Meet Coda a universal tool that allows you to visualize absolutely any process in different companies. What previously required a dozen applications (from Excel to Trello or Asana) is now available in one place and absolutely free.
Meet Coda a universal tool that allows you to visualize absolutely any process in different companies. What previously required a dozen applications (from Excel to Trello or Asana) is now available in one place and absolutely free.
In Coda you can create documents, tables, interactive tools, various graphics, kanban cards (one of the methods of development management) and so on. All features are available through an interesting and very simple interface that also allows you to work together.
Bief history
In May 2019, Shishir Mehrotra in collaboration with his colleague Alex DeNui (a former googler) founded a cloud editor. Earlier, when Mehrotra worked on YouTube, he was constantly strained by complications in the Google Docs and Sheets tools.
In his opinion, these tools are the last century, since documents at the fundamental and structural level have not changed over 40 years.
Principle of work and features
Usually cells in sheets are indicated by a letter and a number, as in the game "Sea Battle". Excel and other old documents also required formulas to be placed inside tables. In Coda, they can be placed anywhere: click the "=" sign, and enter data from anywhere in our document.
As a result, you have a system that can be useful for anything: from creating applications to planning personal events, or keeping clients in CRM for sales.
How to work with Coda
Coda offers authorization through a Google account, which automatically enables interaction with Google Drive. Then you need to choose a role or just skip this step.
After that, the main interface is displayed, in which using the control panel you can:
- create all kinds of folders, projects or documents (they are called sections)
- delete, share, export, insert graphs, tables, maps, media, etc.
- within the project, you can create an unlimited number of individual documents.
Using Coda, you can, for example, specify the Google Directions coordinates in a formula, and Coda inserts a Google map with directions from the source location to the destination.
The possibilities of Coda are endless. Mehrotra himself says that he is pleased with the experiments that he conducted over the entire use of the program. His 11-year-old daughter easily runs a Lego school robotics team using Coda documents.
Pros:
- It's free;
- Coda is available for smartphones on Android and iOS, as well as in a browser;
- Coda tables can be anything from a simple list with automatic color coding to a complex model that you can find in the software;
- Flexible, so you can embed anything (even formulas), and adapt it as your needs grow. You can format it so that it matches our own visual preferences in the form of a Gantt chart, calendar, Kanban board, etc.
Minuses:
- The absence of the Russian language creates a slightly unpleasant impression, but it is not difficult to understand;
- Some projects do not open as fast as we would like, but compared to the first version, the second has significant changes for the better: searching and switching sections have become smoother and faster.
Based on aggregated data, these images show the use of group documentation for one week. Coda 1.0 was for manufacturers. Coda 2.0 - for the whole team. Simpler, cleaner, faster for everyone.
It is not surprising that single users use documents as widely and varied as the teams themselves (cooperation in Coda takes different forms).
Of course, Coda is not the first company to attempt to reinvent Microsoft Office. But none of these applications was a breakthrough in the fashion of other modern tools in the workplace, such as Slack or Trello. Perhaps the future is behind these products.