Notion Databases: Full Guide for Beginners (2023 Notion Tutorial)

hello and welcome to the ultimate notion databases tutorial in today's video I'm going to teach you everything that there is to know about notion databases even if you're a beginner I'm breaking this video down into multiple chapters so if you want to learn something specific about notion databases then you can go down to the description look through the chapters and find what it is that you need help with I've got my water on Deck this is going to be a long day of filming and I appreciate you for checking out this video in particular and if this video helps you out I'd appreciate if you like this video because this took a ton of work a ton of research and it took me three years of figuring this out kind of on my own to be able to be in a position now where I can actually teach this in a way that makes sense to beginners so what would you use a notion database for when I was a beginner I didn't even know why I would use a notion database in fact if you go look back at my oldest notion videos you'll find that I really wasn't using database faces all that much and then as I started learning about databases my notion workspaces got better and better so out of the box notion is pretty functional and it works pretty well but when you want to start creating complex setups and notion that's where databases come in databases can be good for collecting and categorizing information for example if you had a list of books or movies that you wanted to review and you wanted to store those in a way that you could come back later and search them based on how many stars you gave it or based on a keyword or based on a director or even a genre you could do so so it's a really good way to categorize different things and then give them different attributes to make these things more searchable and to categorize them better the next thing that you can use notion for is project and task management so whether you're a large organization or just an individual notion databases can be a great way to organize your tasks into different projects and different statuses and then create views that allow you to see those tasks in a new light the next way that you can use notion is to organize your notes you could create a notion database for all of your notes and then sort them out based on different tags that you have in those notes you can sort them by date by author by Source if you have a source that you're reading from when you're creating that note and I've been using notion as my personal Knowledge Management System or my note-taking system for about three years now and finally one of the most exciting ways that you can use notion databases is to actually connect your databases together so if you have a tasks database and a notes database you can bring those together and make connections between individual tasks and individual notes so if I have a task to complete a website and I have a note over here on how to build a website I could relate those together so that when I'm focusing on that task of building a website I could reference my note on how to do so this is just scratching the surface with what's possible with notion databases but I just wanted to give you a bit of an idea as to how you can use databases in notion next let's jump into my computer and look at some of the foundational steps to building notion databases and then we'll work our way up to the more advanced steps when it comes to building more robust systems and notion so if I click into this empty page here and I hit the slash command and then I start typing database you'll see that there's tons of options that come up and this can get quite confusing the three main ones that we're going to want to focus on in this tutorial are database inline database full page and linked view of database the rest of these are honestly quite redundant and there's other ways of accessing these types of databases without needing to have all of these in this command I'm going to start out by clicking on the first option database inline when I do do that it's going to create a new database and it prompts me to give it a name so I'm going to call it books and here I can change the name column to book because that's what this database is about and I can enter the names of some books I can also change the name of this database View by clicking on table right here hitting rename and calling this view books and I can hit enter and now we have a books database inline databases work fine but I recommend creating full page databases to stay more organized to create a full page database there's a few ways you can do this the first way is just hit slash and then type in full page and you'll see full page database you can click on it whoa it just took us to an entirely new page that's because it created an entire page based on this new database and the title of this page is going to serve as the title of your database so if I wanted to call this one movies I could do so and similar to the other inline database I could add a name here for movie and we could write some movies in here I could also click on The View and rename it to movies table and then hit enter you'll notice that there's some breadcrumbs that have appeared up here so if I click on this Untitled here it's going to bring me back to that original page now I'm just going to name this books and as you can see we now have an inline database within a Books page but that also has a movies page within it so if I click on movies now we're in our movies database this can get quite confusing because now we have a books page that's holding a movies page and an inline books database this is why I tend to stay away from inline databases and I tend to just create a page for each database using the full page database feature let's get a little bit more organized here what I can do is actually click on this inline database and I can turn it into a page so I'm going to hit turn into page and now we have a books page if I click on it you'll notice that it turned it into a full page database you can go back to books and I can rename this page to databases now this is a whole lot more organized because now we have a page for all of our database pages and we can click into books and see our books and we can click into movies and see our movies there's nothing else on these pages and they're dedicated to that single database so now that we have this databases page I'm just going to add an icon and I'm going to type in database you can change the color here and I'm going to select this database icon so now over in my left hand side here I can see my databases page and that's going to contain each one of my full page databases you can also add an icon for these and that looks a whole lot nicer and a whole lot more organized next let's say that we wanted to reference these side by side we wanted to see them both together so what I could do is I could create another page over here using my side panel and I could call it media library for instance and if I click into empty space here hit the slash button and then start typing create you'll see that it pulls up the option linked view of database we're going to click on that and then it's going to ask us which data source we want to reference so we have movies and books the two databases that we've created so far let's say I wanted to access the movies database I could hit movies and now it's going to pull in that movies database next I could go down to an empty space here hit slash do this once again by typing linked this time so you can do create or you can do linked to get this option and then click on it and let's add books as well so now we have a page that has our our movies and our books and we also have a page to sort all of our databases so this is my workflow when I'm creating new databases is basically to just create full page databases and sort them into their own databases page and then from there I can reference them in unique ways and I can create notion workspaces out of those databases without having to use inline databases next let's look at database properties the first property that we want to look at is the text property and this is one of the most basic properties that you can create you can click this plus button inside of your database and hit text and that's going to allow you to create this text column I'm just going to call it summary and here I can actually just type out a summary for my movie in this case so let's enter a summary for La La Land and again you can pull between these columns like so I can even right click on this column and turn off the wrap column option if I just want this to disappear like this and just get a brief preview of it but I'm going to keep wrap column on just so we can see the entire summary and I'm just going to drag this out a bit now I have some summaries here in my movies database and I can actually edit this through this linked view or I can go back to my databases page into movies and I can edit it alone on this isolated databases page next I'm going to show you the numbers property the numbers property is similar to the text property in notion so if I was looking at my movies database here and I wanted to add a run time for these movies so that I know how long they are I could add a property of number and I could name this runtime and then parentheses I will put minutes then I can click out of this and now I can enter the amount of minutes each of these movies is the next property to look at is the Select Property and this allows you to select one option from a drop down list of all of the options that you've added in the past for that database so it would make sense in my movies database to add a genres select tab so I'm going to hit select I'm going to name it genre and within here I can enter the genre for each of these movies so la la land I would type in Musical and hit enter and now if I click into this next one for Great Gatsby it's going to show that we have musical in here but I can also add a new one let's add drama and then for Godfather let's add another one of crime and as you can see it only lets us select one genre with this option and you can also change the color of these options so for musical you could make it gray for drama we could make it brown and for Crime we could make it orange or to keep your databases clean if it doesn't matter what color they are I recommend just making all of them gray I like that look a little bit better personally but that's just me next we have the multi-select property and the multi-select property lets you do the same thing as the Select Property except this one allows you to select multiple options if I wanted to add a multi-select property in my movies database it would make sense to do this for something like actors so I could list all of the different actors in these movies and then I could reference those for other movies in the future so I'm just going to hit plus go to multi-select and I'm going to name this actors and then I can add the main cast so I'll type in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone and what you could do here if you wanted is you could have for the actors you could go Blue for instance and then for the actresses you could go pink that's just a suggestion and this is a scenario where color would make sense to use for your different multi-select options now let's add actors for the rest of these options now in the future if I wanted to reference these actors again I could do so I could just hit new type in the name of the movie I could add a summary here which I'm not going to do right now I could add the run time whatever the run time is we could enter a genre like we did before and then here I could type in Leo and as you can see Leonardo DiCaprio comes up and I can reference that actor once again next we have the status property and the status property is really good at showing what stage of a project something is at and this is typically something that you would use for tasks but it works well in our movies database example as well imagine we wanted to have a status for all of these movies so that we could see what we've watched and what we still need to watch so I would hit the plus button I'd click status and I'm just going to leave the name as status and then here we can select the different stages of these movies so not started we could rename to not watched or we could name it wish list that's on our wish list to watch it I'm going to make that yellow actually it probably makes more sense to call it watch list then we could have a status for in progress of watching and we can even add a little Emoji in here if we want and then finally for the complete option we can add watched and within these different stages of to do in progress and complete we can add other types of statuses so for complete we could also add an archive so these could be some things that were on our list before but we didn't watch them and we just wanted to move them to an archive because they're no longer on our watch list and we wanted to check it off the list but we didn't watch it so it's archived I'm sure you could get creative and come up with some different ways to use these statuses and then once they are all added I can come in here and change the status of these obviously I can only be watching one thing at a time I can also Mark what I've already watched and what's on my watch list as you can see and if you ever want to edit this property you can just click on it hit edit property and you can come in here and add more statuses as you please next up we have the date property and the date property does just that it allows you to add dates to your database items so for example if we wanted to add the release date of these movies in our movies database I could just hit the plus button select the date property and I can name it release date you can change some of the options here like date format and time format between 12 hour and 24 hour if I click into one of these date cells you'll see that it pops up this calendar view where I can select a date or I can just type my date in up here it's important to note that you can also add an end date and that will create two dates within this property so that you can have a beginning and an end this isn't necessary for the release date example you can also include time which also isn't necessary but I just wanted to note that you can add those and there's also this remind feature so if I set my date for the fifth I could set it to remind me on the day of the event at 9 00 a.m one day before the event at 9am which is already in the past two days before the event at 9am which is in the past and one week before the event which is in the past so again you wouldn't use the remind feature for this release date example I just wanted to show you that it was possible to use these and hopefully you can get creative and think of some other ways that you can use the date property now I'm going to fill out these release dates now we have a list of release dates for all the movies in our Movie Database next up we have the person property the person property allows you to tag a person within your notion database so to add that you just hit the plus button and you'd click person and it doesn't really make sense to add it to this movies database but I'm just showing you as an example here you can set a limit for how many people you're allowed to add I'm just going to set it to a one person limit so that I can only add one person but if you leave it at No Limit it's going to allow you you to add as many people as you want right here let's change it to one and click into this area here and because I'm the only one within this notion workspace I'm the only person that's going to show up so I guess I could name this owner and I could add myself for these movies our database is getting filled up with tons of different properties and it's starting to get a little bit overwhelming so now I'm going to show you how to organize your properties within your notion database right now we're in the movies table View and I'm going to show you how to incorporate other views of this database soon what we can do if this is getting a bit overwhelming and we only need to see certain properties right now is we can right click on the property we don't want to see and we can hit hide in view this property is still part of the database it's not deleted it's just hidden right now if we want to bring it back we can click on these three dots right here go to properties and as you can see we have all of our hidden properties down here I can just click this eye toggle to bring it back and then I can always right click it to hide in view again you can also hide Properties by going to the three dots going to properties and then selecting the eyeball that you want to hide here the only one that you can't hide is the page property here so let's say we wanted to hide the status in the release date and now we just have some nice basic information here as you can see these summaries get quite long and if you want to be able to read them it's nice that it wraps but if you don't want to have these huge database items then you can right click on summary and you can turn rap column off and that's going to make it so that it doesn't wrap the column if I go between two database properties and I double click it's going to downsize to the length of the longest item I could also do this for actors here and let's do it for minutes as well now my database is organized a bit better the next property to Showcase is files and media you can add a files and media property by clicking this plus button here and going to files and media files and media is pretty straightforward it allows you to attach files to a database item by clicking into this empty space and then you can choose to upload a file or you can embed a link so if you have a PDF that you wanted to relate to a specific database item you could either upload it here from your computer or you could link to it if it's in your Google drive or something like that it's important to note that if you are uploading files in notion the max size is five megabytes per file unless you upgrade to the plus plan notion can be okay for file storage but personally I tend to just keep my files in Google Drive or I just store them locally and then if I really need to put something in notion then I will but to be honest notion strong suit definitely isn't storing files I tend to leave that to tools like Google Drive Dropbox or I just locally store my files so I'm going to delete files and media because we don't need it for this database next we have the check box property and the checkbox property is fairly simple it allows you to Mark something as either true or false essentially and it has a little check box that you can visually see to add the checkbox property you just hit plus hit check box and you can give it a name so I'm actually going to name this for my movies database favorite so that if I check these I can now check my favorite movies so I know those are my favorites the nice thing about the checkbox property is you can always downsize this all the way down to just the check box so if you wanted to have this be complete and you weren't using something like that statuses property that I already showed you in this video and you just wanted to have complete or incomplete then you could use it for something like this too but in this case I'm just going to leave it at favorite and you can change the icon here as well to a heart if it makes sense next up we have the URL property and the URL property makes it possible to add a link to one of our database items to add a URL you just hit the plus button and then you go down to URL and let's say in this movies database I wanted to link to the IMDb page for each of these movies so I would just type in IMDb and then I could just paste the link for the La La Land IMDb here so that if I ever wanted to go check it out I could click on it and it would open that page if you wanted to relate your notion database items to a phone number or an email this is possible as well just click the plus button in your database and there's an email or phone number option and these are pretty self-explanatory you can either do email and you can type in an email format here or you could go ahead and add a phone property and type in a phone once these properties are in here you can click on this link here to send an email or you can click on this link to call and since notion works on your phone you could create a database that's essentially a CRM with all of your contacts in it and then if you wanted to call somebody directly from there you could do that by opening up notion on your phone and hitting the call button so we've gone over quite a few properties that you can add to your databases but so far we haven't gone over formulas relations roll ups created Time created by last edited time and last edited by I'm going to skip over formula relation and roll up and go to these four for now now the options down here created Time created by last edited time and last edited by our automated options so if I hit created time it's just going to automatically add a property for the time that this was created same with created by it's just going to add created by Carter sarach because I'm the one who created this database item and same goes for last edited time and last edited by I'm going to delete these properties because they aren't necessary to have in this database we'll come back to formulas relations and roll ups a little bit later next I'm going to go over Pages within your databases and how to create page templates for your database let me show you what I'm talking about and how this can be useful to you so as I stated earlier in this video each of these database rows has its own page right here so if I hit open on La La Land as you can see all of my properties show up right here once you're in here you can click and drag to rearrange the order of these properties and you can even click on certain properties and you can choose between always hide or just to hide when it's empty so I'm just going to make it always hide since phone isn't relevant for this particular page and if you want to view any hidden properties you can open them up right here so I'm just going to rearrange things a bit here let's hide email let's keep actors let's put favorite at the top so we can easily select that put genre up here as well if we want to we can also start entering content right within this page so I can add bullet points and list things out I could just simply write something I could add an image by hitting slash and typing image we could go to unsplash so there we go now we have an image that has to do with La La Land so you can do all sorts of things within this page to customize this particular page for La La Land and if I open up the next page here for Great Gatsby as you can see it's empty right now to start now let's imagine for our movie pages that we wanted to create a default template that allows us to leave a quick review for that movie within the page let me show you what I mean now if I wanted to add a template page that sets a default template for any new movies that I add to the database I could click on this drop down here where it says new and I can hit new template from here it'll say you're editing a template in movies and I'm just going to call this template new movie and as you can see we can set a default to watch list so that it automatically goes onto our watch list or whatever we want the default to be and then within here we could add some headings so I could hit slash and type heading 3 and hit enter and now I'm just going to type General review so now that it says general review in the future I'll be able to come in here and write a review underneath General review I could add as many other headings in here or prompts as I want so that I can just focus on reviewing the movie and I don't have to worry about adding all of these prompts every single time I add a new movie now I'm just going to delete everything except for this General review text so now when I create a new movie it will show up as new movie and it will say General review it will also add it to our watch list so I'm just going to click out into empty space here and then I can click on this drop down right here and hit new movie if I click that it's going to automatically add a new movie to my database I can change the name here the name of the movie down here under General review I can give my review and I can also fill out these things here right I can give a summary add a genre add some actors a run time and so on if I wanted to make this the default for the new page instead of an empty page I could click on these three dots right here and then I could set as default now it's going to ask if I want to set this as the default for all views of movies so I'm just for now going to select for All Views in movies this way if there's any other views of this database in the future it will automatically always use this new movie as the starting page if I wanted to just set it for this particular view that we're looking at right now I could also do that right here but I want it to do it for all future views so I'm just going to hit for All Views in movies and that way if I go to the media library and I start working on this view here I can hit new and it will add new movie I can open it up and as you can see it's starting us fresh with our general review now I'm going to go back to my databases and movies I'm also going to go ahead and delete the email and phone property next let's talk about filtering databases what if you only wanted to see specific database items based on some specifications with their properties well that's what I'm going to show you how to do right now so let's say that we added a review proper 30 and to do this I'm just going to add a select drop down and we're going to call it review and here we can add some Stars so for the first one I'm just going to type in Star Emoji and we're going to select one star create then I'm just going to copy this command C and paste twice to create two star so now we have one two three four and five star review and what I can do here is just make the background all the same on these go with yellow and now I can go through and rate these different films now in this case I have reviews that are four stars and three stars if I wanted to filter it so that I just see the four star reviews I can go up here to filter and then I can select what I want to filter by I don't see reviews in here so I'm going to hit more then I'm going to scroll down until I see review click on review and then it's going to give me some basic options here out of the box I can select review is is not is empty or is not empty so if the review was empty there's nothing here that's what this would be referring to if the review is not empty that would apply to all of these because all of these have something in review and for the is not and is we can check what we want them to be so right now it's on review is and I could select four stars now it's only going to show us the views with four stars if I click out of this I can now see that it's only showing me the reviews with four stars and if I selected the three star and the four star it would bring this one back in if I turn four star off it would only show me the three star next let's imagine that I only wanted to see my reviews that are related to crime and that have four stars right this wouldn't work for this four star selection here because I have no way of saying that I want to filter by genre and review but if you click on these three dots right here and then hit add to Advanced filter it's going to open up some filter rules so now we can select where review is for stars then you can add a filter rule and or you can do or but in this case we want to do and because we want it to apply to both of these things so and the genre is crime so then it's only going to show me any of the database items that we have where there's four stars and the genre is crime now I'm just going to remove these reviews here and let's imagine that I add another one in here so let's add Goodfellas and Good Fellas is another crime genre and I'm gonna make this one five stars then I'm going to go ahead and go to properties and I'm gonna bring back status and let's say that I've already watched Goodfellas and so if the Godfather was on my watch list it likely wouldn't have a review and same with La La Land so let's just get a better example here so now only the movies that I've watched would be reviewed another option here is adding a filter group so let's say I wanted to filter by genre and let's go to add to Advanced filter and I can say genre is crime and then I can add a filter group and this is going to set it up so that I can add multiple conditions for the next filter so I can do for instance where genre is crime and review is five stars and then I can also add another filter rule in here where it says or review is empty so now it's going to show me any spots where there's crime and the review is either empty or there's five stars and if I were to change this review to two stars it would disappear because it doesn't meet our filter conditions anymore now I'm just going to delete this filter now that you see how that works now that I've showed you how to filter out certain items from your database and eliminate things that you you don't want to see and just isolate it down to the things that you do want to see next I'm going to show you how to organize and sort your databases let's say that I have La La Land watched and now I have it rated at three stars and let's imagine that we want to see movies sorted by review so that we can see our best movies first the ones that we rated the highest and our least favorite movies last so what we would do is just click sort then I would open up more and click review and now I can sort it ascending which is going to start with the lowest and work its way up or I can change it to descending to give you an idea of how this works is if I click into here you'll notice that I have an order for these if I change the order around it's going to change the Sorting so it's not based on necessarily how many stars are in here but it's based on the order of these different items within that Select Property that we created so this is important to note this can confuse you if you don't have these in the right order in here but now that I have it set to review descending it's going to put these in that specific order now let's imagine that we want drama to show up ahead of musical so I'm going to drag that there and now we can also add another sort by clicking into our sort and hitting add sort and here we could select genre and you could change whether that is ascending or descending and that will change as well if you change the orders of these it will also change your sorting to prioritize whatever is on top so if genre is descending first it's going to look at genre and it's going to start at the bottom of the list and work its way up and then after it looks at genre it's going to look at the next condition which is the Stars so the next one would be crime so since these two are both crime they're going to be next in the list based on our sort of genre descending but then it's going to look and it's going to say okay we have two crime objects in this database which one goes first in the list well it looks to the next sort which is the review descending so review descending says that the five star goes before the two star you can continue to add sorts here or you can close sorts out and remove them entirely and that's how you sort your notion database currently notion has six ways of viewing your data there's tables boards timelines calendars lists and Galleries and these are the six ways to view data in your notion databases table is the one that most of us are familiar with and it's the one that we've been using for this video to teach you about databases for the most part within a table you can drag these properties around and you can add new Properties by clicking the plus button right here if you want to change this icon that's appearing next to the properties you can click into the property right here and then you can click on the icon itself and notion has a ton of icons that you can choose from tables feature a way to calculate different rows so if we wanted to calculate the total number of minutes for instance out of all of our movies when you add together the runtime we could go to these three dots here go to properties pull up run time minutes I'm going to add an arbitrary number here for Goodfellas I don't know exactly how long it is I'm just going to take a random guess and then you could hit calculate under here and there's lots of different ways that you can calculate this number we could average it we could sum it actually average might be an interesting way to see this information so as you can see the average runtime of these movies is 147.8 minutes when you click calculate under certain properties you're going to get different options so for this status property it's going to allow us to count per group so we could count everything in the to do in progress or complete or we could count the percentage that are on our watch list or the percentages that are complete so how many we've actually watched so let's change it to complete and as you can see we've watched eighty percent of the movies in our list and if I change these they'll update dynamically as you can see it changed to 60 when I move this to my watch list or to watching currently but if I change it back to watched it's going to make that eighty percent complete if you don't want it to calculate anything you can just click on the calculate button and hit none like here it's counting the total number of movies in our table we could just click on this and change it to none and now it won't say anything there if we click on these three dots right here and then we click on layout we can change between the different layouts that we have available to us but each layout has its own options some of the options that you can toggle for table are right here so show vertical lines I can turn that off and as you can see that toggles the vertical lines in our database so if I turn that off now there's no lines between these but if I turn it on you can see the lines reappear there's also a master wrap all columns button so that you can wrap all of these columns or you can choose to have them not wrapped by default and you can decide how you want to open pages if you want to see them as a side Peak you can make that the default or we could change it to something like Center Peak so that if I click on these it's going to open it in the center of the screen so right now we have movies table and if I click on this and hit rename it's also going to open up these three dots here which is going to allow me to rename this I'm just going to name it all movies and then in parentheses I'm going to put sorted by review and then I'm just going to click on this icon right here and we're going to search Star then I can put a star in there and actually let's get rid of the sorted by and just have it say buy review so now it's completely visible over here and let's go ahead and add a sort and then type in review hit enter and we can change this back to review descending so now our movies are sorted by review now let's use a board to group these movies by genre to add a board View and keep this table view you would just hit plus right here and that's going to automatically create a new view it's not going to look very formatted because now we pretty much have all of our properties coming back in but soon we'll have this looking really nice so let's change it to board and let's say all movies by genre and then we can come in here and change the icon and as you can see we get some new options so we have card preview now and card preview is just going to show us either the page content or the page cover of each of these items so if we change it to Page cover most of these are going to be blank because there is no page cover if we change it to Page content as you can see it's going to pull in the page content that we created earlier or it'll pull in Goodfellas General review since that has the general review content these ones that don't have any content within them when I click on them aren't going to pull up anything I'm going to click back into here go to layout and we're actually going to change the card preview to none and I'm going to change the card size to small now this is a bit more compact which I prefer and you can also color The Columns so you can color them based upon whatever these items are are so since these are all gray the backgrounds of these will be gray and again you can open pages in side Peak Center Peak or full page if I want to edit what these are grouped by in this board I can go ahead and click this back button go down to the group option which we'll talk a bit more about later and first of all we can hide empty groups so where there's no genre we can just hide that all together and here where it says Group by we can click on genre and we can change it to whatever we want to group by so if we Group by something like favorite there's only going to be two columns because we have two that are favorited and we have three that are not favorited and now let's say we wanted to group by review we could do that too and once again we could hide this by either clicking this eyeball right here or just hitting hide empty groups in general since there's no one Stars we're not seeing any one Stars appearing in here let's change this back to group by genre and let's close this so now if we add a new page from here what it's going to do is it's going to add this property to it so if we add a new drama movie that we wanted to add we could hit Plus and then we could open this up and as you can see the genre is automatically drama one of the nice things about this view is you can also drag items between these and you can change the genre in that way as well so now this should say science fiction because I just dragged it under science fiction you can go ahead and click here to delete and if you want to see more properties related to these movies you can click on these three dots right here go to properties and as I showed earlier with tables you can actually select things like status and you can pull that in here this is editable as well so if I wanted to click on Goodfellas and add it to watching I could do so same with La La Land here I could add it to watch list if I haven't seen it yet and you can even do the same sorting and filtering that you could do with tables so if I did sort the way this would work is let's say I wanted to sort by status and I can change it to status ascending or status DC sending and what that's going to do is if there's more than one item in crime as you can see here it's going to set it to ascending so it's going to start with the lowest item to do and work its way to the highest item which is the complete item so if I added another movie here in crime and I changed it to watched as you can see that's the order that would go down in I can also change this to descending just like I did it in the table I'm just going to go ahead and remove this sort and that's pretty much the board view now let's talk about the timeline view the timeline view won't make any sense for this particular database so I'm going to go back to where I started in my databases page and if you remember right we had a movies database and a books database but now I'm going to add a new database called goals and this is going to help me show you how the timeline feature works so I'm just going to hit the slash command and I'm going to start typing full page I'm going to hit enter when I see full page database and I'm going to call this goals we can create a name for our goal and by default we're looking at the table view so I'm just going to create this in table View and then once I have it all set up properly I'm going to view it as a timeline so let's go ahead and right click to delete these tags and let's add a few goals and I could continue adding goals here but to show how the timeline works I'm just going to hit the plus button and we're going to click on date so now we have a date property like I showed you earlier and we're going to click into this and we're actually going to include an end date so now we can add two dates we can add a beginning and an end so let's say we want to read a new book let's say between January 1st so I'm going to select the date here and click on First and the 20th so that's our range we want to read a new book Within These Days here and let's say we want to start training and we want to run a marathon so I'm going to add an end date for run marathon and we're going to select January 1st to March 31st so we're going to give ourselves three months for this goal gain 15 pounds of muscle go all the way over to let's say September and then forget 100 000 subscribers let's go the first and set an end date and go all the way to the end of the year now that we have start dates and end dates we can view this as a timeline so let's just keep our table here and let's just call this View all goals I'm going to go with the trophy icon then I'm going to click on the plus button and we're going to select timeline and let's go ahead and name this view timeline and I want to show the timeline by date that's the only property that I can select you can also enable show table and it will show in a table what your timeline looks like you can drag this out if you want to I'm going to click back into these three dots go to layout and as you can see you can also include table properties like I can add date here and as you can see it'll add that property there so now I can view this as a table and I can see the timeline on the right side and again you can open pages how you want to see them so if you want to see them as a side Peak you can keep that or you can change it to Center or full now the next thing with layout that you want to direct your attention to is this right here so here I can select how I want to view this right now it's viewing it on a monthly basis but if I click on this I can change it to quarterly or yearly even so for the goal view I want to view this yearly so let's hit year and as you can see it's going to show us the that read new book is going to be in this part of the year and it's going to show us where we're currently at with this red marker and I can also see that we have run a marathon gain 15 pounds of muscle and get 100 000 subscribers our most long-term goal if I hold shift on my keyboard and I use the scroll wheel I can scroll throughout this if I'm hovered over top of this database so I can see how far out these go one of the other neat things about the timeline view is you can actually set up dependencies within this view so you can see something that needs to happen before you can start something else let's imagine that we want to train for this marathon before we partake in it so what I could do is I could drag out run a marathon and it will show me the dates as I scroll throughout the timeline let's move it to the end of January for starting running the marathon and before that let's add a dependent task by hitting new let's just write train or marathon and I'm going to click right here in this empty spot and add an end date and by default it's just going to make that January 4th to January 4th but if I wanted to I could just go the 20th and then I can drag this to tweak it so let's just drag this out so that it makes sense and let's drag it up top here above run marathon now if I click on these three dots up here and I go to dependencies now I can add two new properties to my database which is blocking and blocked by the blocking property is going to show me what this task is blocking and the blocked by property is going to show me what it's blocked by so with this setup the training for Marathon should be blocking run a marathon and blocked by on run a marathon should be trained for a marathon so let's hit create and I'll show you how this works so in the timeline view I can just drag from train from Marathon to the beginning of run a marathon so let's click on these three dots now go to layout table properties and let's turn on blocked by in blocking now as you can see trained for Marathon is blocking run a marathon and run a marathon is blocked by train for a marathon let's just reorder these so that they make a bit more sense so now we know that we need to complete this training for the marathon before we can run a marathon let's go back to our all goals View and let's add another property I'm going to add a status so that we can add not started in progress and done and let's move it here so now all of these are not started but let's say run a marathon is in progress and let's go back to our timeline if I wanted to see what the status of our tasks were I could enable them in this table right here or I could click on these three dots I could go to properties and if I go into properties here I can turn on status and that's going to show it to me right next to said task now I can't change this by clicking on it from here but I can open up these specific Pages by clicking on them and then I can change the status of the goal here there's also this hide table option so if I don't want to see the table I can always do that and then again I can hold shift and scroll my scroll wheel I can always open my table by clicking on these arrows right here this table isn't to be confused with the original goals table this is just a timeline feature that allows you to see your table in a specific way and again if you want to edit that you can click on these three dots go into layout and the table settings are here so if I want to turn the table off entirely I could or I could select properties that I want to see specifically right here the next view that we're going to talk about is calendar view and for calendar view we're going to create a new database I'm back here on our databases page and I'm just going to hit slash I'm going to type in full page database hit enter and we're going to call this actions so this is going to be a list of all of our projects and tasks let's just change the name here to action so it'll basically be a list of the daily actions that we're going to be taking you can think of this as a task manager or a to-do list then I'm going to delete tags and we're going to add some actions in here now we need to add a date property so I'm going to hit the plus button and we're going to click date this could be a due date so that we can see when these specific actions are due and then I can come in here and I can add a date that this is due so let's say the 7th 13th and the 20th let's also go ahead and add a check box property and let's just call this complete so now we can check things off as they get completed next let's go ahead and change this view by clicking on these three dots here going to layout and clicking on calendar now we're going to see everything appearing in our calendar view if you're not seeing things showing up here it's because your tasks don't have a date property so you do need this due date here for them to show up I'm going to click on these three dots and go into the layout here I can select what I'm showing the calendar by so if you have multiple date properties for your tasks you can show by specific dates right now I'm showing by due date again you can open pages however you want to open them side Peak Center Peak or full page let's go back and now we're going to enable the property of complete so as you can see you can also enable properties on your calendar so you can see what's complete and what's not complete one of the ways that I like to use filtering within the calendar is to hide tasks that are already completed so let's say film databases YouTube video is complete I would check that off and as you can see right now it doesn't disappear but if I hit filter I can actually make all the complete tasks Disappear by hitting complete and complete is unchecked so now it's going to show me any place where complete is unchecked and if I check these off they disappear from my calendar next we're going to look at the list View and the list view is one of the cleanest ways to see your data in notion so let's imagine that we had that example that I just showed where a lot of these tasks are complete let's say these two are complete and we add a filter of where complete is unchecked so now it's only showing us where the items are unchecked so we could rename this view here to to-do list calendar and then we could hit the plus button here and we could open up the list view the list view only has one option here open pages in so we can decide how we want to open the pages and then hit done you can also decide which properties you want to see so you can see complete or you can just see due date but let's keep them both on just so you can see what that looks like as you can see we have a due date down here you can click on it to change it you can click to toggle your completion and one thing that the list view is really good at is creating an archive so if I click and rename this I can call this archive so these are all the tasks that I've completed so let's go ahead and add a check icon and then let's go ahead and filter this list view to complete is checked so at this point now we can see our Archive of all of our completed tasks in Nice List and we can go back to our to-do list calendar and we can see what's not complete if we complete something over here it'll get moved into our list view that's set up to be filtered to only show tasks that are checked with complete I'm sure you can come up with other ways to use the list view but this is one of the simplest views and it can work really well for things like an archive finally let's look at the gallery view this makes it super appealing to look at all of your database items for this view you're going to find me back in our databases and I'm going to go to our movies database from earlier in this video here I'm going to hit the plus button to create a new view and we're going to click on gallery now as you can see this has some similar features to the board view that we talked about earlier so I can change the card preview and let's go with page cover by default we don't have any page covers in here so we're not going to have anything let's change the card size to small I prefer small usually with this and then let's just call this our movie shelf and in parentheses let's put buy review now I'm going to go to properties and I'm going to turn on genre and I'm also going to turn on review and as you can see it's going to show us the review for each of these it's going to show us the genre and it has the title but there's this big empty space here and if you have that it's because you just haven't filled out your page cover yet and your card preview is set to page cover I can also change this to none and it will just give me this very basic view here which I like quite a bit but if we wanted to see this with some nice images we can change it back to page cover and then we can click into these individual pages and we can add a cover from here I can hit change cover and go to unsplash and then I could type something in like gangster for Godfather then we can reposition it by hitting reposition and dragging it and then hit save position and then once I click out of this you'll notice that we now have an image here you can also hit reposition here and you can move it around so that it makes sense now I'm going to duplicate these steps with these other movies and you can upload you can go with one of the defaults in notion you can link to an image or you can just go to unsplash all right now these are looking quite nice and that is a good example of how to use the gallery view now we're getting to the point where I'm going to start talking about formulas relations and roll ups but before I do that I wanted to First dive a little bit deeper into some of the settings that you can toggle within your database as I've referenced a few times you can always click on these three dots to edit most of your database settings one of the things that I like to turn on once I have completed work on my database is the lock database button if I hit lock database it's still going to allow me to add new items to the database but it's not going to allow me to come in here and change things like the properties that are in view as you can see these are grayed out and it's not letting me change these settings so it's good to lock your databases after you're done doing any major edits you can also copy link to view so if I hit copy link to view it's going to allow me to copy this specific view here movie shelf then I can go back to databases and let's actually go back to our media library instead and if I hit command V to paste I can then hit create linked view of database then it's going to pull in this movie shelf view if I want to toggle this title here I can click on these three dots and hit hide database title and now we have our movie shelf on our media library and I actually like that a lot better than our movies table so I'm just going to delete that I'm also going to go ahead and delete books and now our media library is just a nice list of our movies in the form of a shelf let's go ahead and lock views here in the settings you can also change the load limit from 10 pages all the way up to 100 pages so if you have a ton of pages in here it's just going to load x amount of pages and then you can open more there will be a button at the bottom you can also click on these three dots to duplicate your view and that's going to just create the same view so now we have two versions of this view up here so if you kind of like the general direction of this but maybe you want to see instead of by review maybe you want to see a little bit of a different view here let's just rename this to favorites hit enter and then filter by favorite is checked now it's just going to show us our favorites because if you remember right we turned on favorite here so it might actually be good to go into this here go to properties and turn on favorite so that way we can see that these are checked with favorite and we can also take them out of our favorites quite easily by clicking on that favorite icon and they'll still be in our movie shelf we can always go back add them to our favorite and then they'll appear in that favorites list then of course there's a delete view button which just goes ahead and deletes this entire view one more thing that I would like to talk about before we get into the Advanced Property types that I promised you we would get into later in this video is database grouping we talked a bit about this when we were looking at board view but the truth is is you can actually add grouping within most of the views in notion however there are a few exceptions for some of the views that can't use grouping I'm going to go to my movie shelf and then we're going to click on these three dots here and as you can see there's this group option so if I hit group it's going to allow me to group by some different settings here so let's just Group by genre and as you can see in the gallery view this is what grouping looks like it puts all of our crime here and I can toggle this open and closed I can also close this one here and this one and this one and I could go ahead and hide the empty one so this is an interesting way of seeing our movie shelf as well and you can always come in here and edit the group settings just by going to group and you can change what you're grouping by you can hide empty groups as I showed you earlier and you can hide specific groups here down here it'll show you the hidden groups and you can bring them back into view if you'd like if you want to get rid of grouping just hit remove grouping as you can see here this is our board view so in the board view by default grouping is turned on if I click on these three dots here I can also add a subgroup within a board so if I hit subgroup it's going to create a swim Lane based on reviews if I hit review so now this thing looks pretty complex but there may be some ways that you can use this so I'm just going to hide no review and as you can see now I can toggle these open or closed and I can see these based upon one which genre they're in and two what the review status is so this is kind of an interesting way of seeing your data the grouping option is available in every view except for calendar and some of the views don't allow for subgroups while some do I suggest you just play around with grouping and see if it makes sense for you next I'm going to show you some examples of how you can use formulas in notion let's imagine that we wanted to see our runtime minutes as runtime hours to do that we could just hit the plus button here go to formula and let's just call this runtime hours you click into empty space and now we can enter a formula here that's going to convert these minutes into hours so let's just click here and then we're going to find runtime minutes so that we can reference it and then you can simply hit the slash button to divide and type in 60. and then you can hit done now as you can see it's turned these into hours instead of minutes if you don't want to see all of these numbers you can click into here and you can surround this with a round so I can put a parenthesis there put a parenthesis at the end it's going to round it for me and as you can see these ones all rounded down to two and this one rounded up to three now let's imagine on our movie shelf we wanted to see a heart next to the movies that we favorited so instead of this default little check box here that shows up we would just want to see a little heart show up here you can actually get this to work with formulas so I'm going to go back to my table here hit the plus button and click on formula we're going to type in favorite symbol and then I'm just going to click into empty space and we're going to create an if operator so if I type in if it's going to show me an example down here and it's going to give me the syntax so we need to enter a Boolean and then we need to enter a value if that Boolean is true and a value if that Boolean is false so I'm going to type if and we're going to find the favorite check box and then we're going to add equals we're going to put two equal signs because this is how we say if favorite equals we're going to type in true and you click on this constant here so we're saying if the check box is checked that's what true stands for comma then we're going to add a heart emoji and we're going to put quotation marks around that then we're going to put a comma and we're going to enter a blank space for if it's not true so what again this is saying if the property favorite is equal to true then we're going to put a heart and if it's not equal to true then we're going to put a blank space then I'm just going to put some parentheses to close this off and hit done and now as you can see the two items that we favorited have a heart and I can go over to my movie shelf of favorites now and we could just select this button right here go to properties and get rid of favorite and just put in the favorite symbol so now if something's favorited it's going to have that little heart next to it and in our movie shelf we can also go ahead and add the property of favorite symbol and now if I click on any of these and I uncheck this option as you can see the heart will disappear and we can make it reappear on certain items as well and if you remember right we filtered this to only show our favorites so now this looks quite nice for this next example let's say that I wanted to figure out how many days are between today and the end of my goal so we have our goals database here and what we're going to need to do first is we're going to need to Define what today is so in order to do that we're going to use a very simple formula so I'm just going to hit plus and I'm going to go to formula and then I'm going to call this formula now within the now formula I can just type in now and then I can click on that function that appears and I can close that off and hit done and now it's just going to return the exact time and date that it is right now and this will update as this time and date changes then we're going to create another simple formula by hitting the plus button going to formula and we're going to call this end so this one is going to pull the end from this date property and in order to do that we're just going to type in end and this is going to pull up a function and we're going to then go ahead and start typing in date so then I'm going to click on this date property now I'm going to close that off and hit done so now we have the end dates and now so from here we can add one more formula that figures out the time between now and end so that we have something that updates dynamically based on if we change these dates like I just did there or when now changes like it has over the past two minutes so let's hit the plus button go to formula and this one is going to be days remaining let's just drag this between now and end because I feel like that makes the most sense and then in here we're just going to click and we're going to type concat which is short for concatenate concatenate means like basically connect two things together so within that concatenate function we're just going to type in format and we're going to type in date between date between is another function that we're going to call to figure out how many days are between now and end so I'm going to hit date between then I'm going to type end and make sure not to click on the function but the property end so we just asked it how many days are between end then we're going to do comma and I'm going to type in now and again make sure you hit on the property now not the function and then we're going to tell it what we want it to figure out so we want it to figure out days so in this case we're going to hit comma and we're going to type out days and we're going to space that out and then I'm going to add some parentheses at the end here now to finish off the concatenate function we're just going to hit Plus and we're going to type out days left then we're going to close that off now we have it where it's saying 16 days left which looks amazing and since there isn't a space in here we can go to where it says days right before days and add a space and now we can hit done and now we have this beautiful formula that brought together two other formulas to create how many days we have left so I'm going to go ahead and hide in view for end and now we don't need those anymore and now we just have this nice formula that just says days left so we can keep that there we can hide these blocked blocking and blocked by and now we just have this nice formula in the Forefront that tells us automatically how many days we have left and it updates dynamically so those are just a few formulas to get you started with notion and oftentimes if you have a problem you can search on the notion subreddit or post your problem there and usually there will be somebody that can help you out the more that you research formulas and use them in your own workspace the better you'll get with them next I'm going to cover relations and Roll-Ups relations and Roll-Ups allow you to connect to notion database items together for example let's imagine that we have some goals here and we want to connect them to our actions database I'm going to add a new view in our action database that just gives me a table showing all of our actions now I'm going to open up the sidebar here and we're going to create a new page I'm just going to call it task management I'm gonna make this a full width page and within this I'm just going to create some linked databases so I'm going to hit slash create and we're going to create a linked view of database like we did earlier in this tutorial now it's going to allow me to choose from my data sources I'm just going to select goals and then I'm going to click out of this now I'm going to click into some empty space and I'm going to hit the slash button and I'm going to type in create and we're going to hit enter on linked view of database once again now we're going to pull in our actions we're going to select the table view so now I can see our goals and our actions all on one page I can even drag them side by side if I hit slash and type in column and then I click on two columns now we have two columns here and I can drag goals to one side of this and we can drag actions to the other and you can drag between them and you can make it a 50 50 split or you can make it an 80 20 split if you wanted to for me I'm just going to click on these three dots here I'm going to go to layout and we're going to change it to a gallery layout then I'm going to go to card size and I'm going to make these small we're going to set the card preview To None let's move this over a bit more and let's just go ahead and hide this goals title and also hide the actions title now we're viewing these databases in a unique way we've brought them both into the same page and now I want to connect them together right we want to have a goal that's related to an action in order to do this we're going to have to create a relation within the action database so let's rename this table here to actions and then let's go ahead and hit Plus and go to relation now I'm going to select our goals database and here it says related to goals because I selected our goals database the name of the property is goals I'm going to change it to related goal and we're going to limit it to one page meaning it's only going to allow me to select one goal per action so we can only have one goal that's related to each action now I'm also going to select show on goals so that not only will my goals show up next to my action that they're related to but my actions are also going to show up in the goals database when I click into one of these goals let's hit add relation and let's change where it says related property on goals to related actions and then hit update relation now it's as simple as clicking into this related goal and then I can select a goal that these actions are related to so maybe I'll add an action of run five miles here I could add a due date and I could select a related goal of train for Marathon so now we have an action of run five miles that's related to the goal of training for a marathon so let's click on train for Marathon and as you can see we now have this related actions property I'm going to click on the six dots next to it and then I'm going to hit show as page section now I can see it as a special page section here and I'm going to be able to see all of the actions that are related to the specific goal let's go ahead and hide the rest of these properties so that they're not getting in the way I'm going to leave days remaining and date but we're going to get rid of some of these others just by hiding them quickly and we'll also leave status at not started but let's make it in progress since we're actually working on some of these things now and as you can see now we have these two related here in the actions database we can see trained for Marathon is the related goal to this action and if we click on train for Marathon we can see all of our tasks for that linked right here I can even hit this new page in related action button and I can type in Run 10 miles then I can open this task up add in a due date and if I zoom back out here you'll see that that's now added a task in our actions database if I go back to our databases View and I go to goals you'll also see that if I click into train for Marathon this is still here right we can still see related actions and if I go back to databases and into our actions database I can see that these are related to that goal of training for a marathon you can imagine that there are so many other ways to connect databases in notion now let's talk about the roll-up property the roll-up property is basically a feature of the relation property let me show you what I mean so here in our actions table we can see that our goal here that's related is training for the marathon but what if we wanted to see some more information about training for the marathon on our action page what if we wanted to see how many days there are left in this related goal well we could add a roll up that pulls in how many days are left for training for a marathon so what we do is just hit Plus and hit roll up here we're going to select the relation so if we click on the select button it's only going to show us any relations that this actions database has and since related goal is the only relation in here we can click on that now by default it's just going to put the train for marathon in here twice but if I go to property here I can select a property from our goals database and if you remember right we created a days remaining formula there so if I click days remaining now I can see that we have 28 days left total to train for the marathon I'm just going to go ahead and rename this to days left for goal so that's basically how Roll-Ups work it allows us to pull another property from this related page now the thing is we can click into here and we can remove our goal and we could add a new one let's say read a new book is the goal that we were relating to and it will actually change how many days we have left because this goal has a different amount of days left than this goal does however if you click on days left you can't edit days left at this point the only way that you can edit days left or edit a roll up is by actually going into the page itself that has that property so I could hit read a new book that's going to open that up and now we can change days remaining by changing the overall deadline and as you can see it updates here so that's how relations and roll ups work now I'm going to talk about how to add sub items in notion similar to dependencies sub items create a relation within a single database so let me show you what I'm talking about here basically in actions if we wanted to create sub items underneath any of these we could do so so let's say we have a new task in here and let's say it is read X book so it could just be a book that we're reading and we're going to relate that to read a new book as our goal and as you can see this is now pulling in our days left for reading a new book and let's say we wanted to break this task down even further and we wanted to have sub items underneath it like you know read chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 and so on in order to do that you could go up to these three dots here click sub items and then we need to go ahead and create the sub item name so we're just going to call it subtask and for the parent item we're just going to name it task now I'm going to hit create and as you can see it bumped all of these out and if you hover over them now you can click this little drop down and you can add a new sub item so for read X book I'm just going to click the plus button and as you can see we now have subtask and task getting populated from this new sub item so I'm just going to say read chapter one we're going to add another new sub item read chapter two another and I could go on and on with this as you can see the parent task on all of these is read X book and then read X book has multiple subtasks within it reading all of these different chapters now if I click the plus button and I click roll up I can now select these other types of relations that are happening within this same page so if I just wanted to roll up the number of subtasks within a task I could go subtask and then we could go ahead and calculate and count all so now what that's doing is it's pulling up a number for this because we've enabled count all for how many subtasks are within this task and we could rename this to subtask count and if we add subtasks to any of these others that would also start to add a subtask count for these so that's essentially how you use relations and Roll-Ups and that's also a mini guide on sub items and dependencies if you want more help with sub items and dependencies you can check out the video in the upper right hand corner right about now this video took quite a while for me to make so please like this video subscribe down below if you want to see more videos like this hit the Bell icon if you want to be notified and comment if you have any feedback or you have any questions I'm happy to help oh and by the way if this video didn't help you check out my playlist of 60 plus educational free pieces of content on how to use notion alright we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Productive Dude

Views: 141,021

Keywords: notion databases, notion, full notion tutorial, notion tutorial, notion databases explained, notion databases tutorial, notion database tutorial, productive dude, productive dude notion, full notion databases tutorial, notion full guide, 2023 notion tutorial, notion 2023 tutorial, notion databases 2023, 2023 notion databases, notion app, notion app tutorial, notion app databases, notion app databases tutorial, notion app database tutorial

Id: RCbtQ_Xg7QA

Length: 78min 24sec (4704 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023