As much as we pride ourselves on top quality support at Coda, the best support is an intuitive product that doesn’t need support 😉. Today, we’re announcing a few new features to make it easier to do some previously complex tasks involving tables in Coda (without contacting support).
Find your format
Better column format organization
For starters, we’ve re-organized the add column menu to make it faster to locate formats:
Column format search
You can even search the formats to find the one you’re looking for:
Switch column format
Also, you can now access all these same formats and improved organization from an existing column. This is especially useful when setting the format of a blank column in a new table:
Smarter lookups
The next set of changes involve lookup columns. If you’re unfamiliar with lookups, they create a column similar to a select-list format that references information from another table. For example, a table of contacts references a table of companies, or a table of orders references a table of customers. To create a new lookup, add a new column, then choose the lookup format and select the other table you want to reference:
Filtered lookups
If you want to reference a table but don’t want all information to appear in your lookup column, you can now filter which lookup items appear in the lookup dropdown menu. Previously, this required a fairly complex formula. Now, in the lookup options, you can expand item settings and choose a custom filter. You can then filter the items available in a lookup column using our newly added filter UI.
Filter suggestions
There’s a fairly common scenario where you want the options in a lookup to change based on the value of another column. For example, after you select a category (e.g. Vegetables), you might only want to see products from that category (e.g. Carrots). Now, we automatically detect those cases and provide a shortcut in the filter dropdown:
Sorted lookups
We’ve also made it easier to sort the options in a lookup select list. By default, they are in the order of the source table, but you can choose to sort them alphabetically, reverse alphabetically, or based off any other column in the source table:
Do more with related data
Part of the power of lookups is the additional information they allow you to access. Again, we’ve simplified a bunch of common scenarios that previously required writing formulas.
Related columns
After adding a lookup column, you can display additional columns from that table. For example, you might create a lookup of contacts and then also show the contact’s email address in another column. To do this, go back to the lookup column format and expand related columns:
Summarizing lookups
If you are using multi-select lookups, you can now summarize the data (e.g. sum, min, max, count) with just a couple clicks instead of using a formula. An example of this is showing the total price of all items in an order. On multi-select lookups, clicking ‘Add’ will show you a list of summary types that you can show as well:
Referenced lookups
It’s also a common need to show where a row is being referenced. It’s a hard concept to explain, but it makes sense when you think about this scenario: You have a table listing contact names and the company they belong to, and you want to see all the contacts for a given company in a new table of companies. Setting up this relationship is now easy. When you add a new column on a table that’s being referenced (e.g. being used for a lookup in another table), you’ll see a blue dot next to lookups, indicating that there’s an option to add a column showing where each row is referenced in a particular table:
That’s it for all the new table updates. If the improved lookups mean you contact support less often for help, we’d still like to hear from you. Feel free to click on the little help icon once in a while and say hi or tell us a joke you’ve heard recently. We may be getting a bit bored.
-TJ
Designer @Coda
