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Introduction to table views

Get more out of your data in Superhuman Docs with connected table views.

We get it: your work—and the data that powers it—lives across a lot of docs, pages, and views. But that doesn’t mean you should have to waste your time making manual updates in them all. Superhuman Docs was built to power effective, dispersed work for teams; our most basic building block, the table, supports this by giving you connected views. That means that edits in one place will be reflected in all the right places, keeping your data up to date, saving you time and effort, and minimizing accidental data management mistakes. By the end of this guide, you'll know how to build and use connected table views in Superhuman Docs.
You'll get...
  • How Superhuman Docs table views function
  • Why you should use views
  • When you should use views
buttons
You'll use...
  • Tables
  • Columns
  • Table options

1. Why Superhuman Docs tables feel different

 If you have used tables in docs before, you may notice that Superhuman Docs tables work a little differently from spreadsheets like Excel or Sheets. That is because Superhuman Docs was designed to feel as powerful as an app. To do that, it needed real tables, not sheets. In a table, rows and columns have distinct roles. Rows represent individual records, and columns store information about those records. In other words, Superhuman Docs tables are modeled more like relational databases than traditional spreadsheets. One of the biggest benefits of this structure is connected views, which let you see the same data in different places and formats while still editing the values in one shared source. For example, you might edit a due date directly in a table or adjust it in a calendar view, and the change will stay in sync everywhere.

2. Start with a base table

 You can think of a base table as your “master” table — the one that will hold every little piece of data you might need in your doc. Your base table should stay simple and clean, with no extra sorting or formatting applied. Save the styling for your views. When creating your base table, it’s helpful to think of your data in terms of nouns and adjectives:
  • Rows = nouns
  • Columns = adjectives
For example, if you want to create a table to track your tasks, the task itself would be the noun, and the columns would hold descriptive data about the task, like the status, owner, or due date. To create this table, add a row for each task and fill in the data about the status, assignee, and due date under the relevant column for each row:
Once you have your base table set up, you can start creating connected views of it.

3. Create your views

 Create as many views as you need to answer different questions with the same data. For example, if you have a base table of all projects across your organization, you might want to create some of the following connected views:
  • Team-specific views
  • User-specific views
  • Projects with a status of “at risk”
  • Projects with a status of “complete”
  • A chart view of your data
  • A calendar view of your data
Views let you and your teammates work from the same underlying data, while filtering and formatting it in the way that makes the most sense for each audience. You can create a connected view by typing / followed by the name of your base table, or by typing /table and selecting your existing table from the menu.
From there, you can add filters, change the layout, and apply conditional formatting to show the data the way you want in that specific view. Any edits made to the data itself will appear in all connected views, so everyone stays aligned without needing to update the same information in multiple places.

4. Columns in table views

 Connected tables all pull from the same set of columns, and you can choose to hide or show them based on how you’d like to configure your views. Hiding or showing a column in one view will not affect its visibility in the base table or other connected views. Some column changes do affect every connected view, though:
  • Renaming a column updates it everywhere
  • Adding a new column makes it available in all connected views
  • Deleting a column removes it from every connected view, including the base table
Newly added columns stay hidden in other views by default, but you can expose them from the table Options menu.

5. When to use views instead of stand-alone tables

 In most cases, fewer tables and more connected views is the better approach. Every duplicate table creates more room for error, because updates need to be made in multiple places. With connected views, changes happen once and are reflected everywhere automatically. Views can change the look and feel of your data while keeping the actual data the same, no matter how it’s being displayed. In most cases, not everybody needs access to every piece of data recorded in your base table, or master table, at all times. Remember that you can use table filters and hide columns to create slimmed-down views for specific audiences, change the layout of your table view for better visualization, and apply conditional formatting for quicker visual summarization.

Now what?

 Say goodbye to monotonous, manual data updates and make way for connected views. Get to building! Where can you create connected views in your docs?

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