Data-Powered Documents: How to Combine Facts and Figures in Modern Writing Apps

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Top Highlights

• Quip,

• Coda’s the most traditional. Designed to combine documents, spreadsheets, and app features like Kanban boards and mini databases, its main focus is on detailed documents. You make one document and share that with your team.

• Coda’s documents are so powerful, though, that a single document can store all of your team’s ideas.

• You can add extra sections

• to each document, organize them into folders, and build out a library from one shared document

• Notion takes a similar path with shared workspaces. The name makes you feel like you’re sharing a broader set of content, but it works out similarly to Coda.

• you can add pages and an almost unlimited number of sub-pages to detail your work. Each top-level page automatically adds links to subpages, for a directory of sorts where you could plan a project, add project details in sub-pages, and still keep track of it all in the top page.

• that’s now part of the Salesforce family of apps

• a powerful collaboration suite with documents, spreadsheets, and team chat all in one

• your team has a shared folder, with as many sub-folders and documents inside each as you need.

• these apps all let you manage the data right inside your documents.

• Instead of opening a spreadsheet

• spreadsheets and document apps hadn’t kept up with the way we work today.

• Coda’s team includes former Excel team members who’d grown frustrated that

• So they reinvented what both documents and spreadsheets could be, together.

• Instead of simply embedding a spreadsheet into a document, Coda documents are a hybrid spreadsheet and database.

• Notion takes the database idea further. Each table is a standalone database where you set each column’s data type—and you can store text, numbers, and more detailed items like multi-select tags, files, and checkboxes. Want to add functions to your table? You’ll add them in a function column, where the same function applies to every row in the table.

• You can then customize each row with more data in a popover.

• Notion includes a Relation row type to link related data together, much like its larger database app competitors

• You can’t reference functions and data inside your text, but you can build smaller tables, reference data from any other table in any other document, and embed them throughout your text as you need to point out key figures and data.