How Destiny’s Child put Excel on the map and syncing data between Coda docs

This is probably the most click-baity title for a blog post/podcast about Excel, but we don’t get many of these in the Excel world, right? It all started in 2002 with the Dilemma music video by Nelly featuring Kelly Rowland, and Kelly decided to send a text using Excel. The most important text in the history of texts: “Where you at? Holla when you get this.” The Excel world has hollered back.

Kelly Rowland texting in Excel from the Dilemma music video

The world responds

A BuzzFeed article came out a few months ago about this 2-second scene from the video. Kelly was interviewed on a show called The Reel and was asked about this incident:

Kelly asked about her questionable text in Excel

This music video has been around for 15+ years and we’re still seeing memes about this momentous text in the interwebs. The fact that Kelly still doesn’t know what Excel is after all these years is mind boggling.

One-way data syncing with Coda

Now back onto regularly scheduled programming. This is the 3rd and final episode in this 3-part series about syncing data. In episode 12, I talked about using the IMPORTRANGE() function for syncing data between Google Sheets. In episode 13, I talked about syncing data using Google Apps Script. This episode is all about syncing data between Coda docs. In case you want to read the full blog post about syncing data, go here.

Here is the Gist with the full script for syncing data between your Coda docs. You’ll have to get the doc IDs and table IDs from the source and target Coda docs you want to sync. Those are set in rows 3-4 and rows 14-30 in the script; but it really depends on how many tables you want to sync.