Coda

What a member can do

• Search docs and read pages, tables and rows.
• Create and delete docs and pages, and edit page content.
• Create tables, add and change rows and columns, and set up views and charts.
• Run formulas, and create buttons and other controls.
• Add, resolve and reopen comments.

Each task names the Coda tools it may call. coda on a task means every tool the Coda server offers; a name such as coda.<tool> means that tool alone. A tool the task does not name is refused, whatever the connection allows.

Who connects it

A Coda connection acts as the Coda account that signed in when it was connected. It can do what that account can do, and no more.

Anyone who may change tools in your enterprise can connect Coda for a member or a team. Connecting it for the whole enterprise is for the owner, and the people the owner allows.

A connection can sit on the enterprise, a team, a member, a role or a task, and the one further down replaces the one above: task, then role, then member, then team, then enterprise. A connection on anything but a task also reaches the chat of every member it covers.

What waits for you

In a run, nothing on Coda waits for you unless the task declares a gate on it. To approve each change before it happens, gate the tools that change something on the task. See Gates and tool scopes.

In a chat, a Coda tool that its server does not mark as read-only asks you before it runs, unless you chose Always allow for that member and tool.

Setup

Before you connect

The Coda MCP is in beta, so its tools may change. Full access needs a Doc Maker role on a paid Coda plan. Editors and free plans get about 30 requests a week, and editors can only read.

Connect it

Coda is an Express tool, so there is no server address, key or app to set up. Work in one browser window throughout: the sign-in returns to the portal in the window you started from.

1. In the portal, open the member's page → Tools. To connect it for a team or the whole enterprise, open Tools in the sidebar.
2. Under Express, find Coda and choose Connect. On the Tools page you are asked who uses it: one member, a team or the whole enterprise.
3. Coda's sign-in opens. Sign in with the account the member should work as, and approve what it asks for.
4. You are back on Tools, and Coda shows as connected.
5. Name the tools on the task, coda for all of them or each by name.
6. Check it. Run a task that reads something from Coda. The run page shows the call and what came back.

You can take the access back at any time: delete the connection on Tools, or remove Zero Human OS from the connected apps in your Coda account.

A first task to try

With Coda connected, give a member a task that uses it. For example:

Every Monday, read the Decisions table in our team doc and add a row summarising last week's decisions.

Start this task in the portal. It opens a conversation with your COO with the request written out. Read it, change what you like and send it. The COO asks what it still needs to know, then proposes the task for you to approve: its name, who owns it, its guardrails, the Coda tools it may use and its instructions. Nothing is created until you approve it.