Hey @Brian_Roech_Roehrich ,
No, it does not disable formula autofill. The extensions are a “shell” around the Coda editor, expanding a couple of options (like size, layout, showing/hiding the formula hints, etc.), but it is still the Coda editor being used.
To my knowledge, the only way to write code without autofill is using an external text editor and copy and past your code. I think it is easier to just accept and learn to work with some of the quirks of the editor, but that is just my opinion of course.
Greetings,
Joost
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Hey @Lizat! Welcome to the community, self-described newbie and all. 
These are genuinely great observations, and honestly, most of them are already being woven into how we operate going forward. Internally, you could chalk some of this up to the classic “move fast” product mentality, but that excuse wears thin pretty quickly when you’re the one on the receiving end of a surprise change. We hear that.
We’re actively building in new guardrails so the launch, pull, relaunch cycle becomes a thing of the past rather than a recurring theme.
But here’s the part worth celebrating: you’re watching community work exactly as it’s supposed to. The fact that we could hear the friction directly, course correct, and ship a fix? That’s the whole point. Community isn’t a buzzword here. It’s genuinely how the signal from the people using this thing every day gets back to the ones building it.
Keep telling us what’s working and what isn’t. It matters more than you know.
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would suggest at the very least giving us visual feedback that shows something changed in the formula
nothing worse than accidentally changing the formula, hitting enter and not understanding why your formula is broken
Also, how did this get shipped before this feature? In the era of AI coding some of these smaller nice to haves are super amazing low hanging fruit for a new PM / engineer (which, these days, what’s the difference?) which will make us all love you (and give us hope in Coda’s product velocity again!)
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Still find ti confusing and causing more issues than solving… for now. I find myself using the Esc and Enter buttons a ton more because mouse click is not feeling safe.
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I really don’t understand what issue this is solving. This has got to be one of the worst feature rollouts yet.
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@Samuel_Langford it’s something new users report expecting to be able to do bc of excel
It’s probably a fine feature, but it requires:
- an accent animation to warn the user that something has changed
- the ability to scroll the page while in the formula editor
The silly thing about this feature is that now you can select things on the page to bring them into the formula editor if what you want to select happens to be on screen at that very moment.
How often does that actually happen? Almost never.
Big thing for them to do would be:
A) upgrade the formula editor, take notes from Paul’s chrome extension
B) allow scrolling while editing a formula
C) allow clicking, sure, but ensure there’s feedback to ensure a formula doesn’t accidentally get changed
I’d also suggest canvas objects that allow coda formulas to be edited inline directly on the page
but I know raising the ceiling is not on their menu, esp because it’s unclear whether nocode survives the ai explosion
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Yeah, I agree with everything you said. But also, just give us an option to turn it off. Even if I have to dig through my account settings to find it.
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I love how you are now able to click on a specific cell or actually choose a column in one click inside formula.
I still agree to the fact that an option to disable it in case you’re working on something very precise and don’t want to mess up (even though it’s again an option to add to many existing options) would be nice.
Thanks for the update and good luck with the work 
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Every day I dislike this feature more and more. I’m so used to closing down the small formula editor by just clicking elsewhere, this ‘feature’ is now pretty breaking for me.
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Ditto. I have the same problem and didn’t know about this new “feature” until my formulas randomly started getting fouled up when I’d go to edit one. And I shudder to think what’s going to happen one day when my client tries to edit something. This client double click’s buttons so I’ve had to write extensive traps to prevent them from fouling up their data repeatedly because instead of Clicking a button, they double-click buttons and Coda dutifully tries to do the same thing twice on a data set that changed after the first click. Imagine if they find out how to open a formula to look at it and then click somewhere else. UGH. I have them pretty much locked out, but they do have access to their main login and half the time they don’t even realize what login they are using. I feel like there’s a ticking time bomb and one day I’m going to get a call that their doc blew up. They already managed to overwrite all the clients of a table and changed them to ONE client and “no one knows” how it happened. The only recovery from that was me manually inspecting each record’s history to see what it was before. Cost them hours of my time. Imagine how unhappy they are going to be when one of them right clicks to open the formula of something on accident.
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This is an excellent idea but just not quite implemented correctly.
I hope they tweak the UX to keep the concept but make it less prone to these severe errors.
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I had a somewhat similar experience with an editor who messed up a formula so bad, that I had to restore a 110mb document a few times to an earlier version to find out what the formula was before.
One of my recent cases related to this feature is a result of a few recent “upgrades” of Coda.
On a page on the canvas, I have references to a table which is placed in a hidden page. Obviously, the hidden page has some restrictions. The page which is visible to the user has different locking restrictions. Previously, when I clicked on the reference on the canvas, it would open the item row on the same page, respecting the page restrictions set. Right now, what happens is it opens the hidden page, exposing everything that’s there.
Basically, what I had to do is set the permissions levels on the hidden page similar to those of the visible page. Because the user was supposed to write and create tables on the canvas, editors ended up with full access to the visible and hidden page.
One user opened a reference which led them to the hidden page. They closed the open row, clicking on the canvas of the hidden page. They had access to the hidden page canvas now. First, they deleted some of the formulas there, which broke half of the document. Then, they also edited some of the formulas by just clicking on the formula and then clicking on a table which was visible on the hidden page.
5 hours after midnight, which I spent urgently restoring the doc.
PS: I admit some of this could’ve been avoided with some complex combination of table locking, page locking, and automations, but wow, I just didn’t expect all that exploding so quickly
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These experiences are telling us that it is NOT SAFE for Coda to launch modifications that change the behavior of existing workflows without giving us warning before, or, at the very least, some RELEASE NOTES.
Coda is not Facebook, where they can “change fast and break things”.
Our users, makers, clients, etc, are depending on their Coda docs continuing to work as before.
THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT DEV OPS ISSUE FOR CODA ENGINEERING.
Otherwise things break unexpectedly because some “improvement” changes how our solutions function.
Respectfully,
Max
@Ruggy-Joesten, please act as the Voice Of The Customer on this if possible.
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Some kind of indicator that you did just click on a column would be really valuable, like if pill were a different color at first or something.
Can you also restrict it so it doesn’t add the column you’re currently working in (like if I’m writing a formula for colX then accidently click on colX and it adds colX to the formula)? That will always throw an error so there’s no need to even let the users be able to click it. That is probably the most annoying issue I run into.
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UGH. I feel your pain on that one. Coda is very powerful, but the inability to lock things down can allow users to wreak havoc upon their docs.
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Yep. I’m still chasing down an issue with some Coda change that I didn’t know happened and still don’t know what changed. But a doc that was working properly is now not calculating the formulas that haven’t changed in over a year so my client didn’t bill their clients properly and we just found out about it. What would make a formula calculate properly when adding rows using the default value suddenly STOP calculating properly when adding rows? I have no idea.
And I second that idea that Coda makes important changes and we don’t know about it until after. And for those of us designated as “Coda Experts” you’d think we should get a heads up about something major. I realize that program is changing but still, there are a lot of us who make a living from Coda and have clients running their entire business on it and something like that can be catastrophic and makes us look incompetent that we didn’t know.
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Yep! True!
I use Coda primarily for my own ventures and initiatives. As an innovations manager, being caught off guard by changes seriously damages my credibility within my own team(s). On a positive note, it teaches me resilience to mockery and anger 
But can’t give me back the nights away from the little ones - too many due to Coda “updates” in the past several years.
Maybe one day soon, we will have the option to push releases to a workspace after we have tested some critical documents in an updated environment. Maybe copying these documents to an upgraded environment, testing them and only when happy, accepting the new/updated features in each workspace we manage.
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I admit I am not a software engineer, but surely it should be quite possible to give users a toggle in the formula editor modal to toggle on-off this point and click mode per formula modal on an as-needs basis.
In a completely analogous way to how the ‘table summary builder’ toggle is implemented.
I also completely agree with Connor that the feature is quite pointless if scrolling in the background window is disabled - which it is when using the expanded formula window.
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Strong agreement here - it’s so hard to rewire the gesture of clicking away to close down a formula. And now it breaks the formula most times I click away, requiring another 30 seconds to work out where the click added something unintentional to the formula…please please give us the option to disable it if you must keep it around
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Hey everyone,
Apologies for the late reply—I was off the last week and just getting back to some of these posts.
I hear you loud and clear, and I’m going to make sure all this feedback is spun up to the right team. I hope to have something to share with y’all once I have a chance to huddle up with them. Thanks, as always, for the candid feedback!
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