- Well, hello there. My name is Thomas Frank, and welcome back to Notion fundamentals. This is the free and open Notion beginners course here on YouTube. And in this lesson, we are talking about how to create complex multi-column layouts
inside of your pages in Notion. You've probably seen
plenty of examples of these if you've seen other people
sharing their dashboards, or if you've used my
templates in the past. Like my habit tracking template or my personal dashboard
template, which we actually did a full build guide video for just last week, I'll have that link in
the description down below and whether or not you wanna make full huge templates like
this inside of Notion, or you just want to
put two columns of text next to each other so you
can cross reference them. It's very easy to create multiple
columns inside of Notion. So this is gonna be a pretty quick lesson. I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it. I'm gonna show you a couple
of different limitations and also a couple of
different advanced tricks. As always, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals
to get all the example files, written versions of
lessons in this course, and every other video
inside this course as well. It is your one-stop shop for
learning the basics of Notion, and then jumping off into more
advanced stuff if you want. So with all that being said,
let's dive into the lesson. (curious music) So if you were around for the last lesson on the basics of blocks,
you'll probably remember that this personal dashboard template is the example project that
we're gonna be going through for the rest of Notion fundamentals. And in building this,
with all of its databases, linked to databases, synced
blocks, all kinds of stuff. We are going to be
learning the ins and outs of basically every
component and every feature inside of Notion. And if you will remember,
one little side note here, I have the sidebar hidden, but if you can just hover over
this little hamburger thing and click it, you can
actually keep it pinned here. If you remember last time, what we came up with was this
single column, much more, I guess, simplified
version of a dashboard. So what we're gonna start doing,
is dragging columns around to create our multi-column layout, which again, looks like this. And when you wanna create
two different columns inside of Notion, gonna
hide this really quick, all you need to do is
grab one of your blocks, with this little six dot block menu here and drag it until you see
a horizontal blue line next to another block. I can do it on the right, and I can also do it here on the left. So I want tasks to be on the left, and I'm gonna go ahead and
drag that on the right. Note that if I drag it and drop it here with this horizontal line,
it's gonna go underneath tasks, but that's not quite what I want. I want to drag it and
I want to drop it here. And boom, I've just given
myself a two column layout. Now, what I also want to do is go ahead and make this a full width page and full width pages are
gonna be especially useful for you when you are creating
multi-column layouts, especially if your actual
Notion window is narrower than what I have on the screen right now, if you have a smaller monitor say. So, now we have two columns, but we have all of these
things kind of underneath the tasks heading here and
there in a single column. So what I want to do is get the notes underneath the notes column. So one thing you can do inside Notion is instead of individually dragging all of these blocks underneath, you can simply click and drag
to select multiple blocks and then go ahead and drag those. And you'll see that now that
I've dragged it close enough underneath this notes heading, I have a half width horizontal bar here. If I drag it just a little bit lower, it's gonna be full width and it would be a single full width column like we have with basically
everything else here. So I wanna make sure that
I have that half width horizontal line here, and
I'll go ahead and drop those. And now I have my notes
column here on the right, and I'm gonna do the
same thing with my tasks. I'm gonna drag them. I'm gonna drop them underneath tasks. So that in a nutshell is how
you create multi-column layouts inside of Notion. So I'm gonna go ahead and
fast forward right now and to create the rest of my columns. And now to finish up this layout, I'm gonna go ahead and grab
this picture of Bruce Lee, and I'm gonna drag him
all the way to the right. So he is to the right of
all of these columns here. Now I'm gonna grab my quote, drag and drop that underneath him. And now we have essentially
something very similar to the multi-column layout that we have in the template version of the dashboard. Now, one of the things that you can do, is resize these columns on the fly. Notice they are gonna resize themselves if I start dragging the window in, they're gonna get smaller. And if you happen to use
Notion on your phone, you're almost always gonna
get a single column layout. And here the desktop version,
if I keep resizing this on the desktop and the browser app, these columns are gonna
retain their layout to the point where it's
really hard to actually see what's going on here. However, if you're using
Notion on your phone, this isn't, what's going to happen. All of these different
blocks you've laid out in a multi-column layout
are gonna stack themselves into one column. And the order of the
blocks inside that column is going to be determined
by the left to right order of each row inside your
original multi-column layout. So keep that in mind when you're designing your dashboards here, think about how they're gonna
look on your phone as well. And I will note that this is
also why I create this little quick links toggle with our
table of contents block here, is because on your phone, you're not gonna be able to
see all this stuff at a glance. So you want to have
this table of contents, which will link to all of
your different headings, which means that on your phone, you can simply open the little toggle, tap one of those heading
links and zoom down to it. Instead of scrolling for
days to find what you want. Now, one significant limitation about dragging blocks around
to create multi-column layouts is inline databases. And we haven't really talked
about databases too much here in Notion fundamentals, but I do have a sample
database prepared here. So one little thing that
I'll mention here is if you have a block
that it's already within a column like this, and you want it to be a full width block, you can simply drag it
down until that little horizontal line is now
taking up the whole screen. And I'm gonna go out and
just paste this little table that I've made here onto the screen. And one thing that you're
gonna notice if I create, say a heading, so we'll
just call this "Tasks 2". If I want this to be to the left or right of this H2 to block here, I can't drag it and drop it. This has been a limitation
with inline databases, no matter what the view is,
board view, calendar view, table view here, has been a limitation with
these inline databases for a very, very long time. And the opposite does not work either. I can't drag this heading to left or right of the inline database. So there are two different tricks for getting your databases
into multi-column layouts. First, you can come over
here to the three dot menu in the inline database, and
you can turn it into a page. So now it is simply a
little page link block, and I can go ahead and move
it to the right of tasks. And then I can turn it back
into an inline database. So that works really well. Or what you can do is
simply create a dummy block. So I'm just gonna create
a text blocks called dummy and use that to form your
multi-column layout first, and then drag your inline table
underneath the dummy block, then delete the dummy block and you get basically
the exact same result. The next thing I want to share with you, it's actually brand new. And I'm really glad
that I waited until now to do my multi-column layout lesson, because just recently Notion
now released the ability to copy and paste multi-column layouts. This was something you
could not do before, in the past if I would have
copied these three blocks and pasted them, they would have all been in a single column layout,
but now if I copy them and I come down to a brand
new line and I paste them, that new multi-column layout is retained and the same is true if I create a page, just call this "Hello"
and do it within the page. I now retain my multi-column
layout, which is really cool. Additionally, you can now
paste your multi-column layouts inside of toggles, which is really cool. So let's create a little toggle
and do the exact same thing. So this unlocks a lot of power
and eliminates the need for a lot of really annoying workarounds when it comes to making
multi-column layouts inside of Notion. So for example, what if I
wanted two different columns underneath this column right here? So I want a column right
here and a column right here. Well, in the past, I would have had to go through
a very complex workaround. You can go look at that video
if you're curious about, and it still does work, but now we don't necessarily have to, because we can simply take
this toggle into which we've pasted these multiple columns, and we can drag it
underneath our column here. And now we gain a nested column layout. And if we go ahead and
turn this toggle into say a heading too, just something
that doesn't contain other blocks, we can then delete it. And we gain our nested columns underneath this middle column here. Now there are some limitations to this copying and pasting functionality. For example, I have three columns here, then one column, then three columns. If I copy all of this content and I try to paste it, let's go back into this
whole "Hello" page, make it full width and I
try to paste it down here. Now, let's give ourselves
a full width column. It's not gonna work because
I've tried to paste a layout that includes a bunch of
different numbers of columns. For whatever reason that does not work. So maybe we'll see that
updated in the future. Right now, it is a bit of a limitation and additionally, if I
create a toggle within one of these columns, so if I create a toggle inside
of a multi-column layout, even if I just select these three, not this entire layer here but
just these three right here and try to paste it like
we did just recently, it's not gonna work. If the toggle exists on a
line within the Notion layout that already has multiple columns, trying to paste multiple
columns inside side of it just kicks them out
and kicks them onto the nearest full line. Now I could grab just this one and easily paste it in there no problem. But if I want to paste
everything inside of this toggle, I need the toggle to be
on its own line first. Then I can grab them. I can paste them in and
then I could move my toggle into a multiple column area. I could turn it into a heading and I could get rid of it. So keep that in mind when you
are designing your layouts. And that is about going to do it for this lesson here
in Notion fundamentals. As always, you can go over to
thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals, which I talked about in
the beginning of this video to get all of the different example files, written versions of every
lesson inside of this course and a hub page where you can easily access all the other lessons. So if you want to go
reference the block lesson, if you want to go reference
the text entry lesson, it's all there, and it's
gonna be continually updated as I make the videos inside this course. Also on that page, you're gonna
find that email signup box, if you would like to join
my Notion tips newsletter, you'll be the first to know
when I release new content and new free Notion templates. One that I'm working on right now is a massive update to my
ultimate note taking system. This is gonna be much better
than one I released last year. And if you're on that
Notion tips newsletter, you're gonna be the first to know about it and the first to be able to duplicate it into your own system and start using it. So sign up to that list
if you are curious, otherwise check those resources out and ask questions down
in the comments below or over on Twitter, I'm
@tomfrankly over there. I'm very responsive on Twitter. And if you've got questions, I would love to try to
answer them for you. Hopefully you found this video helpful. I will see ya in the next one. (energetic music)
