All Notion Databases Explained in Under 30 Minutes! (Full Guide)

databases are the most powerful feature in notion and in this video you're going to learn everything you need to know about how to create databases and customize them in notion and in doing so you're going to be able to create a lot of powerful tools within your notion workspace which could include things like a task manager a note taking system a finance tracker and so much more you can build pretty much anything you want using notion databases now in this video we're going to be building a simple recipe tracker and along the way you're going to learn everything you need to know about notion databases okay let's start with the fundamentals what is a database so in the context of notion a database is a structured collection of information you can store organize and even manipulate the data as you please so here's a really simple database that I created to track books that I'm reading in notion so as you can see in the First Column we have the name of the book in this column we have the genre of the book and in this column we have a checkbox I can simply just check off once I have read the book now another feature of notion databases that you need to know is that each entry inside of a database is actually a page so so I could open up any of these and it will bring up a page as you can see so I could add anything I like to this page so I could add for example my booknotes I could add a to-do list I could even add more pages and more databases inside of this page if I like that's the beauty of notion now one of the things that I love about notion databases is that you can view the data in different ways so for example instead of this table view that I currently have I could view this data on a board view like this and group together the books based on their genre which is what I've done for you on this tab next I want to talk to you about how I personally am using databases within my notion space so the first template that I want to show you is my second brain which is an all-in-one productivity system this is just composed of a few different key databases so we have the task manager here which is a database I have various different views so you can see overdue tasks here this is your main task list and as I said this is just a database but I've played around with the settings to create a more advanced system and we also have a virtual notebook which again is a another database but I've cleverly put it together so you can see all of your favorite notes and any recent notes another template that I have is my Reading Tracker so here we have my current reading list so I have these little cards here which give you an overview of all of the books you're reading including the progress so again this is all set up using databases and finally I also have an advanced Finance tracker which I use to track my transactions to track things like my total incoming and outgoings for the month and even to track the balances on different cards and again this is all made up using databases and if you are interested in any of the templates I've shown in this video they are available on my store so I'll leave a link in the description box below okay so to add a new database the easiest way is to type in forward SL database and you'll see these two different options we have database in line and database full page now the key difference is that inline databases can be added to an existing page whereas full page databases will create a separate Standalone page that will be linked to from the existing page so for inline you can add them to to any page within your notion workspace and you can add them wherever you like on the page so I've just added one here on this page and as you can see it's within the page that we've already created now the second type is a full page database so let me just add one of those quickly full page and this essentially just creates a standalone page just for that database so adding one will take you over to a brand new page as you can see with a blank database so you can obviously fill out and populate this database let's say it was a Reading Tracker and if we now go back to the previous page that database that we just created is now stored inside this page now one of the key things to know is that with the full page databases you can't add anything else to this page so if I wanted to add something below like some text for example you can't this is just a dedicated page just for this database so you cannot add anything else to it but if you want to see this database on another page within your workspace then you can do that with a link to view database okay so I'm now back on the previous page so this is the page here that links to our full page database but I want to see that database on this page so let's set up a linked view so you can actually set up a linked view of any database whether it's inline or full page and you can set up as many of these linked views as you like so linked databases are essentially synced copies of the same database so if you update the data in one it will also update on the other so here's how to set one up so say I want to add that Reading Tracker database onto this page I can type in SL link View and select this link view of database block I then just need to select which database I want to link to so I'm going to type in Reading Tracker and select this one and that's going to allow me to pull through the existing view that we had on the other page so here is the Reading Tracker that we just set up so this is a linked view so if I change anything on here as I said it will update on the other page let's just add another book as an example okay so I've just added this book Let's head back over to the original Reading Tracker and as you can see that book has now been added on here as well so they are synced copies of the same database next let's talk about database properties so you can add a range of different properties to a database which all allows you to store and organize different types of information like text numbers dates and more let's build a database together as an example and I'll show you all of the different properties that you can add to your databases so let's build a recipe database as an example so I'm simply going to type in/ database and for this one let's do a database in line and this is going to be our recipe tracker and I'm just going to hide the database title okay so the First Column name is a mandatory column and you can't delete it it's the column that actually creates the pages which is why it cannot be deleted you can however change the name of the column so for example I could change it to recipe name instead and in here we can actually list the name of the recipe so essentially how this works every recipe that I add into this database is going to be a page so let's add one as an example okay and that is a page so you'll see this open button here which means I can open it and you will see an entire page here so you could for example use this page to actually write the recipe and the ingredient list okay so I'm just going to add a few more as an example now all notion databases come with this default tags property now I usually actually just delete this because in most cases it's not relevant so I'm just going to click on here and hit delete okay so now let's start adding some properties so to add a new property you want to click on the plus symbol here and it will bring up a list of all of the different property types here so let's work our way down the list so the first property type is text now this one is pretty simple it's just a text box so you can write in here essentially anything that you like so in this example we could add a text property and name it description so we could then write just a brief description of the rest be in here so for example for spaghetti bolog let's add a short description so the text property is pretty useful you can use it for a lot of different things now the next property we're going to look at is the number property which again is fairly self-explanatory you could use this for a ton of different things for example with our recipe tracker we could have the number of ingredients so in here I could simply just type in how many ingredients this recipe requires so maybe this one is eight maybe this one is five and so on now you can actually format number columns in many different ways so if I just click on here and edit the property you can actually change the number format here so I could change it to a percent or I could change it to a currency so notion comes with a ton of different currencies so you should be able to find the one that is applicable to you so as an example let's change it to US dollar and this actually could be the cost of the dish so how much it costs to buy the ingredients for this dish and then obviously in this column I'll simply input how much it would cost so let's just say it costs I don't know $3 for this one and another thing that I love about number properties is that you can actually calculate them at the bottom so if you click this word calculate here you can do a range of different calculations like the average cost the total cost the minimum Etc let's go with the average cost so as you can see this is now working out the average of all the numbers in the table which is pretty useful I could also change it to sum if I wanted to add all of these costs together so you can also use number properties to create progress bars so let's add another one for a rating out of 10 so this one is going to be rating out of 10 so where it says show as I'm actually going to show this as a bar so that we get a progress bar and because I want it to be a rating out of 10 or it says 100 here I'm actually just going to change that to 10 so in this box I can then input my rating out of 10 so let's say this one was a 7 out of 10 and as you can see we now get a nice progress bar to show my rating so that's just a pretty fun use case of numbers next let's look at the Select Property so there are actually two different types of Select Property there's the normal Select Property and then there's the multi- select option so the Select Property allows you to select one item from a list whereas the multi- Select Property allows you to select multiple items from a list so that's the only difference between them so let's start by adding a select property for a recipe type and I'm going to add a few different options here so let's say breakfast lunch dinner so on okay so I've added these options so I can now select for each recipe what type of recipe it is so let's put this one as dinner for example now this Select Property might actually work better as a multi select so let's change it if I go on edit property and where it says type I can actually change it here so let's change it to a multi select so now I can select multiple different recipe types for each recipe so for example for french toast I might want to be able to select breakfast and lunch now you can also use the multi- select to add a recipe tag so let's add another multi select onto here and let's name it recipe tags so for example you could have tags like favorite for a favorite recipe Italian French easy so I can then just add the appropriate tags to the different recipes you can then search these tags later using this search function here to find recipes that match the tag so I could just type in Italian and it will just bring up anything that is tagged as Italian now the next property that we have is the status property now this works really well for things like task lists or project lists but let's add it in here so you can simply choose between the different statuses either not started in progress or done now you can actually change or add other options in here so if I edit property so for the recipe tracker instead of in progress it might be nice to add something like buying ingredients and I could add another in progress option like added to meal planner it's just an easier way to track the status and it's more relevant to the actual database that I have so you can add as many options as you like here and I can then use this to select the option so you can essentially just add options that are more closely related to what you're actually tracking which is really useful the next property is the date property which as you can imagine is where you input a date so you simply click on the box and it will allow you to select the date so if I just go with this one it will input today's date now you you can actually also add a range of dates so if you switch on this end date toggle here it will allow you to select an end date and that will display like this in the box now a quicker way to do that is select the first date hold down the shift key on your keyboard and then select the end date and that will automatically toggle this end date on for you and add a range of dates so that's just a quicker way to do it you can also include the time if that's relevant to you so you can just input the time here and you can also set a reminder so notion will essentially just give you a reminder so you can decide which which one is most appropriate for you so for example I could be reminded 10 minutes before and that will give me a little reminder when it's due so as an example I could maybe use this column to select which date I next want to make this recipe on next we have the person property which allows you to link to a person within your notion team or anyone associated with your notion account so if you're just using notion for personal use then you probably won't ever use this one but if for example I were to share this database with my boyfriend I could then assign a person to each recipe so I'll just assign myself to this one one so I could input who is going to make each recipe or something like that so the person property Works particularly well for databases that are related to projects or tasks because you can assign projects or tasks to different people so if you are planning on using notion for your team or your business then this property will be super useful the next property is files and media which allows you to upload a file so this could be a PDF or an image or anything like that so in this case I could upload a photo of the dish after I've made it or I could upload a PDF with the recipe on it so let's upload a photo for this one so to add a file you simply click on the box and it will ask you to upload the file you can also embed a link if it's easier so I actually just grabbed an image off of Google Images and copied the link so I'm just going to paste it in here and select link and that has then grabbed the image for me from Google Images so that's a handy little hack as well if you don't want to download and re-upload an image you can just copy the link and paste it in here so that is now been added so if I ever want to view the images I can just click on here and it will show me the images the next property is a checkbox which simply just adds in a checkbox that you can check off so I could for example add a checkbox for made question mark and I could then just check this off after I've actually made the recipe for the first time like this so it's pretty simple and self-explanatory and you can add as many checkboxes as you like now because we're adding a lot of properties to this table the First Column is now disappearing from view when I scroll over here so one handy notion hack is that you can actually freeze the First Column so if I just click up here on the column and just select freeze up to column it will now freeze this column and I can just make that a bit smaller as well so it's really handy because now if I scroll along here as you can see this column is always visible which just makes it easier to be able to look at all of the different properties and still reference it to the original recipe name we then have the URL property which is where you can simply just paste in a URL so in this example I could paste in a link to an article that I found online with the recipe for this dish like this we also then have the email and phone properties which are pretty self-explanatory I don't use them often but if you're creating something like a client list or a CRM then you may find them useful and I'm just going to skip past the formulas relations rollups for now we will come back to them later in the video but they are more advanced notion properties so I want to talk about a few other things related to the databases and then we'll come back to these later and then you can also add the created time which will input when the page was created as you can see here and the last few here are quite self-explanatory so we have the created by which will input the person who created the entry the last edited time which will input when that entry was last edited last edited by which will input the person who last edited the entry and finally the ID which you can use use if you need to generate an ID so next I want to talk about database views so views are essentially just different ways of looking at the same database now there are currently six different ways to view a database and I'm going to cover each one right now and explain why you might want to use one over the other so the first one is a table view which is what we've been using throughout the entire video so far it's simply a table version of the database so these tend to be the easiest to edit as you can view all of the data in one place now I usually build all of my databases from scratch on the table view because it's really easy to add new to the table and also to add new properties and you can easily visualize all the information as you build now you can also add new tabs onto each database if you want to be able to click between the different views so let's add a new tab for the next type of view and the next type of view is a board view which shows each entry in the table as a card and these cards are grouped together now the entries are usually grouped together based on the select property within the database so in this case it's grouping it based on our recipe type you can actually change the way that they're grouped so if you just click on the Three Dots here and select group if you click on Group by it will then allow you to choose any of the properties within the database to group them by so if I actually want to group them by their recipe tags rather than the type I can click on there and it will change it to group them by the recipe tag so I'm actually just going to keep it as the recipe type for now now the board view is a great way to organize your databases into different areas and you can actually also group them based on their status which makes it super easy to see where you're at with each item this works particularly well if you have a task list or a project list database now you can also play around with what's displayed on each card so if I just click on the three dots here and select properties I can actually show some of the other properties on the card so let's just say that I want to show the recipe type as you can see that's now displayed on the card and maybe I also just want to see the cost as an example and you can also play around with the order as well so I could put the cost for example above the recipe type if I wanted to so even on the board view you can still easily add new entries you just click on the plus new button under the group that you want to add the entry to so for example this one is breakfast so if I click on here it will add a new entry for me under breakfast so let's just say that I want to do an English breakfast and if I want to add any more details I can simply click on the card and it will open up the dedicated page and here are all of the different properties from the table so I can simply just fill these out and down here is the actual page that's where I can actually write the recipe next we have the timeline view which isn't one that I personally use very often as it only really works well for specific database types but it will show entries based on a timeline so the entries will show up based on the date property that you have within the database so here's an example of some projects that you might have coming up so it might be nice to see these in a timeline view like this I also love that you can easily drag and move these around to change the dates and you can also drag these out as well to make the time frame longer and this would then update the dates within the date property for you and if you do have multiple different dates within the DAT space then you can actually choose which date the timeline view is based on as well which is really handy the next view is the calendar view which also deals with dates like the timeline view but instead it shows your entries on a calendar so let's convert this projects database into a calendar and this is what it looks like so it'll automatically come up with a monthly view but you can also change it to a weekly view if you prefer so you can just click on the three dots here select layout and here it will say show calendar as month so you can change this to week if you prefer to see it as a weekly view like this now I personally think that the calendar view makes it much more easy to visualize your entries compared to the timeline view and you can also show other properties on the calendar like the status the tags or anything else so if you just click on the three dots here select properties and let's for example add the status on here as well so that will show up on the card here so these work really well for task lists so I actually utilize a calendar view in my second brain template to easily visualize all of my upcoming tasks so it's super easy to add new items to the calendar you simply just click on the plus symbol here and just type in the name of the task so let's just say I need to call my accountant you can also fill out all of the database properties here as well and as you can see that's now been added to the calendar and by adding it straight onto the calendar view like this the date is autop populated so you don't actually need to bother selecting in the date and the next view that we have here is the list view which is one that I use all the time it simply shows all of the entries within a list and you can then choose which properties you want to display in the list next to it so to display more properties in the list we can simply click on the three dots up here select properties and then decide which properties we want to show alongside the entries in the list so for our recipes database we can already see the recipe type so let's also maybe just add the cost on here as well so if you just click this little I symbol it will then add it into the list and as you can see the type and the cost is now visible on the list so for a couple of these like this one I've not actually inputed the cost which is why it's not showing up if I click on here I can also add the cost on here so let's just say it's $2 so lists are a great way to view information and they work particularly well if you want to search your database for a particular piece of data or if you're adding filters so let's say that I want to find a breakfast recipe so I can simply just use the search bar here type in breakfast and as you can see it's just going to bring up anything that has been tagged as breakfast so it's a really easy way to find that information and I also use the list View in my second brain template to view my task list for the day so as you can see I can view all of my tasks see the priority and also check them off using the checkbox once they're complete and I've also grouped this list based on when the tasks are due so that I can easily open and close the appropriate toggles and the last type of database view is the gallery view which is my personal favorite as I think it's the most aesthetic looking one so these are particularly great if you want to show images on the cards so for the recipe database we could turn this into a gallery view and we'll be able to see the images that we've added for each entry here on the card so to actually display the photo on the card we simply want to click on the three dots here select layout and here you'll find this card preview and it's currently set to page content but we're actually going to change it to the files and media option CU I've uploaded the photo of each of the dishes as a file so if I click on that and just give it a second and as you can see that is now displaying the images on the card which looks really nice and you can also add other properties onto the cards here as well so let's just click on the three dots here select properties and we can decide which properties from the original table that we want to add onto the card so let's for example just add the recipe type and the cost on here as well so as you can see they're now displaying on this card so you might have noticed that the gallery view is very similar to the board view in that we get these cards appearing for every item in the list now the main difference is that on the gallery view they're not grouped by a particular property which is what the board view does however you can actually also add grouping to the gallery view however it does show up a little bit differently so let's just say that I want to group these together based on the recipe type so if I click on the three do here select group and I can group them based on one of the properties within the database so let's group them based on recipe type and that will add each group as a toggle so you can then just open and close these toggles as you please and as you can see this looks a lot different to the board view which groups them in columns like this okay next we're going to talk about sorting and filters so you can also add a sort to your databases which allows you to arrange your database entries based on a specified piece of criteria so for our recipes database we might want to sort these alphabetically so it's easy to locate the recipes so in that case we can add a sort by clicking on the sort button here and we actually want to sort based on the recipe name and you want to set it to ascending to go from A to Z so if you just have a look at the list as you can see these have now been sorted alphabetically and you can change this to descending if you want to start at Z and go to a and for things like a task list like this one you actually might want to sort them based on the due date now interestingly on notion you can actually add a secondary sort like priority which is what I've done here so the priority is a select property and it's actually going to sort them based on the order of this list so this sort here means that the items will primarily be sorted by their due date but then if we have multiple tasks on the same date like this one they will then be sorted based on their priority so it's going to go from high to low and you can also add filters to your database which allows you to only display certain database entries that match specific criteria or conditions so in its simplest form we could add a filter to only show dinner recipes as an example so to do that I can click on the recipe type and add a filter and I'm actually just going to select dinner as the option and as you can see now that I've added that filter only entries where the recipe type is set to dinner are showing in the table now you can also add Advanced filters where you set complex conditions and criteria so for example let's remove this filter to start and I'm going to click add filter and we're actually going to click on this add Advanced filter option which is going to bring up this page where we can actually add a filter with multiple conditions so for example I could say only display entries where the recipe type is set to dinner and the cost of the recipe is less than than $5 so if I add that filter as you can see it's now only displaying one recipe where the recipe type is set to dinner and it costs less than $5 and you can actually add as many conditions as you like to these filters so let's just delete the filter for now now you can also use this search bar here to quickly find recipes so let's say that I have a long list of recipes I want to quickly be able to find my French toast recipe so I can simply just type in French toast in here and that will automatically pop up at the top and the search bar will actually pull up entries if any of the properties here con take the inputed text so I could actually type something like breakfast and that will bring up anything that is tagged with breakfast okay so now that you understand how databases work I want to come back to some of the more advanced properties that I skipped over earlier so the next property that I want to talk about is the relation property which actually allows you to connect two different databases together so let's also say that I have an ingredient list database that I use to keep track of all the ingredients that I need to buy so here I've got the name of the ingredient and I've simply just got a check box here where I can check if I have the item or not so wouldn't it be great if in our recipes database I could actually select which ingredients each recipe needs directly from this ingredient list so let's add a relation property to do that so I'm going to click on the plus symbol and we're going to select the relation property it's firstly going to ask me which database I want to link to so in this case it's going to be our ingredient list you want to ensure the limit is set to No Limits so that I can add as many ingredients as I like and I also want to show this on our ingredient list as well and I'm going to click add relation you can change the name of this so let's just change this to ingredients now as you can see when I click on this box it brings up all of the ingredients from the ingredients database so I could just select the ones that I need for this recipe so the ingredients I added were actually for the chocolate fudge cake so if I just click on that one let's just add a few of these ingredients like this so these ingredients have now all been added to the chocolate fudge cake recipe if we then take a look down here at the ingredients dat to base it now shows next to it which recipes I have that use this ingredient which is also pretty handy too now the next Advanced proper that I want to share with you is the rollup property which goes along with the relation property now a rollup allows you to grab data from another database and pull it into this one now the first thing to know is that you can only use a rollup if the two databases are already connected together using a relation property so because I've just added this relation between the recipes database and the ingredients database I could now add a rollup to pull through some of the data from the ingredients database into this one so let's start by adding our rollup property so I could simply use it to count how many ingredients we have for this recipe so let's call this number of ingredients so it's first going to ask me to select a relation so this will bring up all of the relations that you have between different databases so in this case we've only added one relation it's with the ingredients database so let's select that one next it will ask you which property you want to grab from the related database so this will bring up all of the different options in the table so in this case we're just going to grab the name and then it's going to ask you what you want to calculate so in this case as you can see in our number of ingredients column is currently just showing the original but I actually want to just count how many items there are in here so I can count the number of ingredients so if I click on calculate it will allow me to count all so if I click on that as you can see it's now counting them and it's telling me that there are seven ingredients for this recipe now I could also use a rollup property like this one to count how many ingredients I already have so that's based on this got check box so I could ask it to grab the got check box and then count how many of them are checked so let's add one more rollup property up here roll up so this one is going to be the ingredients that we have so I'm just going to call it ingredients got firstly we'll select the relation so again we're going to do ingredients next we'll select the property so in this case we're going to go with the got check box cuz I actually want to count how many of the ingredients do I already have in my possession and then it's going to ask me what I want to calculate so in this case I want to count how many of those check boxes are checked so that's the one I'm going to select and now if we take a look at the ingredients got column this rollup is pulling through that four of the seven ingredients I already have in my possession so I can actually check that down here myself so as you can see four of these check boxes are checked so that rollup is working correctly so that's quite a simple overview of how relations and rollups work I do also have an entire indepth video on relations and rollups where I cover them in more detail give tons of examples and I show you some more advanced use cases so I'll link to that video in the description box if you want to check it out and the final Advanced Property that we haven't covered yet are formulas now I could probably talk about formulas for hours and hours because there is just so much that you can do with them so let's start by adding a few simple ones so the first way that you can use formul for as is to do math for you so let's say that I run a jewelry store and here is a very simple database that I've set up with each item in my store the current stock level and then how much that item usually sells for now I want to create a formula to automatically work out the total value of my stock so if I sold all of this stock how much money would I make so simply I just want to multiply the stock level with the price and that would give me the stock value so let's add a formula to do it so I'm going to click on the plus symbol and we're going to select the formula property and let's name this one stock value and to actually input the formula we need to click on this formula edit button and that's going to bring up this panel which is where we're actually going to inut the formula so in this sidebar here you're going to see all of the properties within the table so I simply want to do our stock so I'm going to click on that and it's going to add it into the formula and then going to multiply using the little star symbol and I want to multiply that by the price so I want to do stock multiplied by price and I'm just going to hit done and as this is a number I also need to set the number format so instead of a number I actually want to see this as US dollar so that I I can actually see the total price and as you can see that is now being worked out for us now formulas can be a lot more advanced and we can incorporate things like text and if statements now if statements allow you to return a specific result if a condition is true so let's add a simple one in here so I actually want to create a formula that shows me the current stock status so let's say that when my stock level Falls below 10 I want the formula to display the words low stock otherwise it should display in stock so let's add another formula to do that and this is going to be our stock status and we're going to click formula edit so we're simply going to write if open parentheses and we're going to add in the stock property so if the stock is less than so I'm adding in the less than symbol here so if it is less than 10 comma and then you're going to tell it what you want it to display so if this statement here is true I want it to display the words low stock you just want to add that in between two quotation marks here going to add another comma and then we can tell it what we want the formula to display if this statement here isn't true true so if the stock is not lower than 10 then you should just display the words in stock and again you want to just make sure that's written inside two quotation marks I'm then going to close the parentheses and click done so now the formula is working as you can see for the necklace the stock is nine so it's displaying low stock because that is less than 10 however for the earring the stock is 40 so it is displaying in stock as I said you can make these formulas super complex but that's just a few simple examples of how to utilize them and that's it that's everything you need to know about notion databases remember remember to check out all of my pre-made notion templates over on my store including my Advanced second brain template which is an all-in-one productivity system I'll leave a link in the description box below and if you did find this video useful then I'd really appreciate if you could give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel as I post new notion tutorials like this one twice a week

Channel: Creative Cove

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Id: BHrBWqy3sT0

Length: 29min 50sec (1790 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023