Notion Charts: Get Stunning Charts In Notion (For Free)

there are two types of people in the world those who wait patiently until all the features that they need are finally released by the tools that they love and those who just go out and build them themselves in the meantime let's take charts in Ocean it would be super useful if you had a way to visualize your data and surely notion doesn't offer a way right now for build in charts but there are already a lot of tools out there that you can use today to create stunning and insightful charts riding your notion workspace so here are three ways to add Charts to notion today sorted by difficulty from notion newbie all the way to notion Ninja level 1 notion newbie the easiest way to get charts into your notion workspace is through embeds as you know right now you can embed a ton of things in notion ranging from tweets to YouTube videos well to also graphs the good thing is that also a lot of charting tools allow you to take a chart that you've created with them and them embed them somewhere else so this method is the easiest one if you're just looking for quick and easy fix Pros it's super easy to implement and they're a wide number of them that supported cons your data lists outside of notion right you can't directly connect your databases to that third-party tool and you need to use this third-party tool pretty heavily in order to make actually the charts for it to make sense to reimbat them oh and while you're learning about charts make sure to subscribe to the channel because why not one example for a third party app with charts would be causal which is a great app if you need to build Advanced Financial models now in here I have already my very simple model and as you can see if I go to the dashboard this is the graph that gets rendered base of it and I can just click on share and then go for embed and then copy the embed code and I can head on over to notion to add this chart to my report now one thing to know is that oftentimes when you have these tools that allow you to embed their charts what they will give you is an iframe call right so if I paste what I copied I get this A-frame blah blah blah thing and notion doesn't know what to do with it if you just paste it like this so instead of pasting it like this what you want to do is you want to type slash embed and in here you can now even though it says paste the link you can also paste this iframe part and click on embed link and will properly process it so as you can see I have here now my chart my embedding and I can add just the size of it and the way I want it depending on what I want to see I can also adjust the alignment since the recent notion update now with the centered one here that doesn't matter too much but if you have a full width report right and you don't want like it to be this big red you only care let's say about this part and you don't want the center line you can go here and then click here to left alignment or the other way around and now you have your chart embedded in notion level two for notion nuts using Google Sheets sync now of course you know that you can create charts in Google Sync and just like with our tools you can embed these charts and into notion but and that's the key difference to Method one you can use a third-party tool like make or zapier to actually sync your data from notion to Google Sheets that way you can use Google Sheets to create a jar but your data can live inside an ocean and you can have notion as your main hub for the work Pros you get automatically updated data you can keep your data in notion and it's free to use con it's not really suited for a complex data situation you could build a more complex one but for the most part this will be great if you just need to push new information from notion to Google Sheets second well you get the typical Google Sheets look it's okay with the charts but they're not the prettiest around and third you need to use three Tools in total right you need notion sheets and then the third party tool that connects the both so in this example I'm using make my favorite no code automation tool to connect both notion and Google Sheets and as you can see here all we do is we watch the database items in notion so I check okay in my workspace in this database is there anything new and then I push that information to sheets and add a new row to the spreadsheet and the sheet with the corresponding values very straightforward automation to push your data now I have step-by-step instructions on how to build this with a link in the description in there you can also find the template if you want to download this let's just take a look how it actually works with sheets right so if you go two sheets on the other side we have here my different values right so they are pushed from a notion and signify my subscriber growth across the different platforms and then I simply created a chart because of course Google sheet just lets you create charts fairly easily it could of course customize this but if I'm happy with it all I need to do to embed into notion is to click on the three dots and then say publish chart and then here I can get this link so I can just copy this link go back to um notion and again even though it's a link don't paste it directly because if you do what it wants to do is it wants to embed a Google Drive and we don't want the access to the file right we just want the graph so again we will type slash embed and then paste the link and then it actually shows up as a chart in a second and just like before we can adjust the size until we have it in there just the way we want it level 3 for notion ninjas using rows rows is a spreadsheet tool with superpowers that is just perfect for our situation rows can run API calls directly in a spreadsheet which means that we can in rows pull the data from notion right into your spreadsheet that allows us to do complex data manipulation and we can get updated data whenever something in notion changes it's overall much much easier to handle more complex situation you can even add easily other data sources right so if your data lives for example in Google analytics or you have somewhere else where you have important information you can use that to sync it into rows as well the setup can be a bit overwhelming but that's why I created a template for you that you can get with the link in the description Pros it allows for complex data modeling you can keep all your data in notion it will automatically update and you can also build the whole thing for free cons well it's the most complex to set up to get started with notion and rows we first need to set up our API call to get the data from notion into rows so in notion I have this information about my time that I spent on different activities and I want to get it now in here and I can do so by defining first the variables that we need for the call here so I will just type endpoint here and then here I will paste the URL that we need to make our request to notion and grab that information and that URL we can construct in rows with a formula and the formula that we're going to use for this oops one second is this one and as you can see we concatenate so we combine various strings we combine this api.notion.com V1 databases then we take the value from B2 which is still empty and then we add query to the end and that's because we need to insert between database and query the actual database ID and this way we can easily swap out a database ID if we want to change our data so I'm going to hit enter and now I need to of course Define the database ID so this will be next part so database ID and for this one we need to go to notion and we need to open our database as a full page all right it's an inline one here so I need to click on here say open as a page and then I can copy the link to it here and then I can go back to my report and in my report or anywhere else I can paste now this thing and then I can grab the part firstly let's remove the link and then we need to grab the part between the workspace name so in my case it's lab playground that's the name and the first question mark So this part of the URL that's your database ID so we want to copy that head on over here and then paste it into here and now if we inspect the one above we will see that this one automatically adds this ID here great so that's the first step now when making an API request to notion we also need to authorize us to prove that we are actually allowed to get this information so the next two things that we want to set up are the um our secret token for notion and the actual authorization method and for authorization we can again paste in here a formula to combine them and this time we concatenate bare error with the space and the value in here and again if you need at any point help with these things you can also find them all in the written blog post in the description below together with the exact things to copy paste so we have this and right now we don't have a secret token so what we need to do is we need to head over to notion.so slash my Integrations and here you can create your own API key for notion as you can see I already have a few ones but if you wanted to create a new one you would click on new integration and you would pick a workspace that it's supposed to go in so in my case this will be in the sandbox you can give it a name rows charts and then you can click on submit now this will give you a secret token and I can show it here and I can copy it and it's very important that you saw this in secure place and don't share with anyone so I'm going to delete this after this video otherwise they can access your notion workspace and you can go back into rows and paste it in here and now you have your setup for the secret and authorization now you just need to give your integration access to the data in Ocean so go back to notion to the page where you're on and on here you can then click on the three dots in the top Corner go down to add connection and then look for the connection that you just added if it doesn't show up here try refreshing the page if you use notion and browser or restart the app until it shows sometimes it takes a few months and now it will have access to the data on here and we need to set up one last thing because before we can start doing the API call we need to add also the notion version here as a variable and that will be 2022.06 and then 28. now that's all the information now we just construct the full API calls on our to do this we first will create our actual headers that we send with the request so let's type headers and then we can paste in as a formula this pair Json object that takes the information from authorization and the notion version and combines it so we get this data part here and now we can do the actual API call and for that one we need the post command so we type here API call and insert this thing so post and then in Brackets B1 and B6 so the end point first and then the headers and then an empty object for the body and when I hit enter now we should get back a data object and this should actually contain information from our database so in order to look at it we can click on it and say inspect the data and this will pull up here on the side the information and we can just hover over one to see whether it's correct so we have as the properties oops properties in here uh low value work social media perfect so it worked we got all the information from our notion database into rows and can now use it here to manipulate it and create our charts to do so we can make our life a bit easier and just grab from the data if we look at it again only the relevant part the results part so in order to do that we can add another cell below here and call this results and then in here we're going to pass the information from the app so I'm going to type the equal sign and then pass and just like in any other spreadsheet tool right this brings up one of the functions and then I tell it the Json so the Json here lives in B7 and then our query is in quotation marks and then the brackets and then another set of quotation marks the other ones results and then we close it all off and then hit enter and now if I inspect this data you see that it's just the part with the responses so we have our various properties when they were created and the data in under properties so with that we can now very easily start manipulating our data in here by just clicking on the drop down again and I'm saying create data table and then just click on the next step and now I have down here a table that gets automatically synced with the data from notion so whenever something changes in the notion database it will change down here as well now of course this information here is another one that we care about right object ID created time that's nothing that we can work with but we can click on the edit table here and then brings up the setup and here right now in the table columns right it's all the things that we don't need so I will remove them all and then click on the drop down here and now I can select all the individual data points from the Json data here from notion and put it in here so we only care about the actual property value so I'm opening that up and then inside all of these we can open them up again and then just take the number so this is what I care about right so I care about the social media hours the Sleep hours the debug hours the Fun hours the exercise hours and then of course also about the actual day that it occurred on so here we have a few more things to open up you want to go for the plain text version and then we save all changes and now as you can see we still have this weird name so we need to rename it but now we have the actual information that we care about so I will just quickly rename this to uh low value work and the the next one to social media just to show it the other ones we can leave for now for the demonstration and then I can re-order them right I can take the day one to the front so let's rename this also actually quickly the day and you see it's not yet in the correct order but we can quickly fix it as well I will just highlight oops the whole uh cell and then I will say oops to highlight everything and then I will activate the filter and sort option and now we have our filters up here now it's all connected and now I can start by dragging them in the right order if I wanted to and then we have them all sorted correctly and can in The Next Step start using our charts in order to add a chart we can click on insert here and then say we want a chart and then we can first pick the type so for this one let's go with a pie chart and then we select the data range so I click in here and just like in any other tool right I just highlight all the relevant cells so everything I think so and then we I think it's actually until G and then we can hit enter and now I get here automatically my chart with sleep social media all the things are greatly ratified if it had the access wrong I could of course say okay it's actually not the day access that I want here for the information I want something else I can as usually change the colors if I want them I can add more series and I can also under more option add some description or footnotes but here we have it our chart and it will automatically update if the data in notion changes but before we look at that let's quickly embed this now into notion in order to do so we need to click on share up here and we need to say that we want to share this privately with the link in general and then I can click on here on the three dots and say embed and now I get again either the iframe embed code or here I also have DRL directly so I can just copy the URL and then go back to notion and in here just paste it and create embed so no need to do slash part although you could do that here as well and now I have my chart in here and as usually I can adjust it for the size and I could also like say right in the other one that I don't want to see name or rename it and have my pie chart here for my values now how can we get any data changes in here well let's say okay so for example exercise right let's say I did an exercise five I exercised 15 hours in a single day for whatever reason or let's to make it even clearer let's say 45 hours of exercise on this thing it doesn't update automatically but what we can do is in rows we can either we could just run the API call again so if I go in here and just tell it to do this again it will pull in the new information right so now we have 45 here and now we have a lot more time for fun here and as you can see now the chart also has updated so again we have this huge one here or alternatively if you don't want to do this manually you can schedule a refresh in order to do so we go down here and we say schedule maybe and then I say in here equal and then I type refresh and that brings out this refresh command and I can now pick the what I want to refresh so I want to refresh B8 and I want to refresh it let's say um every 30 minutes so then I type 30 and then I'm in and then close it off and now I have this refresh here and as you can see it has this scheduled sign it tells me okay the next time it will refresh this data oh it actually refreshes results so this is wrong it's refresh the seventh for the actual API call it will refresh it and updated it and then automatically also show you the new chat in notion so for example right if you pull in data data and you want to see it every day the new and updated visitors to your website you would schedule a daily refresh and would automatically reflect here in your chart and to help you get a head start with rows I've added actually this basic setup so all the endpoints and URL and stuff as a template in the blog post in the description so you can download that and then you have to hold spreadsheet and the only thing you need to fill in is your database ID and your secret and then create the tables and you can get started right away without having to set up all of this there you have it three ways how to get Arts International which one is your favorite oh and now that you know how to get charts into notion why not solve one of notion's biggest remaining problems too here step-by-step instructions on how you can finally share only a part of a database emotion which is really really crucial if you ever want to collaborate with people outside of your organization here's the video see you in a second

Channel: Matthias Frank

Views: 40,250

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Id: tJlkd8JXpUw

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023