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Using the Slack Pack

Centralize your team’s communication and project management in one place with Slack and Coda.

The Slack Pack offers endless possibilities for improving your team’s productivity and efficiency. By integrating Slack with Coda, you can centralize your team’s communication and project management in one place, making it easier to stay organized and collaborate effectively. You can set yourself up to receive Slack messages about any changes to your team’s projects and tasks, ensuring that you never miss an important update. In this guide, we’ll go through some common use cases to get you well acquainted with the Slack Pack. 🤝 Before we get started, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of automations and Packs. You can check out this guide on automations and this article on Packs for a quick overview before jumping in.
What you’ll learn:
  • How to send messages to specific Slack channels
  • How to send Slack DMs to more than one person
  • How to combine automations with the Slack Pack
buttons
What you’ll use:
  • Slack Pack
  • Buttons
  • Formulas
  • Automations

1. Send a reminder message to a Slack channel.

 One of the most common ways to use the Slack Pack in Coda is to send a message to a particular Slack channel after some change is made in Coda. This could be a status update, notifying a point of contact, or sending out a team reminder to go read or update something in Coda. To build this out, we’ll use the Post message button available with the Slack Pack. First, let’s set up a table with columns for the following data:
  • Reminders/FYIs: A text column. Feel free to add some fake reminders or notices here for now.
  • Slack content: A compose column, or text column. Feel free to add any test message here for now. You can also use the compose feature in the Slack button.
  • Send Slack message: A button column. Here’s where the magic happens! We’ll configure this button to work with the Slack Pack to send a message out to remind your team to do a thing.
Once you have your table structure set up, add in some fake data for a couple rows for testing purposes. Once you have your Slack button built out the way you’d like, you can then add in real data. For now, your table should look something like this:

2. Set up your Slack button:

Open up your button settings by right-clicking on one of the buttons or selecting Column options from the column settings menu. In the first step, On Click, select Packs > Slack > Post message. Or search “Post message” and select Post message under From Installed Packs. Select private or shared mode for this button based on your use case.
Tip
Most Packs allow you to set up both private and shared accounts. A private account is one that only you—the person setting up that account—can use to take actions from the Coda doc. A shared account can be used to take actions by anyone who has access to the doc. Read more about this here.
For the Content, we’re going to target the Slack content column in our table. For Channel or Email, this is where you will set the channel you want these Slack notifications to go to. For testing purposes, you can place your own email in this field until you’re sure your Slack content setup is ready for the public. Alternatively, if you have a fake channel for testing in your Slack workspace, you can add that here instead. For Results column, select + New column. This will add a column to your table to record whether or not the Slack Pack action was taken, in this case whether or not the message was sent. In the Visual portion of the button settings, feel free to give your button a descriptive label like Send Slack Message and select a color and an icon! In the Advanced section under Disable If, we’re going to add one condition to disable the button if a specific reminder has already been sent to Slack: Results column is not blank. Your button settings should look pretty similar to this. 👉

Once you’ve configured your button settings, go ahead and give one of those buttons a press!

Now what?

 Keep tweaking things to you’re liking, and when you’re ready, take this solution and add it to your docs wherever you need to post a message in a Slack channel! Bonus points: automate this button press! Check out our Combine automations and Packs guide. Want to keep learning? Check out these awesome resources. 👇

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