Coda Automation - Put your small, important tasks on autopilot.

I've been working on this new building block Automation for a while now, and I can't wait to see what you do with it. Coda's vision has always been to empower makers to create documents as powerful as apps. But an integral part of any app is the logic that powers the application. Today we're taking a big step forward on this front. One of the best parts of Coda is our rich formula language, which makers have used to calculate everything from invoice totals to wedding dates. But some logic goes beyond calculation. In geeky terms, some logic requires "side effects" in response to some trigger. For example, you might want to auto-assign a task to the next available person when it gets marked as P0, or send an invoice to a customer at the end of the month. Up till now, these tedious tasks couldn't quite be modeled in Coda. We saw some of our coding-comfortable makers use our API to script these tasks out, but most of our makers just kept these in their head and came back to the doc regularly for these steps. Not only was this tedious, it could be unreliable. As a close personal example - we have a doc that rotates who waters the plants in the office, and if someone forgets to check that... well, the plants weren't looking that great 😞. Now with this change, even this logic can be modeled in the doc - right next to the data it works on. It's a pretty simple idea: you can craft rules with a WHEN trigger (a specific time, or when a specific a data change happens, etc) and a THEN action (an action to take). And when paired with the recently announced Coda Packs, you can use Automation to take action outside of Coda as well. We've been testing this for a few weeks and have seen some really compelling examples created. And perhaps most importantly, our plants are looking great 🌻. Taking a step back, I often get asked how serious we are about enabling people to "create docs as powerful as apps". A couple friends even asked me if we intend to pass the Turing test. Filling in this gap in logic makes this goal feel like a much more credible claim. You can read more about it here. We have added few examples in the product and a starter kit in our template gallery to help fuel your imagination. Looking forward to seeing what you Coda! Himanshu

As a LONG time lurker on PH (years!), I signed up today just to post this comment. Coda seems INCREDIBLE. It's almost a hybrid of Notion, Airtable and G Docs/Sheets. I just tried it out - the only thing I struggled with was creating a conditional for an automation - there seemed to be no 'if', which was in contrast to what some documentation said was possible - perhaps it's not quite yet in Coda, or I just couldn't find it... As a user of Podio (Globiflow), Zapier, IFTTT, Google Sheets et al - this product looks the most cohesive. SUPER excited to use it, and to see where it goes...

So excited for this launch. As Himanshu outlined, this is both a super useful feature and a key step in fulfilling our "docs as powerful as apps" vision. I've personally added Automations to so many docs and found them really useful. As one simple example, I updated my personal To-Do list to send me a daily summary, and also notify me as my Frog task changes (updated template is here). One of our makers referred to this as a step towards creating a self-driving doc. I like that. Enjoy Coda autopilot! Shishir

Coda is the clearest vision of the future of business operations. What I thought would be “just a fun test” became a critical tool in record time. There was no migration, I simply started using it to solve one off problems quickly...and now it runs everything. This product outshines many other tools with similar goals (Podio, Airtable, Smartsheet, Notion, etc). I have tried nearly all of these and nothing else come close to the day-to-day usefulness of Coda. It is by far the most elegant solution available.

Coda are going from strength to strength lately and it really feels like the momentum is building! We've recently moved to run all of partnerships here at Intercom to Coda and it's been amazing. So much easier to see what we're all doing and automation will only make it easier. 🚀 Well done!

Another awesome release by the Coda team. It has been fascinating to watch them build, integrate, and ship such a dynamic product over time. Using Coda is like raising a child - if you give it your sincere effort and teach it new things, it will go on to win full rides to Ivy League schools and win Pulitzer Prizes.

Congrats to the the entire team. I read Automation and I had to check it out. What you guys are building is really cool and it's interesting that your aim is to become a go-to no-code tool to power docs. The main question I have is how do you see users transitioning from something as omnipresent as Google Docs to Coda. I've tried and tried but failed. Also, how are you guys tackling user education? Would love to chat about it!

I love this new feature! The little Robot button showed up in my coda docs a few days ago so I have already experimented with it. One use case I found was to automatically generate tasks when an item in my content calendar changes status (Research, writing stage, Editing, Publishing...). I now have it so that when a piece of content switches its stage to "Preparation / Research " and the category is "Product review", then it automatically creates the tasks "Test 'product name'" and "Research key facts about 'product name'". I also use automations to automatically create a daily summary (add a row to the "Summary" table) once a day for the time tracking app I've built with Coda. I 'm a big fan of Coda and was really looking forward to this feature after attending the "virtual block party" in October. Really didn't think that it would come so soon.

Awesome update! Keep the productivity superpowers coming.

Great flexibility, limitless options

Pros:

Functional

Cons:

Mobile access