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

hello and welcome back to another notion video thanks for showing up my name is carter sirach i'm the productive dude here on youtube in today's video we are going to be tackling notion databases notion databases can be confusing when you're first starting out but in this video it's my goal to help you understand databases so that you can really start creating some awesome things with notion that's really when the power is going to get unlocked with notion is when you start understanding how to use databases so let's jump right into it [Music] [Applause] so first how am i personally using databases right now well here are some examples first and foremost i use it as a task tracker this is really nice i can just click tasks away as i complete them and i can bring them back command z if i want to you can organize tasks by type by priority and by all sorts of different properties you also notice that i've got different icons here and this is even an animated icon right here as you can see my girlfriend and i also use an ocean database for our groceries so here we just get a good idea of what we have in stock at our house and what's out of stock and then we can also see what the best points slash deals are for each of these items and we can get an idea of what store to go to to get these items as well this has all been thought out strategically to try to maximize the amount of points that we're getting and whatnot and to make sure that we're getting our favorites when we go out to get groceries as well that leads me to our next section which is a food recipes database and the food recipes database i you know basically just keep lists of ingredients and instructions for making some of our favorite meals cool thing about this is i have all sorts of different tags in here and i can also sort by like favorites if i want to as you can see another way that i've been using notion is as a way to keep inventory of all of my house plants so when i click on one of these it'll give a brief description of it it'll tell if you know what kind of sunlight it needs what kind of watering it needs how it propagates is it pet safe what kind of fertilizer does it require etc and then we have unfortunately a status down here of alive or dead because you know i was not the best house plant keeper when i first started getting houseplants so some of our houseplants are dead now but as you can see this gets super powerful and it's it's a really cool database now the next database that i want to show you is my watch gallery and this is similar to the plants you know it just has some properties on here and a nice picture of each of my watches that are in my collection fun fact i bought this one for 450 and this watch is now worth around two grand um if you have a mint completely new one last time i checked the price so that's exciting i don't have a mint watch um it's not in mint condition i wear it but um yeah that's just one of my hobbies is uh you know trying to find watches that are priced moderately high not like super high in the luxury watches but moderately high priced watches and then reselling them or at least wearing them and enjoying them while they go up in value so those are some ideas of some of the databases that i've personally created using notion now before we start talking about how to use databases i need to explain the different types of databases that you can create so there are two types of databases there are inline databases and full page databases so an inline database is basically a database that you can add anywhere on any page all you have to do is click in an empty block hit slash and then start typing inline when you do that it will pull up inline databases and you can choose which view you want to pull up for a database so if i wanted to do an inline calendar i could do so and a calendar is just a type of database it's just a way to view a database we'll talk more about views in a little bit but anyways that is an inline database you can also get an inline database just by hitting the little plus button next to the block and then scrolling down until you find databases inline now the next type of database is a full page database and this is what i always recommend you use for your databases because this is the best kind in my opinion a full page database can be stored somewhere and then you can actually pull it out and you can put it wherever you want for instance this is a full page database i just have it linked to my home page right now so if i click into it you'll notice that it's a full-fledged database of all of my past tasks so in order to create a full page database all you have to do is create a new page so if i do slash and then start typing page you'll see that that's a block type so i can click page and then from there i can select which type of database i want to create these are just different ways to view the database there are six views there's table board list calendar gallery and timeline i'm just going to go with table for now i'm going to call this full page table database in parentheses because i don't want to confuse you guys with all the all the different views these are all very simply put these are all databases they're just different ways of looking at a database so we have our full page table database i'm going to go back to my homepage and you'll see that that is stored here as a page if i click into it you can see it and you can't add to this because it's a full page it's just the database i can't do anything else at this page but if i wanted to i could actually embed that right here on my home page just by hitting slash and then starting to type linked and then once you get create linked database you can click on that and here i could type in a table or whatever i named that full page table database yeah and then it's going to pull it up right here and then if i start adding names in here carter john sarah etc and then i go back to my full page table you'll see that that has dynamically updated so that's why i recommend using full page databases instead of using inline databases because if you delete an inline database it's pretty much just gone forever bottom line is 9 out of 10 times i would just use a full page database unless you just need a quick temporary inline database and if that'll do the trick then you don't really need to worry about it next let's talk about database properties there's tons of different ways that you can actually manipulate the data within your database and those different ways of manipulating it are called properties so in order to give a quick example of this i'm actually just going to create a new full page database all right i'm going to call this database a bookcase so this will just be a list of all the books that i've ever had and i'm going to have a lot of different properties associated with those books so that i can use this to its full potential and i can really go through and view it as i want to view it so let's start out by just typing page hit enter and i'm going to call this book case all right and we can choose a little icon let's go with the book here and we're just going to click table under database right there and this column will be book name okay this first column that you get in a database is a mandatory column meaning you can't get rid of this you need to have at least one column that creates pages so this column creates pages is what it does so each page will be a book in our case so i'm just going to enter some books here reality train surfing alright so now i've got some book titles in here now what you'll notice next is it automatically includes this tags column i'm just going to delete that for now and what we're going to do next is we're just going to add a property type of number okay so this is the next one down you have text and then you have number text is pretty self-explanatory it's just you know like i'll actually show you an example so if we wanted to put something like book summary we could choose text and now that this is a text column i could just write a quick summary of reality transurfing maybe i would just do like a one sentence uh summary for each of these all right great so now i have some strings in here which a string is basically just a line of text so that's really all this is it's a text property so those are our book summaries listed out here the next property that i want to talk about is the number property so if i click on the number property and then i change the name here i could create one for pages and then i could just enter the amount of pages for each book so i'm going to do that really quick all right now i have some pages in there you can also format number columns differently so if you don't want just like a regular whole number i could create a whole column for let's just say i wanted to create a column for something like price and then i could put the price of the book so i believe this one was like a 50 book i could put that and then i could change this by clicking this little button i could change the format to us dollars for instance i'm just going to enter some arbitrary numbers in here so those are some of the different ways that you can interact with number columns or number properties all right now that we've got basic numbers and text out of the way let's look at a select property so there's two different types of select properties there's the select property and the multi-select property and it's pretty self-explanatory the select property allows you to select one item from a list and multi-select allows you to select multiple items from lists this is good for if you're tagging something with a bunch of different identifiers the select is better if you're trying to share the status or the state of something so i might create a select column if i was just trying to create a column for like genre or something because that's something that's just not going to change so this book is like a self-help book so there's self-help business and personal branding so those are all the different genres and if i click on one of them specifically you can only select one at a time for this genre column now if i wanted to i could create a multi-select property and this would be good for something like tags so tags for instance would be something like favorite or night time read or easy read so those are some different ways that you can tag a book and then you can search for it later so the good thing is is like you can come in here and you can delete these i would say this is a good nighttime read definitely not an easy read i would say it's a favorite of mine all right so now i've got some tags in here so as you can see you can add multiple tags or you can add a single tag if you wanted to and it doesn't matter how many you add it's just a way of describing what it is that you are adding this property to so in this case it's this book name now there are also date columns so if i wanted to i could create a date column for the published date so publishing date then i could just enter those in i'm just going to again just put some arbitrary dates in here for publishing obviously these aren't correct but just just as a placeholder another way that you can use dates is to cover a span of time so not just a single date but maybe we have a goal to complete these books in a certain amount of time i could create a reading time date and then i could put multiple dates on it so let me show you what that would look like so let's just select date i'm going to name it reading time and then i'm going to click in here and i'm going to click on include end date and then i can add a start date so october 5th i'm going to add an end date of the 31st there's a few other options when it comes to dates so if i click into date for this publishing date here as you can see i can also add a reminder that's going to send me a notification on that particular day or a day before or so on um i can also include a time for this specific date so that that drills down even further if you want it to and you can format this here it's based on the time time zone or date i'm not going to do that for now we've got a publishing date and our reading time the next type of property that i wanted to share is the person property so if i click into here and i click person the person property is going to allow me to just link to a person that's on my notion team or that's associated with my notion account so i'm just going to name this owner so it'll be the owner of the book and since i'm the owner on all these i'm just going to enter myself as the owner there's a few other properties that i want to share so if i add another property here you'll notice that there's files and media check box url email and phone these are all pretty self-explanatory i think files and media you can just upload files and images and whatnot check box it's just a box that's either checked or it's not checked this would actually be good to add if i hit check box here and i could make a complete column this is nice because if i finish reading a book i can just check complete and then i'll know that i've already finished that book moving on there's also url email and phone which is pretty self-explanatory but i don't know how i can associate these with a bookshelf so i'm not going to add them for today these more advanced options down here we'll get into a little bit later but these last edited by last edited time created by and created time are actually pretty simple they just dynamically update based on exactly what it says so if i added created time it would show the exact time that i input these particular book names if i change this to let's just say created by it would show who added them next i want to talk a little bit about database views there are six total views there's six ways to actually view a database and i'm going to share each one right now and kind of share why you might want to use one over the other so right now we are looking at a table database that's the current view tables are good for viewing all of your data in one place and they're also good for editing the database so right now since i just got done filling all this information in a table is super useful for that you can add information in on other databases but a table is nice because you can see it all in one place and it's just really easy to hit new and you know kind of enter that in and see how it relates to everything else in the table if i click add view up here i can add like a board view for instance and hit create and then it will separate it into uh whatever my select property was so if i have a select property of um genre it's going to select it's going to organize it into different genres so that i have lists based on the genres which is pretty cool so that's the board view if i don't want to see this i can hit hide on that no genre which is a little nicer i think and in this view i could also add a completely new genre so to do that i would just hit add a group and then i could name it like auto biography so that's what the board view is kind of nice for you can also use the board view to view statuses so if you have a project in the works and you wanted to create a bunch of different pages then each page could be a task and each of these headers instead of being a genre could be a step in a process so it could be not started working and complete for instance now i'm going to add a timeline view so the timeline view is pretty neat if i hit create this is how we will see it and i'm just going to scroll back to wherever these are located right now it's basing it on publishing date but if i wanted to i could change this to reading goal and then it's going to show us our reading goals so if you remember right i set a span for the for the dates so these three books i have x amount of time to work on and then essentialism in the outsiders book i've got a time crunch so if i wanted to i could drag these out and that would actually dynamically change the date so that's pretty neat let's say i wanted all of them to catch up with expert secrets because i don't mind if i finish them all by december let's just drag that so you get the idea this is just a way to view uh dates in a very interesting way right now i'm viewing it by reading goal but i could also view it by publishing date and i could see how far apart all of these truly are it's kind of nice that you can click these arrows on the side too if something is super far back in time like this one's 1999 i can click all the way back to 1999. next we're going to talk about the calendar view calendar view is similar to timeline in the sense that it's dealing with dates i like this for uh reading goal because it's it's basically a view of the timeline that you can get um in the form of a calendar however this would also work well for publishing date so since the publishing dates aren't really around these times it doesn't really make sense to use it but if i wanted to i could view in a calendar all of the books by a publishing date and if i wanted to also like add them by publishing date i can come in here and let's say a book came out today i could add it as an item i could give it its name i could give it its summary can you give it a genre today book um owner pages and as you can see once i get down to publishing date it's already there because all i had to do is hit that little plus button and we're going to move on to the next view which is list now the list view is one of my favorite views because it really allows you to see everything just laid out so nicely and in my opinion the list view is best if you are filtering sorting or searching through data so right now you just get a very basic list of all of the books and you get their genre on the side if i click on properties i can add all of the properties that i want to add so that they're visible on the side as well then for instance if i wanted to let's actually get rid of some of these properties let's just keep price price and pages let's just say from there i will just see the page amount and the price so then now that i've got those properties showing what i can do is i can hit sort add a sort and then i can sort them by let's just say pages ascending or descending so let's say we're starting with the most pages and we're working our way down but let's say so so now it's just 765 is at the top 251 being the least amount of pages is at the bottom i can also add another layer of sorting if i wanted to so i'd hit add sort and maybe i also want to sort by price so i want to figure out descending price as well so you'll notice that with this sorting it's going to show us pages descending so it's going to start with the highest amount of pages and work its way down but after it does that the next level of sorting is pricing so price descending right so price and page number is the highest for reality train surfing so of course it's going to be at the top now we've got this expert secrets book here which is ten dollars but that's in the middle and that's because it has 268 pages whereas the outsiders is still on the bottom even though the price is higher than expert secrets and same with essentialism the price is higher expert secrets just has a few more pages than these two so that's why it's out ranking it because we've chosen pages descending as the top sorting factor and then price descending is the next one if i wanted to switch how this came out i could drag price descending up front and then it would sort them in pricing order first and then it would sort them by page number then you can also add filters now filters will basically get rid of different items so we can filter based upon let's just say like which books have we read and which books have we not read so that we can create a list view of books that we've read and a list view of books that we haven't read yet so in order to do that we would go to filter and i'd hit add a filter add a filter and we're going to go to complete and if it is not checked that means we still haven't read it for instance so now we have a list of everything we haven't read but if we wanted to i could create a new list view and i could name it list view already hit create and then i could go into filter add a filter where complete is checked so now i can toggle between these two already read and the ones that i haven't read yet because there's filters on them this filter is showing me everything that's already read this filter is showing me everything that i haven't read yet i'm going to remove this filter here and then i'm going to turn on properties for everything and i just want to show you how the search bar works really quick so the search bar if i start typing in it like a word like disciplined it's going to pull discipline out of text if i started typing something like self-help it would pull that out of these different select tags it also pulls from these tags over here so if i were to type reference it would pull up that reference and it will also pull from like the title specifically so essentialism i could type that in and it would only show essentialism i believe you can search by year as well so like if i went 1999 it's just going to show this one 1999. if i did 10 it's just going to show this 10 one and i could also search by page numbers so let's say 260 pages boom if i typed my name in here it would show up for everything because carter siraj is the associated name with all of these different books so that is how you use the search bar now there's one remaining database view that we haven't looked at yet and that is galleries now galleries are good for if you want to show off um like the cover of a book so if i wanted to i could take a picture of expert secrets i could take a picture of essentialism and i could put those right in here in my bookcase so that's exactly what i'm going to do now i'm going to add a view and i'm going to create a gallery and this will just be a bookshelf view so i'll be able to see all of my books here i can turn on properties so i could turn on genre if i wanted to i could turn on pages whatever i want really summary you can change the order of this as well so if you wanted the genre to show up above you could do that now here's what i'm going to do i'm going to click into essentialism here and this is where i want to put that picture of essentialism so in order to do that i'm just going to take a quick picture on my phone i've got an iphone and i'm using a macbook so this will be a quick entry because all i have to do is take a picture and then i can airdrop it to my macbook now from here i can just drag it in and it's going to pull up that picture of the book and then it will also show up up here and i can hit reposition and drag that into frame if i wanted to and i could get better pictures of these and that's actually what i'm going to do right now i'm just going to take some pictures so you can see what the gallery looks like in full swing all right and then once i have all my pictures on my desktop i'm just going to come in here and i'm going to add them and the first line here now as you can see this is a great use case for the gallery because now i can see all of the covers of the books and i can still search for them by whatever i wanted to so for instance i could just search self-help and i could see all my self-help books next i want to go in depth on how to relate databases now this is where notion can get unworldly and just super powerful so let's say we had a bookcase and then we wanted to link that bookcase with some notes so i could create a separate database for notes i'm just going to create a page very quickly here i'm going to call it list list of notes and we're going to create some different notes in here so this might be chapter chapter 1 notes of reality tran surfing and then i would enter some notes here this one might be notes on outsiders and i could even enter a title like uh what makes them different then let's say i had some personal and mba notes let's do one everything you need to know without college and then i'm going to duplicate that and i'm actually going to create a personal mba notes too everything you know without college 2x okay so these are some notes just very basic notes and if i wanted to i could go back to my homepage go into my bookcase and i could link those notes up with the specific books that i was talking about so for outsiders if i come into this one here and i add a property i could create a property of relation now what that's going to do it's going to pull up the selected database button and i can just select a database and i could type in list of notes now that list of notes is going to pop up and i can hit create relation and then i'm going to call this property notes now what this is going to allow me to do is it's going to allow me to come in here and just add whatever notes are associated with the outsiders so boom i'm going to add that one in there and now you'll see that i have my notes link and if i come look at this book here for instance i can always click on whatever notes i want it will show me exactly where that's located and i can even open them up like that and then you'll also notice that on this end the notes end it's going to say related to book so i'm just going to type book so what book is it related to the outsiders now we can bounce between the outsiders and my notes if i wanted to i could also add multiple uh notes so since we have two for the personal mba i'm going to add that one and that one and you'll notice that it adds both of these notes in here so i can go and check those out if i wanted to last but not least let's link our reality tran surfing note and then i can go into properties we can turn notes on and then it's going to show all the linked notes underneath that have to do with that book so if i wanted to i could look at reality tran surfing as a whole read a little bit about some of its properties and then i could open up the notes and i could read what notes i had to offer here alright so that's that i hope that you enjoyed this video today if you did please leave a like subscribe if you want to see more videos like this especially notion videos i've got tons of those and yeah just just let me know if you guys have any ideas for databases as well just comment below let me know what you're going to be using databases for or what you're already using databases for and at the very least i hope that this video was very helpful and informative if you're new to using notion and databases we'll see you guys in the next video peace

Channel: Productive Dude

Views: 120,954

Keywords: notion database, notion databases, databases in notion, notion tutorial, notion app, notion, notion app tutorial, notion tutorial 2021, notion database vs page

Id: HeX_MH_Z-Bc

Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021