- Hey, what's going on friends? Thomas Frank here, and welcome
back to Notion Fundamentals. In this lesson, we are
talking about creating links to your Notion Pages
within your workspace, along with creating pages and sub-pages. These are pretty related topics. So I am mashing them
together into one lesson. This is part of Notion Fundamentals, the free and completely
open Notion Basics Course here on YouTube and over
on my website as well at THOMASJFRANK.COM/FUNDAMENTALS. If you have been following along so far, you are probably aware
that we are creating an example project, because this is a action-based,
project-based course, which is this Personal Dashboard here. And in this video, we are gonna be taking this Personal Dashboard
that we left off with in the last lesson on Page Layout. And we are gonna be adding
the links that you see here on the actual template version of the Personal Dashboard. So just to give you a preview, we are first gonna go over how to create links to other pages. And then we are gonna
finish up this lesson by telling you how to
actually create new sub-pages inside your workspace. Before we get into creating links, though, I do wanna show you what
a sub-page really is. So something that is unique in Notion, or at least different than some other note-taking apps
out there like Evernote, is that you can create
basically an infinite number of nested pages inside your workspace. So if I come over here to this sidebar that we have here in this Test Workspace, I can open up this
writing page and inside, there is a Books Page
and that's not just here on the sidebar. If I click this page, we actually
see that Books is a block, a page block that is sitting on the page. And if I click into that, then I have another
page block sitting there and we can sort of drill down and create as many nested pages as is necessary for our workspace. Additionally, the sidebar
is not the only way to navigate our workspace
because we can create links from any page to any other
page in many different ways. And that's what we're gonna
start doing right now. So I'm gonna go over to this
little Personal Dashboard that we are working on, and I'm gonna show you
one of the first ways to create a link here in Notion, which is the Link to Page block. So instead of these tasks here that are just Checkbox blocks, I wanna have an actual
link to the views here in this Ultimate Tasks
copy that I've got here in this sample workspaces specifically, I wanna link to my Today view. So there are a couple of
different ways that I can do this. And the first is to simply
create a Link to Page block. So I'm gonna come over
to my dashboard here and you can create this
anywhere in your workspace, but if you type these Slash character to get that Slash Menu,
and then just type Link, you're gonna get this Link to Page option. And if you click that, we
are gonna get a search prompt where we can actually
search for whatever we want. So I'm gonna search for that Today page, and it's gonna come up
and I'll click that. And now I have a Link to
Page block on this page. Now, what is interesting
about the Link to Page block, specifically is that I'm going
to get this link right here, but just like I showed you over here with these actual page blocks, I'm going to get a link in my sidebar, so something that I really like to do is to create Personal Dashboards, which I then favorite in the star up here. So it's up in my Favorites bar. And then I will create these links to other places in my workspace, which are then accessible from the sidebar in my Favorites area. That way I don't have to
favorite tons of different pages. I can just favorite one
page and then twirl it open anytime I wanna access
all kinds of other stuff. There is another way to
create a Link to Page block and that is simply by pasting the URL. So I'm gonna go back
to Ultimate Tasks here and I'm going to grab my Tomorrow link. So if we hit Control or Command L, I'm going to copy the URL to my clipboard, and then I'm gonna come back
over to my Personal Dashboard. And I'm just going to get
my cursor on a new line. And if I paste this URL, it's gonna give me
three different options, Dismiss will literally just
leave this URL on the page, which I don't want. Mention will create what's
called an Inline Link. We're gonna talk about that next. And then Link to Page actually creates that Link to Page block. So you're gonna see in my sidebar, I now have Today and Tomorrow. To get Parody with our
actual template here, we also need Next 7 Days
and Habit Tracker [DEMO]. And then we also need the "Thomas Frank's
Note-Taking System" [DEMO] link in the Notes area, so I'm gonna go ahead and
create those right now and speed the camera up. Okay. So, now we have all
of our link to page blocks here on this Personal Dashboard. And you'll see that all of these are now in the sidebar as well, which means they're easily accessible. But there is another way
to create links in Notion and that's to create what
are called Inline Links. These are actually in line with a text and they also do not show
up in the sidebar here. And the way to create those is number one, if you were to just paste the URL here, you could choose the Mention page option. And you will notice if I
go and delete this one, just as a example, here, that the page mentions are
not shown in the sidebar. So that's useful if you don't want to clutter up your sidebar. The other thing that these
allow you to do though, is to create links
inside of lines of text, or even inside texts
that are in other types of blocks like Checkboxes. So, as an example, let's go and look at a sample task here in Ultimate Tasks. And I'm actually just gonna
go into the Today view and mentally make a note
for Create Homepage. So if we're here in the Personal Dashboard and I've got a task that I want, just done a check box here, if I created a checkbox
block, I could just say, "Don't forget to," and then I want to link to
that Create Homepage task, which is actually a page itself in Notion using an inline link. And I can do that by
typing double bracket. So bracket bracket, and that instantly gives
me this little search box for creating an inline page link. And I'm gonna go for Create
Homepage, click that. And now I have an inline link
and I can type text after it. And if I click it, then I get right to this
page inside of Notion, which is inside a database, we are gonna be covering
databases in the next lesson. So don't let all these crazy
properties here overwhelm you. They are just database
properties inside of a page. One thing that I do wanna
mention before we go back to the dashboard is that
when you create links to pages inside your Notion workspace, you also create what are called Backlinks. So now that we have created this link to create homepage, this page here, you'll see that we have one backlink. And if we click this, we actually can see that we have a backlink from our Personal Dashboard. If you're coming from Roam
Research or another tool that is similar to Roam you'll notice that the
backlinking functionality isn't quite as powerful
as it is over in Roam because you don't see exactly
where the backlink is. You just get a backlink to
the page containing that link. Still quite useful, but not quite at the same
level of functionality. Additionally, if you come
over to the Three-Dot Menu in the corner and you hit Customize page, one thing you can do is change the way that backlinks are shown here. So right now they're showing that pop over like I showed you. You can click Expanded and they're always gonna be showing by default, or you can even turn them off. And they're completely
hidden from display. Going back over to our Personal Dashboard. The Double Bracket command
is not the only way to make an inline link. There are actually two other commands, both the At symbol and the Plus symbol will do roughly the same thing. So if you type the At symbol, you're going to get
the same search prompt, but it defaults to
either mentioning a date, a reminder, or a person. So using the At symbol is primarily good for those functions,
however, if I do start typing a page link, I'm going
to get it just like I did with the double bracket. Additionally, you can
do the exact same thing with the Plus syntax, I may need to get back into another line, and you will see that
with the Plus syntax, I default to creating a new sub-page or creating a new sub-page somewhere else, which we're gonna go
over in just a second, but I also have the option
of creating an inline link to that Create Homepage task. So you get multiple different options for creating those inline links, but I find the Double-Bracket method, or simply pasting a Notion URL. And choosing that Mention option is the easiest way to do it. To be thorough here, there is one more linking option you have, which is hyperlinks. So with hyperlinks to web pages, there's a few different things you can do. And I'm gonna come down here to reference, to actually show you this in action. If I paste the URL to a
webpage, I can dismiss, I can also create a bookmark, which is gonna create
this little box like this, or I can even embed the web
page in my Notion workspace. And it really kind of depends on whether or not the webpage you're
embedding supports this, but most do. And you'll see here that I have a nice mobile-optimized view of this page here on my website, embedded directly in my Notion workspace, which is pretty cool. Last but not least, if you have some text, you can actually highlight that text and add a URL to it directly. So let's type Notion Fundamentals here. If I were to highlight this and bring up a little context menu, I can hit Link, and then I can paste that
and link to the webpage, getting myself a nice little hyperlink, like I would get in WordPress or some other blogging platform. Now, so far, all we've done to this lesson is link to existing pages
in our Notion workspace, but it's just as easy to create new pages or sub-pages inside of
our workspace as well. So now let's go over creating those and the different ways to do it. The first way is using the sidebar. And even the sidebar gives
you several different options. So the first one would be to
click this little Plus button, right next to the private area, or if this was a Team workspace, I would also have a Team Area up here and I would be able to do the same thing. And if I click that, it's gonna
create a new top level page. So we can just call
that, "Top Level Page", or I can click the Plus button next to any of the existing pages at any level here in the sidebar as well. So let's just say I wanted to create another chapter in this little
book area, I could do that. I could call it "Chapter 3"
and now I have that page. Let's give it a nice little book icon and we'll open it as a page and now you'll see it's sitting
here in the sidebar as well. Additionally, at the bottom
of the Notion window, I'm gonna have to actually change the size of my Notion
window, so you can see it. There's a new page button right here. And when you click this, it's a little bit different because you're gonna get a blank page, but you will also see that
it has a default destination and you can actually click this menu here, and you can change the
destination of this page. So I'm gonna go ahead
and click Writing here, and let's just call this "Blog Articles". And now this page is created underneath the Writing page and just like Books, it is sitting here on
the page as a page block. Now, if we don't wanna use the sidebar, we can also create pages very easily on the actual content area. So let me just make this
sidebar a bit better of width. I'm gonna go back to my Personal Dashboard and let's just say that I
wanna create a Goals page in my dashboard. So what I can first do
is use the page block. So if we type Slash and then type Page, I'm gonna get that, and I can click here, and I can create my page
like I normally would. Now just like the Link to Page block, this page block is an actual block. So it's going take up an entire line within the column that we have it in. And it's gonna show up in the sidebar. We also have the ability
to use the Inline syntax to create sub-pages as well. So maybe I didn't want this
Goals page on its own line, maybe I wanted instead
to have a line of text, like, "Don't forget your goals", but I want Goals to
actually be a new sub-page. So that is where that Plus syntax, we'd went over a little
bit earlier comes in. If I hit Plus, and then I type Goals, I'm going to get a
sub-page that is actually on a line of existing text. I can click either Sub-page or I can click New Goals page in, and this is gonna create
a sub-page somewhere else. So first I'll do this one, and unlike Inline links to other pages, we are still going to get this link in the sidebar because it
does live on this page. So it's pretty much just
like a actual page block, except for it can be in line
on an existing line of text. If I go in here, it's gonna
be pretty much exactly the same as an existing page. The only thing to know is if you've seen me do tricks before, where I turn a page block
into something else, So for example, let's do Page here. Let's just call this "Cool Stuff" and list out some cool stuff. And if I come back, I can
actually turn this page block into something like a Toggle list and get the page's content inside that. If you create an inline
sub-page like this, you're not gonna be able
to do the same thing because the block that it exists within on this page is actually a text block. So if you wanna do tricks like that, just make sure you use
an actual page block. If you don't care and you wanna
do something more Wiki style where you're just creating
page links inside of text, then you can go and use
that Sub-page Inline syntax. So lastly, let's talk
about the other option when creating sub-pages, which is creating the sub-page
in a different location. So if I were to use the
Plus syntax once again, and let's just say, I
wanna create a page called, "Someday" for tasks
that I wanna do someday, but I don't think this should exist here. I want it to exist somewhere else. If I click New Someday page in, I'm gonna get once again,
that search menu here, and I'm gonna pick
Ultimate Tasks for Notion. And what this creates
for me is an inline link to a new sub-page that
exists somewhere else. So again, because this is an inline link, I do not have it linked
in my sidebar here. And if I click it and navigate to it, I've got a Someday page that is, if you look at the
breadcrumbs up here inside of Ultimate Tasks for Notion
and it's probably gonna be at the very, very bottom. And if we open up the
Toggle, it is linked here. So when we create that
new sub-page in option, it does become an actual page block and to prove that, let's
just create a List item, come back here and go ahead
and turn it into a Toggle list. So that's a breakdown
of pretty much every way that you can create
links and also sub-pages inside of your Notion workspace. Going back to our Personal Dashboard, we pretty much replicated
the exact template that we created in that
whole template video. So in the next video here
in Notion Fundamentals, we're going be creating
these linked databases and finishing this project up. As with every other lesson
in Notion fundamentals, this lesson has a written companion, which is a great reference
if you ever forget anything, and you can find all of those lessons, all the written versions, video versions, and example files over at
THOMASJFRANK.COM/FUNDAMENTALS. That is the home and hub
page for this entire course. And also on that page,
you'll have the option of signing up for my Notion
tips newsletter as well. If you wanna get notified
via email and be the first to know about new tutorials and also a new templates
that I'm working on, you're definitely gonna
wanna get on that email list. And when you do, I'll also send you a link to all of my current free templates, so you can check those out and play around with them in your workspace. As always, you can ask me questions in the comment section
down below or on Twitter. I am Tom Frankly over there and I do tend to respond quite a bit faster. If you did enjoy this video,
if you learned something new, hitting that like button for the algorithm is appreciated as always. And if you wanna take
your knowledge further, I've got more videos on this channel, like this one right here on "Building that Personal
Dashboard Template" from scratch, start to finish. You can check that out or "Building a Habit Tracker Template". So check those two out if you are curious, and I will see you in the next one. (upbeat music)
