- Well, hello there. Welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains. In this Notion fundamentals video, we are talking about the basics
of blocks inside of Notion, how to create them,
how to manipulate them, how to change them and use them to bend Notion to your will. What are blocks? Well, blocks are pretty
much everything you see inside of Notion, except for the sidebar
and some of the top menus and things like that. But all the content that you
create, and see, and work with inside of Notion is built out of blocks and blocks come together to form things inside of Notion that are greater than the sum of their parts. Think of blocks as a container for data that can take different shapes. A blob of text is a block. An image is a block. An embedded YouTube video will be a block and even databases and
pages themselves are blocks. A page, in fact, is a block
that contains other blocks. And you can prove this to yourself, by taking a page that has
some content inside of it and turning it into another
type of block, like a toggle. You're going to see all that
content inside the new toggle. So in this video, you're going to start down the path towards becoming an expert at
using blocks inside of Notion. We're going to talk
about how to create them in multiple ways, how to change their settings
and how to move them around in preparation for our next video on creating complex, multi-column
layouts inside of Notion. And starting with this video, we are going to start an example project that we're going to be carrying throughout the entire rest of this course, which is going to demonstrate pretty much everything
we're going to talk about and all of the basics of Notion itself. And that is going to be the creation of this personal dashboard, which will serve as sort of a home base for your Notion workspace, if you want. In fact, if you've been to the
courses homepage over at thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals, you might've seen at the top of the page, a picture of my personal dashboard. I use this to get to my task
area, my note taking system. It is pretty much my home base
within my Notion workspace. And by the end of Notion fundamentals, you're going to be capable of creating something
very similar for yourself. You're going to be able to create this. And in this video, we're going to take the first baby steps toward getting to it. If you look at a personal dashboard, we have many different types of blocks that are all working in concert to create something that
is very, very useful. So, how do we get all
these blocks on the page and what blocks do we
have available to us? That is what we're going to
start covering right now. As always, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals, linked in the description down below to get all the example files and written versions of every
lesson inside of this course with lots of extra cool
reference materials. So check that out, if you are curious, otherwise, let's roll that intro. (upbeat music) Okay, here I am once again, being in a circle on your screen. So like I said earlier, we're going to be creating
this personal dashboard inside of Notion. And this is composed of many
different types of blocks in a multi-column layout. So, like I said before, a block is basically just a
unit of data inside of Notion. It can contain images. It
can contain embedded content. It can contain pages. All
kinds of interesting things. And to create a block, all you need to do is
type our slash commands. So what I'm going to do
is go over to a blank page and we're going to start getting some of the content on the screen that we need to build this dashboard. So here in my blank page, I'm just going to call
it Personal Dashboard and to add our first block, the page here, all you need to do is
type the slash command, like it says on the screen, and we're going to get this list of all the different types
of blocks inside of Notion. We can scroll through
here and we can choose one by scrolling and searching, or we can simply start
typing to add something. So if I want maybe a heading,
I can start typing heading. And if I want heading two, I can do an H two and I'll
have that right there. I can either click it or I can hit enter, and I've gotten myself a heading two. So let's just call this heading two tasks. Cause that is one of the headings
on our personal dashboard. And boom, I have put my
first block on the page. Now, another thing you're
going to notice about blocks is there's this little six dot icon to the left of every block, which is the block menu. And if I open it up by clicking, I have a lot of different options that I'm going to go
through in a little bit, but I just want you to
know that you can basically do whatever you want to do to this block by opening up this block menu. Now, before we go forward and start creating the rest
of the blocks on this page, I want to let you know about
the Notion block reference that I've created inside
of the course materials for this course. So once again, thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals, you can get all the
supplemental materials. And this has a listing and
example of every single block that you're gonna find inside of Notion. We've got a table of
contents at the top here, so you can see all the basic blocks. Things like to-do lists and toggles and bullet lists, numbered lists, all kinds of stuff like that. We have inline blocks,
which are inline links, and there are dates and reminders and mentions the people on your team. Along with inline formulas, we have different types of databases. There's an example of each different view of a database inside of
all these toggles here. And we have media blocks, embedded things like
images or web bookmarks, or even embedded YouTube videos. There are also other more
advanced embeds like Google sheets and tweets, and even whimsical boards, which is a really amazing
outlining tool that you can use to create flow charts,
really cool thing there. And then there are advanced blocks. So synced blocks, which can sync content across multiple pages
in one Notion workspace, even across Notion
workspaces, in some cases, block equations, template
buttons, breadcrumbs, and table of contents. All kinds of really cool stuff. In this video, we're not
going to give an example of every single one there, but I do want you to know
that this reference exists. And that you can see an example of every single block within it. So going back to our dashboard here, I want to add a few more of the headings. I know we had one for notes. We had one for references and we had one for web links. So we're going to go ahead
and get all those there. And then one thing that I like to do, is give these a background color, look a little bit different than the content underneath them. So if we go in here, we can change the color by
going to the color menu. And then these options here
would change the text color. So I can show you that right there, and I'm going to control Z,
so I don't have that there, but if I go and change the
background color to gray, then I get a bit of a highlight here. And one thing that I do when
I'm building my dashboards is also add a divider or otherwise known as a horizontal rule by typing the dash key three times. And that is another tip for adding blocks. For certain types of blocks, there is a way to get them onto the screen without actually opening the slash menu and searching for it. So for example, with block quotes or quotes, I can simply type a quote and hit space. And I get a block quote there. For bullet lists, I can type the asterisks and get a bullet, or I can even type the dash
and hit space and get a bullet. For number lists, I can type one period and
get a numbered list there. And one more example, if I
want to create a toggle list, I can use this little HTML
bracket here to the right, hit space, and I get an empty toggle. In the written version of this article, I have some more examples of some blocks that you can get onto the screen using special keyboard shortcuts. And Notion's documentation has lists of every single one available. They're useful to know, especially for creating
things very quickly, but that is all I want
to say on them for now. So one more that I'm actually
going to show right now is how to create a to-do item because I want one beneath tasks. So let's go ahead and hit
bracket on left, bracket right. And now we have a to-do. So I'm going to go ahead and
give this a name, film video. And now, I want to add
another to-do list item beneath this to-do here. Now, because I already have a to-do, I could just hit enter and
I'm going to get another one, but I do want to show you the other way you can start to create
blocks inside of Notion, which is to hit the plus icon to the left of every single block. If I do that, I'm going to get the option
to create any other blocks. So I could create a heading, I can create whatever I want. In this case, I'm going to create
yet another to-do item, and I'm going to go on
and fill those out now. And I'm also going to fill out some more basic content in here that is not super
important to talk through. All right, so now we have some to-do items here, we have some toggle lists,
which you've seen before. The next block that I'm going
to create, is actually a page. And we're going to have a whole video on creating and linking to pages, but I'm just going to do
it right here as well, because it's very, very easy. You just type your slash command. You can search for page, and boom. You have created a page
inside of your page. So let's call this page Quotes and I'm gonna go ahead and paste in some quotes that
I had from a different page. So now we have this cool quotes
page inside of our dashboard and going back to the dashboard, the next thing that
would I really like here is a link to another existing page that is outside of this
dashboard, somewhere else in my Notion workspace. So, what I'm gonna do is actually go over to our Notion block reference here. I'm gonna hit command or control L to copy the URL of this
page to the clipboard. Then I'll use control back bracket to go back to our personal dashboard. And I'm going to click this
little plus button here and I'm going to search for link to page. So if I do this, I can
search for lots of things. And actually I have it right here. So if I pasted the URL, it would also come up after awhile and I can select it like that. You can also type to search for the page if you know the name of it. So now what I've created
is a link to page block. And one cool thing that I want to note about link to page blocks, is that if you open up
your personal dashboard or anything in the sidebar, whether it's Favorited, or if it's in the workspace area, you're going to see the
link to your external page inside of this page, in the sidebar, even though the page is
not actually contained within this page, that link there is a block and it creates a link in the sidebar. This is very, very useful. And as an example, I will show you, well, number one, I have my CIG Creator's Companion here. This is how we manage all of
our YouTube and blog content. And this is filled with
pretty much nothing but pages inside of Creator's Companion. But if I go down here
to my Thomas' dashboard, you're gonna see all these
items here with arrows. These are all pages that
exist outside of my dashboard. And I simply created
these link to page blocks so I can easily access
them from my sidebar without having to favorite
every single one of them. It's very, very useful. Okay. Back to our little dashboard here, I'm going to create
another horizontal rule. And then I want a link to a web page here so I can type my slash command and I can type link and
choose web bookmark. I can paste in my URL like
that and create a bookmark if I want to. But what I can also do, is simply paste the URL onto the screen. And I have the option to
either create an embed, which will literally embed
the webpage inside of Notion or create a bookmark or simply dismiss it and have the URL on the screen. So I'm going to also create a bookmark because I'm creating this
little web link section here and now I've got links
to both College Info Geek and my personal website on
my little dashboard here. And if I remember correctly, the next thing we have in the dashboard is an image of Bruce Lee. So if I wanted to, I could just type slash
image and I can upload or embed with link. But what I can also do is if I have an image on my clipboard, I can simply paste it, just like I would with a piece of text. And there's the image. Now upload it to Notion
servers and on my page. Lastly, I'm going to add my
favorite quote in the world, which is from Bruce Lee. So once again, I can hit my little quote mark and hit space to get a
block quote on the page without having to search
for it in the block menu. And I'll go ahead and type
in my quote right there. All right. So I'm gonna go up and
I'm gonna change these to their gray background. And one cool trick you
might not know about is if you type slash, you're going to get the block
menu inside of this text, but if you start typing a color and the word back, you can actually get to
this background option here. So I can take that and
make it a gray background. Okay. Next thing I wanna do is create a little list of quick links that actually link me directly
to the headers on this page, in case I'm scrolling through
this dashboard on my phone, and I don't want to scroll
through a ton of different stuff. I want to zoom right, to say, the notes section of the Web Link section. So I want to do is go
ahead and create a toggle. And I'm going to call this Quick Links. And what I want to do actually,
is give this an emoji. So on Windows, it's Windows key and a semi-colon and let's type in navigation to get this cool little compass, give it a space and bold, Quick Links. And then in here inside of our toggles, we can actually add any
kind of block that we want. So I'm going to type slash and I'm going to search for
a Table of Contents block. And now I've got links to all of these different
headers on my page. And because we are on a pretty big screen, we're not going to zoom down
to them, but if I click them, you'll notice that they turn blue, which is pretty much me
linking right to them. If I were on my phone and the notes section
in the reference section was off of the screen, clicking this will zoom me down to it, which is very, very useful. So I'll go ahead and close that. And I'm gonna go ahead
and give it another, let's give it a green background just to visually distinguish it. And one more thing that
I want on my dashboard, if I get rid of that
there, is a call-out block. Now this just makes something stand out. And something that I want
at the top of my dashboard is a little affirmation, basically just telling me not
to spend so much time working and to live a more balanced life. So I'm going to have that in there, and I may want this in
some other places as well. So this is where I'm going to show you how to use synced blocks. So if you type slash,
just like any other block, we can search for synced block. And this is basically an area
where we can put other blocks, which we can then copy to other locations in our Notion workspace. So if I go ahead and grab this, I can actually drag it
into this synced block. And what you will notice, is that I also drag the block around. That's something I haven't covered yet, but if you click and hold
on this little menu here, you can actually drag a block
pretty much wherever you want. And this blue line indicates
where it's going to go. Now for most of these blocks,
we have a solid blue line, but notice that underneath
these to-do lists, if I move it to the right a little bit, it indicates that I'm going
to get an indented block. So if I go and do that, now it is indented underneath
the to-do list item here. So I'm gonna go ahead
and put that back there and get rid of the space
in the synced block. And now if I want to put the
synced block somewhere else, all I need to do is hit
this copy and sync button, which will copy the synced
block to my clipboard. And let's just say, if I want to go over to
this quotes page here, I could also add it at the top by hitting control V to paste it. And with synced blocks, you can see if you click
here in this editing in one of the page, you can see a list of all of the pages where this synced block exists. And you'll see a label
for what this page is, but also where the original
location of the synced block is. And if you want to learn
more about synced blocks, I have an entire couple of videos and a huge guide over on thomasjfrank.com And I will link those in
the description down below. So it won't cover them too
much more in this video, but I do have a very,
very in-depth resource. So now we have a single column version of most of the kind of
content we're going to have on that personal dashboard here. If you look at the actual
personal dashboard, you're gonna see that there's some different
types of blocks on here. There's some databases,
more advanced things. We're going to cover those and
add them in later tutorials in this series, so you can understand exactly what's going on. So right now we have basically a rudimentary personal dashboard. And to round this video out, I want to show you some of
the extra options you have when it comes to blocks
of all different types. And the options are
actually going to change based on the different type of block. For example, in the block quote down here, if I hit the block menu, I actually have the quote size option. I can choose to make
this default text size or large text size. So I think it's large by default here. And if I go ahead and make it default, it's actually smaller. I like it to be large, so I'm
gonna set it back to large. And if we open the
block menu for an image, we can actually view the original. We can make it full screen, which will take up pretty
much the entire Notion here and make a light box. We can download it. We can view the original
on the AWS instance that Notion uses, we can replace it. And we can also add a caption. So if we wanted to, we can even, you know, take this quote and we
could've made it a caption on the image itself like that. So I'm going to go ahead and
leave it as a block quote and something that we can do
with pretty much every block is actually add comments to it. So if I go ahead and
hit comment right here, I can add whatever kind of comment I want. And something that's pretty new in Notion is that we can actually
attach files to comments, which is pretty cool. I'm not gonna do that here, but check that out if you want to. And if I go ahead and
click it right there, now we have a little
comment icon and we can see, and even maybe have a discussion with other members of our workspace about whatever we're talking about. Another pretty cool thing we can do with pretty much any
block inside of Notion is move it somewhere else. So let's say, and maybe a
group actually want to move. Let's say I want to move this
task list to somewhere else inside of my workspace, I
can actually click and drag, just select them all and
then open up the block menu and choose, move to. And if I type in a page,
let's try Creator's Companion. I get a list of options here, and I'm gonna go ahead
and choose this one, which is my demo version
of Creator's Companion. And I'm gonna go over here
and scroll to the bottom and see all those blocks
are now moved to this area. Another way to move blocks
is to simply select them and drag them to pages in the sidebar. Which we'll go ahead and do right now. And now we've got our task list back in our personal dashboard. So I'm gonna drag those up
and put them right there where they used to be. And last but not least, I want to show you how to turn a block into another type of block. And the example that I'm
actually going to use here is this Quotes page we created earlier. So if you remember clicking here, we have all these different quotes along with an instance of a synced block. If I go back to our personal dashboard and I click the block
menu and hit Turn Into, I have the opportunity to turn it into all
different kinds of blocks. Now, with most of these kinds, like the headings here or a
to-do list or number list, I'm going to end up with
the title of the page turning into the block that I want. And then all of the
content within that page is simply going to be underneath it. So let's go and do
heading one as an example, all that content is now here, but if I undo and I turn it into say, a toggle list, I actually get all this content
inside of this toggle list. So if you ever have stuff inside of a page that you would really like to have within the page that contains that page, you can go ahead and
turn the internal page into something else, such
as a toggle list there. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that because I do want it to be a page. And that pretty much covers everything that we're going to cover in
this block of basics video. We now have a lot of
what we're going to have on our personal dashboard
once it is finished, but it is in a single column and it's not exactly looking like this finished personal dashboards. So in the next lesson, you're going to learn
how to create complex, multi-column layouts inside of Notion. We're going to get something
that at least looks very similar to this personal dashboard. Once again, if you want to go over to thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals, you can find the written
version of this lesson, which has more details about blocks, and you can get all the
supplemental materials, including this Notion block reference which shows you an example
of every kind of block inside of Notion. So check that out. You'll also have the
opportunity to sign up for my Notion tips, email list, where I've got lots of cool tips coming to the people who are
specifically on that list. Check that out and as always, thanks so much for watching. Ask questions in the comments down below, or follow me on Twitter over @TomFrankly. I am very responsive over there, probably my favorite social network, so check that out and thanks as always for
watching and learning. See you in the next one.
