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Coda delivers on the promise that there is a much better alternative for Excel lists and tables
March 10, 2021

Coda delivers on the promise that there is a much better alternative for Excel lists and tables

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Coda

We started to use Coda to
  1. keep track of all of our upstream and downstream customer projects
  2. maintain a detailed view of application and OS configurations,
  3. manage software version compatibility overviews.
We manage our projects in Coda full-fledged, (e.g., with trackers for milestones, deliverables, actions, issues, decisions and more). Soon after establishing that framework, we started to use Coda to publish information relevant for a much wider group in the organization by means of "booklets" comprising a set of views that are filtered, grouped, and formatted as relevant for the audience. It's amazing to see how we've expanded the use of Coda on a week-by-week basis, now including trackers for daily standups, OKRs, and other purposes.
  • Overviews of any kind--think of lists you want to keep in Excel, but then easier and better.
  • Links between tables (references, look-ups).
  • Extensive filtering capabilities.
  • Conditional formatting.
  • Publishing/sharing information with a wider user group.
  • Creating multiple different views based on the same primary table.
  • It would be great if the row height of text fields could be capped to an x-number of lines. Now, you can select to use wrap/unwrap; however, headings and hard returns can still make the rows too high.
  • The formulas in Coda are very powerful yet can turn somewhat confusing, too. The good thing is that there are many YouTube videos available with instructions. Still, it may take certain users quite some time to get a good grasp on the formulas.
  • The speed of loading the pages has improved and should be improved further.
  • Increased insight for all stakeholders involved--both in terms of overview and details
  • Better grip on issues and escalations--reduced friction, confusion, and higher clarity on status, next actions, and ownership.
  • Reduced time required by those who need to maintain all information. Record (a detail) once and use multiple times.
We used Airtable for a while and looked at Notion briefly. Airtable is good, yet a bit technical and doesn't come with rich text and formatting capabilities--so less suitable for publishing/sharing with the rest of the organization. We haven't used Notion for real; I did look at it briefly and found myself lost in no time.

Do you think Coda delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Coda's feature set?

Yes

Did Coda live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Coda go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Coda again?

Yes

This is the best tool I ever used that delivers what it promises: it removes the need of using Excel for maintaining lists, filters, lookups, and what have you. Coda combines the power of Excel with a real database, conditional formatting in the tables, and rich text formatting in the text parts. Altogether, it is suitable for use as a company-wide information sharing tool.