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Beyond the formula
Why static values are your secret weapon
How strategic use of plain text and fixed data creates faster, more maintainable, and AI-ready documents.
Untying the formula in
Recently, in a conversation with the Coda community, I described a favorite technique: using the “Value for new rows” setting to automatically populate new rows. Something interesting happened — someone assumed the value I was creating would remain “live,” still actively linked to its formula.
This was the perfect illustration of a crucial concept that’s easy to overlook. My point was that the formula acts like a rubber stamp, not a live feed. It calculates a value once at the moment of creation, then impresses that result into the cell as simple, static text. The formula does its job and gets out of the way.
That exchange got me thinking about how we often focus on Coda’s dynamic, formula-driven power while underappreciating the simple robustness of static values — plain text and numbers that stand on their own.
On one hand, you have dynamic values: the living, breathing results of a formula that change the instant any input changes. On the other, you have static values: the fixed, reliable data you type in yourself or “print” into a cell.
