Love of Fibery and Presentation Possibilities

Ideas & Features
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Greetings Fibery Community. I’m a longtime visitor of this site and a first-time poster. First of all, I want to say that I love Fibery. While it’s not perfect but I think it’s the best option available today in the hybrid database/spreadsheet/document/reporting solution category.

I use Fibery to collect data for various aspects of my business. The relationship capabilities are fantastic and allow me to create deep data structures that I use across the full spectrum of needs for a technical consulting business.

The output capabilities are relatively standard but leave me desiring much more usefulness. I think the potential is impressive, but now, printing and generating documents to output isn’t a strength of Fibery. I leverage Make.com, Documint.me, and some google document services to cover the gaps and generate documents and reports for clients. This solution works well and allows me to auto-generate 200-page complex, professional-looking assessment reports that combine data and text in ways I’ve not been able to do previously. It’s fantastic and both business-changing and enabling.

I previously used Airtable as the backend, but Fibery handles text and templating so much better; it’s not even in the same category, in my opinion. I replaced the Airtable backend entirely over a couple of days of work and haven’t looked back since.

I came across another product randomly tonight, Gamma. They created an excellent presentation system based on documents similar to Fibery’s pages and documents. If the Fibery team could implement a similar presentation mode for pages and documents - Fibery would be catapulted to another level of usefulness. Let alone would the need for Make and tools like Documint largely disappear, but it also starts encroaching on the PowerPoint crowd. I can envision creating documents and presentations data driven by the structures and relationships existing in users’ spaces. This is a powerful feature set for me and my current Fibery use case. If Gamma had an API into it, I would replace my Documint.me with it, but it doesn’t appear to yet.

Thank you all (team and community) so much for making Fibery the product it is today. With the impressive roadmap ahead, I look forward to every release.

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Hi Nicolas, thank you for the feedback!
I agree that printing / output docs from Fibery is very limited.
On the other side, it is relatively unusual use case and we don’t have much feedback / votes.
I hope eventually we will make it better, but so far integration with some external services looks like a good option. Maybe we can add Documint.me plugin and make Make.com redundant for your case? Can you maybe share your case in some details?

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Great ideas @Nicolas. I like the presentation mode idea you are talking about instead of printing/output. Fibery seems 50% there already with block layout in their Pages. I can see a presentation mode being very useful for creating Pages that move through a workflow with different view/report transclusions in each block

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Presently my use case is to collect various bits of data from clients and build relationships with them for reporting and knowledge capture/sharing. I run the DevOps and cloud enablement aspect of a small and elite software development and consulting company. My journey with Airtable, Notion, Coda, Jotform, Zoho, Bubble, Monday, ClickUp, and others all started as a way of trying to structure the projects and data related to DevOps, Cloud, and Software assessments that we generally start using initially to engage clients.

My Fibery workspace is currently using a modified version of the Hiring, Meeting, Sales CRM, Employee Management, Project Management, Business Model Canvas, Reminders, Templating, and GIST Planning templates with various fields and relationships to interconnect them all. I utilize the integration with Gitlab/Github, Hubspot and will integrate Jira soon for one client. Additionally, I’ve added spaces for Rice Scoring, Principles and Standards, SWOT Analysis, Objectives, Result, Risk, and RACI Matrix, Artifacts, Best Practices, and a simple bookmark collections.

Almost all of these spaces have relationships in at least one way. When I built this structure (the start of it anyway) within Airtable I could utilize Documint to perform lookups of related collections. This is the power of Documint with Airtable. Since Documint does not support the same relationship lookup with Fibery yet, I had to utilize Make.com to perform the lookups and collect the various data bits for creating the assessment reports. I currently have a Make scenario with over 100 components doing the lookups. It’s expensive to run since so many transactions occur during each execution, it’s fairly fragile given the component count, but the results are the best I can do now.

The GraphQL interface for Fibery in theory, should decrease my lookups almost entirely and allow the creation much more manageable and at less cost. I haven’t tried this fully yet but plan to start this weekend.

The use case I wanted with the presentation capability is an output similar to what is possible with Documint but also able to be presented professionally. The ability to start with a section and drill into more depth within the simple presentation structure is perfect for the relationships I’ve built. Each relationship would effectively be something that could be drilled into individually. This is similar to the entity view today but with more controls in the presentation of the data. I think as the functionality of Pages with blocks evolves, the capabilities to create these type of document presentations (and potentially much better) is genuinely within Fibery, and I’m excited to see how it comes to be implemented.

CleanShot 2022-08-19 at 17.28.35
CleanShot 2022-08-19 at 17.28.352511×860 264 KB

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Yes, please! If I understand correctly, using an integrated documint plugin, you could create fully customized documents with the press of a button?
HR documents, contracts, reports… and everything in the format you pre-configured! Please add that integration.

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Cool stuff! Hey, how did you configure RACI?

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I am using the RACI as a reference in several databases: Contact, Account, CRM Opportunity, Objective, and Project.

I have a push button on each entity to add a RACI, which walks through a bit of form entry. In some cases, if the RACI is mandatory (like a project), it is linked and created automatically.

The RACI Database is configured with the following fields: Description, Name, Title, Creation, and Modified Dates. There are relationships to Account [one-to-many], Project [one-to-many], and 4x Contacts (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed [many-to-many]). We then use Hierarchical lists to display and sort the RACI for each entity. I tried whiteboard also, but it’s less ideal still. The hierarchical lists work well.

It’s a simple configuration that wouldn’t be challenging to extend into other databases as needed, but it does what we needed for RACI functionality.

FWIW, we did something similar with a RICE score, but its configuration is more involved with multiple automatic link creation scenarios.

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Any chance this is actually gonna happen?