With so many pieces of software today, and tools for your tools, you may not be clear on why to use yet another app. But we've found that this proliferation of apps is one of the best reasons for using Coda. Below are some of the most common situations during which users find themselves gravitating to Coda to solve their problems.
Reason #1 - When you're exporting to CSV
If you've ever done this from an enterprise app, chances are it's likely because the application wasn't doing exactly what you wanted. Maybe you wanted to visualize the data in a different way, or add another bit of data on top of it., Maybe you wanted a colleague to only see part of the data. Whatever the reason, the app itself didn't provide what you needed, so you exported and did it yourself.
This is one of the first reasons people pick up Coda - to manage data from somewhere else, in a very specific way for that specific instance.
With Coda's lightweight tables, you can edit, contextualize, or "massage" data very easily. You could show or hide rows or columns, drag-and-drop columns, even group by elements to create a pivot table or kanban board. And, if you're looking for a Gantt Chart, you can visualize your data in that way too using timeline charts in Coda.
Reason #2 - When you're working with structured and unstructured data
People think in different ways at different times. You might toggle between crunching numbers in Excel to writing a flowery email about why those numbers are crunched just so. When you do that, you switch tools - but why do you have to? What if those numbers were part of the narrative you were weaving, and as you updated them, they updated as well?
With Coda, they can! Your Coda doc can pull data from anywhere in the document, and put it right in a canvas with text. So you can write an email, include a calculation in-line, then later edit the underlying data table and not have to change the calculation. Or @ reference a task or to-do and allow it to pop out in a row modal so all the details are right there - no switching back and forth.
Reason #3 - When your team needs separate workspaces
When a number of people are working on a large dataset, the data can get messy quickly. Perhaps one person wants to sort by column A, the other by column B, and still another wants to hide a column entirely. When this happens, the dataset can start to look like a creme brulee "for the table" - everyone's taken a few bites, and it's suddenly a lot less appetizing. Not to mention, the risk of losing data hygiene.
With Views in Coda, you can have your flambé and eat it too. That's because one data set can be represented in a number of ways, for different people, project milestones, or meetings. And while the underlying data is edited by all, the way they see that data doesn't have to be. So you can hide all the columns you want, even color up your table to make it just for you - and not change the formatting of the base table.
To see examples of how other people like you have used Coda, check out the Template Gallery.