. This also means that updates can be made by members of the team who don’t have Salesforce seats.
2. Easy data cleanup.
Data cleanup might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Coda but it’s actually something it’s well suited to—especially with the addition of AI. Here are just a few ways we’re seeing customers using Coda AI to automate tedious, repetitive data tasks:- Formatting a table of phone numbers and adding the international dialing code based on the contact’s country, so they can be clicked to call directly from the doc.
- Cleaning up a list of customer names into a standard First Name, Last Name format.
- Converting review comments into a rating out of 5, based on the sentiment of each post.
3. Inclusive early access communities.
The best products are built with the help of customer feedback along the way, which often means managing early access or beta groups. The product team working on Coda AI is, of course, using Coda to manage the admin of running our AI early access group. But they’re also using it to create a mini community with a centralized doc shared with all customers in the early access group. This is where the product team adds updates on new features and what’s being worked on, streamlining communication to the group. But it’s also where users can add feedback on those features and vote on each other’s comments, so there is a continuous, real-time loop between our product team and the early access customers on what’s most important.4. Simplifying the event planning pipeline.
As Coda’s event marketer, Liz Marxen, curates seamless, thoughtful, and compelling events for prospects and customers. And providing that experience takes a lot of coordination behind the scenes. From finding a venue and planning a menu, pulling together the right guest list, and outreach to follow-up emails and metric tracking, there is a lot to manage. By managing events in a Coda doc, she’s removed the friction of those tasks. In that doc she:- IDs targets to nominate to events.
- Send invitations.
- Tracks responses.
- Drafts leadership briefing docs for hosts.
- Populates metrics dashboards.