Before I write up something for Any Requests, I wanted to hear some feedback from the community on this, because maybe I’m missing something here. I finally decided to make the full jump from Notion – just can’t do it anymore. But my AnyType experience has been less than stellar – I get it, smaller team and budget. I have a few complaints, but I want to focus on this experience I’m having.
I want to import a long list of around 1700 different pieces of legislation into AnyType. This is a “big leauges” project, I work in policy advocacy and research. I need a tool that is encrypted, collaborative, fast while handling a lot of data, cross-platform (esp with mobile), and finally… looks nice. I want my team to be able to go out and talk to legislators, and if they need to reference a bill and our notes on it, they can just search it on their phone. AnyType seems like a nobrainer. Here are the issues I’m having with this task:
- The CSV import limit is 1000 items and 10 columns. This makes sense, I get import limits. But when I edited my CSV to only include 1000 items and 10 columns, I got the same error. 999 items and 9 columns, same error. I waited a day, came back and just made a new CSV with 500 items and 7 columns, smooth import. Finally.
- This import created a new collection. I had already created a “Bill” object and I was happily surprised that I could just CMD+A to select all 500 items, and seemingly every single one (even items that hadn’t loaded past my scroll) were changed. However, the Bill default template page I set up was not applied to all of them. In order to set up that template, it looks like I need to open each individual page and manually create the template version. Unlike Notion, I can’t seem to apply an existing template to an existing page. The page needs to be created with that template. Do I have that correct? And I also can’t import these objects through the importer in a way that automatically assigns them an Object Type. This is incredibly annoying to say the least. There is no way I’m doing this manually.
- Also worth noting that Notion and Coda automatically recognize fields that are Select instead of text, and AnyType did not, but I can forgive this I guess.
- Now that I had the table of 500 imported into a Collection, I figured I could just create a new set, go into the table, and copy/paste the rest of the entries straight into the table: not only is there no keyboard navigation for tables, I can’t just select the first column cell, it automatically opens the full page when clicked. I can select the second coloumn cell, but pasting data into this just puts all the columns of data into that second column cell. So there’s no way to mass import data using just copy and paste like a normal spreadsheet?! That would have solved my import/template problem.
- Also, another issue with the new Set, I made and set the object type to Bills, I have to manually add all of the relations that are already tied to the Bills object… what is the point of defining those relations on Bills if now I have to look for them again when creating a new set for them?
- Okay, so then my only option is to just keep breaking my file up into small chunks, importing a collection, changing those objects to Bills so they appear in the Set, and I guess just give up on the idea of having a template for a page, or manually setting them up? All 1700?
I think it’s really nice that this app exists, but I am able to take Notion and Coda seriously because they can actually handle large datasets quite well. The keyboard navigation for cells is a must – Grid view should just behave the way we know tables to behave from the classic spreadsheet apps with the ability to select multiple cells, copy and paste across rows and columns, etc. I should be able to use Enter to create new objects or go to the next row down, and tab to go right. Otherwise this can’t actually be used for data entry. The import tool should function a bit better. There should be a way to apply templates to existing objects, and there should be a way to apply an object type to imported items. Or a way to choose the location of the imported objects, and if you’re importing to a Set of Objects, turn those imports into that Object and take on the default template.
Any thoughts? Am I missing something here? Has anyone found a work around or even an alternative tool that has this functionality but is end-to-end encrypted?
Sidebar: I am honestly really annoyed when people relegate apps like this or even Notion to a simple aesthetic dashboard for my personal todo list and plant upkeep and OooOoo look at me, I’m making a list of my favorite movies. Great, have fun, but these tools ACTUALLY have some real world use cases that are powerful! I think they’d be taken more seriously if the UX was tailored for professional use, because sure these are non-issues if you’re just casually using this to rank your favorite coffee shops… you can overlook many of the issues. But these tools could solve some really serious problems with organization and collaboration here in the policy and medical world. I need full 100% buy in from my team, and I can’t get that when tables are in this state (and when indenting on mobile is as difficult as it is). It’s unfortunate that I can’t move forward with this Policy Project or moving my team to AnyType because of that, but it’s the truth! We have to choose one tool to use and I wish this could be it.
But AnyType team! I believe in you! I wish I could help you in some way! Wish I knew how to help develop!