Inside this Article
What are Controls?
Controls— like buttons, select lists, and sliders— make your doc easier to interact with and more intuitive for your team. For those familiar with programming, you can use controls as the front-end and tables as the back-end to make your doc more like an app for your team. Add a checkbox that filters a table or a scale of coffee cup icons to take the temperature in a meeting.
With controls, you’re able to define how and where others interact with your doc, and create safeguards so your more cautious teammates can add or edit a row without fear of breaking a table.
You may have seen many of these controls as Column Formats of a table, but you can also add these building blocks to other parts of your canvas. This makes it possible to setup easily filtered views of your data.
How to Create a Control
On a new line, use the quick insert command “/” then type in “Control” to select a control of your choice.
2. Once created, right-click on the control to rename it and set your control’s properties. For a select list, choose the eligible items you can select. Or for a slider, pick the min and max.
Here’s our video on Buttons & Controls if you’d like to see this in action.
How Controls Work
Once you’ve set up your control, you can reference that control’s value by calling the control name using formula language. On a new line, or in a formula editor, use the “=” sign to begin your formula and enter the control's name to reference its value in formulas.
Use control references to interact with a table or view filter with the Matches() formula. This makes it easy to match exact values, lists and ranges. Controls used this way are also referred to as Interactive Controls (more on this here).
Pro Tip: You can filter any of your tables and views based on any Control in your doc. There's no need to have it in the same page - pretty handy!
Keep in mind that when you filter tables from Controls you can use AND and OR logic to allow you to filter based on multiple controls and variables.