I have a Project database with a field for each entry called “Historic Updates.” I try to write things as they happen in this field, with a date stamp.
I do a pretty good job of updating those things while I’m in the project working. But sometimes, like with emails, I just need to drop a quick update without much friction - going to find the project, then clicking on the rich text field, then clicking on the popup pane is too much friction in this case.
So I created another database called “Personal Work Updates” that I figured I’d just drop notes in as I went, then have my Assistant manually add those updates later on to each task.
But it occurred to me: what if I could just write the update, then later simply assign a project to each update and that assignment would then force the rich text update to apply to that first database field?
I fear I didn’t describe that well enough - and I know the simple solution sounds like: “create a new database called “Historic Updates” and just write stuff there then assign to projects.” But… I dunno - I prefer the idea of the updates being embedded in each project as a rich text field - not as a series of relations. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I realize to do this would also mean to override whatever existed in the rich text field originally. So maybe this is a bad idea overall, but perhaps it could be useful for other field types?
Yeah, that was my first effort - thanks for this idea!
Comments are so weird. You can’t access the field directly from a table and a table view won’t show you anything about the comments other than how many exist. And unlike nearly every other thing in Fibery, clicking on the comment indicator in the table view gives you nothing.
SmartSuite’s comments were really quite incredible and I used them in this way. But Fibery is a bit lacking on this front so far. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I realize I could use a formula perhaps, to get the information I want from the comments, but it still doesn’t resolve the hyperlink issues of access the comments directly for edits.
I have done almost no experimenting with automations yet. What I really want is to prepend items, and I see I can do that. This is pretty interesting. Thank you!
Unfortunately, there is no trigger for “new comment added” in the automations but you could also schedule a rule to check every hour if the number of comments has changed and if so, append the comment.
I think @Chr1sG should surely have some neat workaround.
The alternative would be to use Slack (if you do), to create entities there and get them attached.
This is what I’ve been experimenting with. I was just using a normal rich text field on my project entities but realized if I had each “update” be its own entity in a separate database, I could do some cool things.
Like allow myself to just write updates at the end of the day without spending the time to link to projects - so I didn’t miss anything. Then just sort them to projects later.
This also gives some interesting data on how many updates are being generated each day by which staff members. Who knows if that’s a metric worth tracking, but… it’s there!
