Notion Office Hours: Relations & Rollups 🎩

all right we're live good morning everybody welcome welcome if you've never been to a notion office hours pretty stoked to have William nut on today now we've had him in the past doing some formula stuff that we get so many questions about relations and roll ups with databases and I think this is really some of the magic of notion so today William nut is going to walk us through the basics possibly some advanced features to I'm sure we're going to go through all of that so William super excited thank you for joining me today yeah pleasure to be here once again Murray thank you this is fun it's easy for us to get pretty nerdy about notions so just some housekeeping if you've never been to a session before use the ask a question area below because Williams gonna kind of go through a little bit tutorial style we're gonna definitely leave questions at the end if questions do pop up kind of as related to what you're talking about I might kind of jump in and and we'll try and address those as best we can but we'll make sure to leave some time for Q&A so that we've clarified that so welcome looks like we've got people from like everywhere Switzerland Calgary Burbank Laura midians France very cool welcome welcome first so fun so welcome I'm super excited let's dive in William if you want to give us a little I don't know a little intro about the session kind of what people can expect yeah yeah well thank you so much again for for letting me join you again it's always an enormous pleasure I so I am William Nutt I run nut labs typically from New York but I'm currently quarantine eing in North Carolina still I was actually in North Carolina the last time I joined office hours maybe on when I can get back to the city but the family time is nice and we're kind of an integrated digital strategy firm and notion consultancy but I also run the website notion VIP and there I published got tools and insights about all things notion so that's at notion dot VIP and so as Marie said we're going to be davin into relations and roll-ups today and to your point we will we will keep the the detailed kind of step-by-step instruction kind of simpler so everybody can grasp the concepts but we will look at some kind of more advanced implementations of relations and roll ups so that folks can get a sense of really what they're capable of doing so at the end of the session afterwards we of course it will be recorded and it will be available on YouTube probably within the next 24 hours or so and to complement this material we there's a post on ocean VIP about relations and roll ups and that will probably be a helpful resource as you're implementing some of these practices on your own because it dives in to a little bit more of the specifics and in a text format that that will probably complement the video well so we'll probably link to that from within the YouTube video description let me know William if you want me to add that to the call to action button at the bottom so I'm happy to drop that in oh yeah I'll just put it in the chat I'll pop it into the chat now I mean it's I I included an ID tag so you're gonna jump to the bottom of the page perfect but okay so Marie if you don't have anything else to add weaken that we can start to get our hands dirty here let's do it alright I'm gonna actually delete some of what's in place quickly so that we can build that ourselves so fundamentally the relation property in notion is a method of connecting items in one database two items in another database so here you can see that we have a database of expense categories and then we have a database of expenses and this database of expenses include a type of property that most users are probably familiar with for the category it includes a select property but if we were to use a relation property instead of a select property and choose the categories based on the categories available in the categories database that's going to offer a lot more functionality that you will see that you will soon see so the relation property can often be thought about as a way of grouping items in one database with items in another database you can think of it as a group as a category as some form of classification and oftentimes this is going to form sort of a parent-child relationship so in this example you've got expense categories and this is sort of the parent in the parent-child relationship where the children are the individual expenses each expense will be mapped to a category using a relation property and again that's going to offer a lot of functionality that you'll soon appreciate so we're looking at expense categories and individual expenses here but you could also consider how this might work say for projects and their individual tasks where projects are the parent in the relationship and their individual tasks are the children so you could map each task to a project and use that relationship in a lot of helpful ways another example is recipes and their individual ingredients you can map each ingredient to a recipe but in that example the parent-child relationship kind of works both ways so you don't have to have necessarily a dedicated single item in one database and then map that to multiple items in the other you can have multiple mappings in both databases so in the ingredients and recipes example you might want to view the individual ingredients within a recipe but you might also want to view the individual recipes that can earn the recipe all the recipes that contain an individual ingredient if you've got you know something going bad in your fridge and you want to prepare it for dinner and you need a really inspiring recipe for it if you had this ingredients and recipes databases you could filter your recipes database to show only the recipes that contain that particular ingredient so this Parent Child sort of relationship that this method of grouping works both ways so let's that's a lot of talk and description let's see exactly how it works so let's create our first relation we'll do that in the categories database so it's just like you do with any other property we'll add a property and we're gonna name it expenses because we're going to be mapping the category to all the individual expenses within it and we'll choose the relation property type and when you do that you'll be prompted to select the database that you want to relate this database to so we want we want to relate it to our expenses database in this case is called simple expenses and then click create relation so we've created our relation property and we've linked our categories our categories database to the expenses database and when we do that because this is a two-way reciprocal relationship we automatically get a reciprocal property within the individual expenses database so this default name is undesirable you will rarely keep it so we are linking these expenses back to their categories so we can just call it category and so now we have our reciprocal relation properties configured the databases are connected through the relation properties and now we can start our mapping we can start establishing these connections between the individual items so when you click into the relation property for an item you're going to see all the items in the connected database so in our Netflix subscription expense we want to map that to our entertainment item and it's really easy to copy and paste the the linked items so I'm gonna copy that entertainment item and I'm gonna paste it into our NBA ticket and side note that came to mind to me when I was preparing this because I had an NBA ticket prepared before the pandemic hit and I didn't get to go to the Knicks Clippers game but hopefully it will be an even better game when they're back so for the next one we've got our weekly grocery run that is going to be a food item so we'll select that from our categories database and then we'll copy and paste that to our dinner with Austin and then finally our mortgage is going to be a housing item will select housing and then we'll paste it also into the HOA dues so we've now mapped each of these individual expenses to an item in the categories database and if you click into the populated relation property that item is going to be a link that you can click to open the database page for that item which is going to be useful in a lot of implementations of these relation properties you've seen Murray do that in a lot of our templates without even knowing it probably so what you can see that as we've added these items to the individual expenses they've appeared in the reciprocal property within the categories database so for each expense we can see the linked category but for each category we can also see each linked expense and if you're linking a lot of them these rows will get pretty tall so you'll undoubtedly want to choose to unwrap the cells so we've we've established our our relation properties and we've populated them let's um let's see how this can be useful so I mentioned that this forms sort of a parent-child relationship and I would say if there's one real benefit and there are so many benefits but the most useful benefit of these parent-child relationships is the ability to filter the parents or to filter the the child database by the parent within the page so that probably makes no sense explaining it let's see what it looks like if we open the housing category page what we can do is we can add a linked database so for anyone unfamiliar what a linked database is it's not a new database it's just going to show a view of an existing database in this case we're going to show the simple expenses database so remember we're we're within the housing expense category and we're creating a view of the simple expenses so when you create this linked database it's automatically going to show all of the items in that database and what we want to do is we want to filter this linked database to show only the items that have been mapped to the housing category so what we'll do is we'll apply a filter and we want to filter for the that relation property that we created to choose categories and we want to choose only the categories that contain the current one that we're editing which is housing so when we do that we can see those two expenses that we mapped to the housing category and of course you can show and hide properties and choose you know galleries and boards and whatever else that you want but we won't get into the formatting here what's important is that we're filtering the housing expense category to show only the child's the children within the related database but we're not gonna want to do this for every house for every expense category and certainly not as we're creating new expense categories so instead we're going to want to create a ten but I'm gonna delete this linked database that we just created and I'm going to go back out to our master expense categories database and you may already be familiar with the process of creating a template so you go up to the new button and click on the arrow and I already have this created so I'm going to delete it so we can see exactly how it's done and I'm gonna click new template so we're creating a template within the expense categories database so we'll call it new expense category and just as we did previously we're going to insert the linked database and we're going to choose that simple expenses database so remember previously we filtered this database to show only the items in the housing category because we were editing the housing category but right now we're creating a template so for each new category that we create with this template we want its inner database to be filtered for that new category so what notion has just recently allowed us to do this is within the past week or so we can actually filter this database by the template this is what's called a self referencing filter so we'll create the filter we'll choose that category property our relation property and we want a filter to show only the expenses where the category falls within this template so that template is now an option here new expense category so of course we don't have any existing expenses that fall within this category with this category doesn't even exist yet it's just a template so it's not going to show anything here but what we've done is we've said for each new category that's created with this template we want its inner database to show all of the expenses that are linked or related to that new category so let me show you exactly what we mean by that if we go back out to our master databases we now have the option to click on that air again and choose new expense category so let's call this one transportation for example transportation yeah okay so of course we don't have any expenses yet for transportation but as you're editing the this filtered view if you add a new expense from within this view it's going to be automatically related to the new transportation category so we can just call this car payment for example and you can see here that the relation property has automatically been populated with transportation because we are editing it within the transportation category in this database this inter database is filtered to show only the items that fall within that category so when you add a new item it's going to be automatically added to that category so if we go back out to our master databases we can see our new transportation category we can see the car payment has been added within the linked expenses and we can come down to our expenses database car payment has been added and it's been automatically related to the transportation category so if you think about this not only in terms of expense tracking but if you think about it in terms of projects and tasks or like we said ingredients and recipes you can begin to get a sense of how useful this is and you can link these categories to multiple child databases so that presents one other benefit of using these relations versus the Select properties because it if you use the same categories with multiple databases you're going to have to create independent select properties for those categories and you're going to have to manage them if you add or remove or rename one of those options but if you're using relation properties instead if you change the source of the category within that category its database then it's going to change every instance so if we wanted to say like and beverage here for example then it's going to name all of those references to it to food and beverage so if we had multiple databases referencing this categories database that only allows us I mean that allows us only to edit it in one place and that's going to keep your information really consistent and accurate and it's also gonna eliminate a lot of redundancy and your work I just wanted to bring up a related question that just popped in from Maria which is that you cannot group relations in a board view so there are some times where I will actually maintain the select property just for the purposes of sometimes I like to see things in a board view I do that with like my like product and services sales database because I like to kind of see things by category so sometimes I'll actually kind of leave both in there because it can be helpful to group by by Kanban board yeah that is a that's a really great point you know and I would I would say that that's a feature you know among probably my top five ten that I'm most eager to see is the ability to group a board by a by a related op because that would be magical that redundancy but also you'll see here in a second that there I would also like to be able to filter by a a formula property because formula properties can often be used for workarounds like that and such out the case for for that particular issue but you'll see how they can be helpful a helpful workaround for another another kind of roadblock here in a second so let's move on so we've seen the the implementation of a relation property reciprocal relation properties so let's look at how roll-ups fit into this picture what a rollup does is you're able to pull in information from all of the related items so for example we're we're gonna add a rollup property to the categories database and it's gonna pull in information for all of the related expenses so let's let's look at exactly what I mean by that and we'll start by adding a rollup property and what we're gonna do is we're gonna use that roll-up property to calculate the total cost for each category so we'll name it total cost and we'll choose the roll-up property type and then when you click in to that roll-up property for any item you're gonna make three specifications you want to specify the relation property that you want to reference so in this case we only have one option we've only created one relation property which is the expenses property and then the second option is the property within that related database that you want to pull in to to this roll-up property so in this case we want to pull in the cost and then for calculate you have the the ability to perform different operations on the pulled in properties so to calculate the total cost we want it to be the sum so here you can see that of course our transportation includes zero because we just created the the car payment on a whim and we haven't assigned a value to it but for the other ones it's pulling in all of the costs that have been linked to this category and it's totaling them so there you can see that you know where as we have six or seven different options here they're condensed into their categories here and if we use the calculate feature at the bottom of the table and create the sum you can see that it aligns with this sum here so this is just breaking out that total spend in two different ways and just because I just referenced it let me show you what I meant by using that formula property as a workaround when you use the sum feature at the bottom of a roll-up property you're not able to format it as a currency but and if you're if if you're already absorbing a lot of information then just plug your ears for a second if you if you use the formula property to reference that roll-up property so we are gonna reference total cost you can format that as a currency and then when you calculate the sum at the bottom that's gonna be nicely formal formatted so you could just hide this one and you can only display the formula and then you're gonna see your nice dollars at the bottom we did have a couple of questions popping up it might be good to clarify so Jennifer was asking when you referenced the category in the template is there a way to do that for multiple filters at once for example in transportation what if I want to filter it for transportation category but also a second property at the same time so I mean you can have multiple filters as many filters as you want really in that database inside of your template but you could also create multiple linked databases inside the template if you wanted to as well but yeah you can add more than one filter yeah yeah you can definitely have combination filters and in terms of the self referencing you're only gonna be able to do that for the active template but you can but you can you know create as many other different filter conditions as you want and I just learned recently through my own sort of tinkering that you can actually create new databases within a template and reference each other and they will not conflict with any other instances of that template that's getting real meta and heavy so we won't distract everybody with that but I was pretty excited to make that discovery okay so that is our first roll-up we've used to roll up to pull in all of the costs associated with the length expenses and then we've totaled them to determine our total cost by category so let's look at a few other instances of the roll-up and this is not going to be quite as applicable to expenses but this will be the most helpful way still to show you exactly how it works so we pulled in numbers formatted as a currency in this roll-up but roll-ups can also pull in dates and they can pull in well they can pull in any property but let's look at dates so this would make more sense and it kind of be more useful in terms of our projects and tasks example because you can use a rollup to determine kind of like the earliest tasks or the next tasks or the full range so if we add another roll-up here and we just call it dates and then choose the roll-up property again and then go through that same process of picking the expenses relation and then this time we're gonna choose the date property and when you choose a date property you have the ability to choose the earliest date the latest date or the date range so it's going to summarize all the dates that you've selected that are associated with your linked child items and kind of present them in useful ways so like I said this isn't necessarily quite as applicable to expense tracking which you can see how it would be really helpful for for managing tasks and projects and really I'm just quickly Patrick was asking well he said wait what how is that William not how how to have them within templates so that was your your thing that you were learning when you were tinkering I don't want to break your flow but you were yeah well and and I that's gonna be that's kind of a whole different topic it's not necessarily related to relations and roll-ups so to our friend who asked that question let's connect on Twitter or elsewhere and dive into that because I can show you an example of exactly what I'm what I'm talking about does that work yeah because I want to make sure we can cover all relations and roll-ups here - so we won't - like we did last time with the formulas oh yeah this is 101 we can do it - no one so we've pulled in numbers and we've pulled in dates you can also pull in check boxes and this is this is really cool and useful so again probably more applicable for tasks and projects but still helpful to demonstrate it here so say that we wanted to add a checkbox property here just to in key to indicate when the expense had cleared you know in the bank or whatever so we can add a checkbox property call it cleared and then just like check off a few of them so then we can go in and add another roll-up property within our categories database and we can call this percent cleared and we'll again choose roll-up and again choose our expenses relation and the property this time is going to be the cleared property so when you're pulling in checkboxes you have the option to show the you can show just like a series of them but what's most useful is to display the percent checked or unchecked so if you think about this in terms of projects and tasks it's wildly useful and we'll see that in a second so here you can see that this roll-up property has calculated the percentage of checked items among the expenses associated with each category so if we mess around with the checked items that percentage is going to change so if instead we were looking at projects here and each project had a series of tests you could see how many tasks have been completed towards that project in order to indicate the progress of that project so that is a really really useful feature of these relations and roll-ups so that is a very simple well I don't want to say very simple because it's not the whole concept is is kind of has a learning curve but probably the simplest way to demonstrate how to use relations and roll-ups and kind of how they can be useful let's look at some kind of more advanced implementations so I'm gonna go back here and just kind of continuing our expenses I've got some populated databases here that um that include a little bit more nuance than our simple examples so we have our expense categories again and we have our in I'm gonna try not to move to do too much scrolling because I know Krause doesn't really keep up but we also have our expenses and all of our expenses so previously we were linking expenses to their categories but we've introduced a whole nother dynamic here and that is vendors so in the previous example we were just typing in the vendor name where we spent the money but if you're tracking expenses you're often going to be reusing vendors frequently and if you're real serious about seeing where your money is going you might want to summarize your spending by vendor in addition to category so what I've done here is added a vendors database so this includes all of the vendors where we're spending our money and this vendor has two relation properties this vendor is related to the categories the expense categories but it's also related to the expenses so if you look at the categories database it's only relation is to the vendors and then the expenses are also related to the vendors it's not directly related to the category so by doing that we have the ability to summarize all of our spending by vendor in the exact same way that we did with our categories but because each vendor is related to a category and what I did is I had to manually populate you know the categories for each vendor but having done that what I can do is I can automatically categorize each individual expense based on the vendor using a roll-up property so I hope that makes sense we manually pick the vendors for each expense we you know this is a relation property and for each one you know we'll click into it and we'll choose the vendor from the vendors database but because there's already a category linked to each vendor we can just use a roll-up property to pull in that category here which once again eliminates redundancy ensures accuracy and creates consistency among all of your information so that is a method of not having to redo your categorization and and then put your make yourself vulnerable to making mistakes so then after doing that we can use another roll-up property within categories still to summarize spending by category so I know that this is if you're me I wouldn't grasp this right here you know in five minutes or whatever but as you work with this and practice it on your own it'll click for you for sure and this gives you the ability and just kind of a few simple streamlined steps to summarize your expenses by category to summarize them by vendor through these relations and roll-ups without having to do a bunch of duplicate work and so this is kind of like a grandparent parent-child relationship if you're thinking about it and that's sort of hierarchy so what I've done here is I've created a database of months and you'll see I thank a lot in Marie's examples and videos and tutorials she creates like days and months or quarters particularly like for okay ours for example you'll create like quarterly items within a quarters database and so here I've assigned a month to each expense we've related the expenses to the months and that allows us not only to determine our total spending by category and vendor but also by month and the reason that this is helpful is because it allows us to use the average feature at the bottom of this database so you can see your average spending per month and again this is ugly formatting so we would use that little formula trip trick to to format that average at the bottom of the month's database and for any you know business owners or self-employed folks you know this is kind of how I track sales per category right so retainer clients one-off clients products that you sell you know just being able to track that stuff really easily on a monthly basis and to look for patterns and oh what months you know do I sell more of this than that it's to you know whether you use it for expenses or for for sales there's just a lot of I think interesting different ways you could apply these principles yeah yeah it can be if you have kind of these periods of reflection built into all of your tracking it can be really really enlightening as as Marie discusses so I mentioned projects and tasks as we were walking through those preliminary examples so I do have some examples of that built out here for us to again not do step by step just to review how it can be useful so actually I have in addition to projects and tasks I also have a client's database and a resources database so if you look at a lot of the methodologies that are recommended by those of us who publish this content about notion you'll see that a lot of these sort of methodologies incorporate some sort of variation of clients or areas as the payara method would call and then projects and then within those projects tasks and then resources for the items and materials that you reference for your projects and tasks so for example I've got this bulletproof methodology on notion VIP that is kind of an adaptation of Paris specifically for notion and then Auguste Bradley who has emerged is just an incredible resource for all things notion has his own sort of adaptation he calls pillars pipelines and vaults but ultimately they all include kind of some sort of variation of an areas database in this case clients and then projects tasks and resources so I have those four databases here we have clients we have projects we have tasks which are the steps towards completing projects and then we have resources so with you can see that our clients have two relation properties they each client is related to projects or maybe in simpler terms each project is mapped to one client and then resource each resource is going to be mapped to a client as well so then it what you can do is just as we did with expenses and our expense categories within clients you have the ability to open the page and see linked filtered views of the projects and resources database so you can see here that this projects database shows only the projects that have been related to this particular client which is blue ribbon restaurants which I miss a lot it's my favorite restaurant family in New York and it's displayed as a board based on kind of where it is in the production cycle so it can be in progress planned or complete and again this is filtered to show only those projects that have been related to this particular client and the same is true for resources we're showing only the resources that are elated to this particular client and again I won't walk through it again but you can create a template that configures these linked databases to include the the new client automatically so you don't have to manually configure that as we were all doing just three weeks ago I think on that note - I know a lot of people sometimes say like oh like it takes so long - like how do people get work done like I've heard that comment but I don't think people maybe understand the full magic of templates like once you set up the template once it's so much faster to spin up those projects but it it does take that upfront work and so yeah I just think people need to take advantage of the templates yeah that's really important to reinforce because I'm actually actively working with a business now helping them to configure their workspace and they're kind of like this is a lot of work they're like there's a lot of time going to this and I have to continuously underscore for them that we're just we're just building the infrastructure for this at this point and once it's in place it's totally streamlined so you know the idea behind the template is that just in a couple of quick clicks you can create a new client that automatically includes these nice filtered views of its associated projects and then so the same is true for a project if we open up a project we can see a nice filtered view of the tasks that are related to that project this one is displayed as a list it shows its deadlines it shows the person that it's assigned to and then it's gotten that checkbox property so this is an instance where it's helpful to use that roll up that pulls in check boxes and calculates the percent completed because if we go back to our projects database we see Blue Ribbon website 2.0 we have 57 point 1 percent of our check boxes of our tasks have been completed so that is kind of a more applicable example of where that check box oriented roll up can be useful so that's it I know it's a lot and again you can you'll have the recording of this webcast as long as as well as that published post on notion VIP to take this kind of one step at a time but I hope that that sort of simpler example that simpler demonstration allowed you to grasp these concepts and then these these kind of more advanced example should you kind of how powerful they can be yeah let us know in the chat I know a lot of folks were I think pretty stoked about the roll ups and understanding how that works so I think there was a lot of clarity there some questions have popped in so why don't we have someone said so the first step might be to create a template yeah if you've got I mean obviously there's some amount of building needed first sort of like just to get those initial templates in place figure out which ones you need but yeah I often will kind of start with the template and that's where I'll do a lot of my practicing if you will because it's a lot easier to start with a template than to move your data and recreate that stuff inside your template so I don't know if you have anything to add there yeah I just in terms of up you know a lot of preparing your notion workspace it's always going to be evolving and refining based on you know new information and new methodologies that you come to understand and updates to you know notion itself but you still kind of want to start with much of a as much of a plan as possible from the beginning so what I do even before creating a template is I'll kind of populate it for a real client or a real area or a real project um so I know exactly what I want that template to include because if you're thinking and hypotheticals it's easy to kind of emulate in but if you build it out for that blue ribbon restaurants client like a you know really include the projects and the resources that you want to associate it and with it and then format it in the way that's going to be most useful then you can easily just pop that over into the template yeah I think that's that's a great point and I think a lot of people want to get their space right when they just start but I always encourage people treat it like a bit of a sandbox you're only going to figure out what you need once you've gotten in there and kind of played with some of that data and figure out what's useful for you and what's useful for one person is overkill for another person so you kind of have to just jump in a little bit and like you said do it with a real project and figure out what you need yeah and that's always the caveat with these webcasts because we have such a you know variation in the in the skill level and the experience of users that for some of you I know that this will be drinking through a firehose and for others it may be slow paced and elementary so the idea here is to offer as much information as possible without making it overwhelming but I do always underscore you know you'll have that recording to reference afterwards because the best way to grasp these concepts is to apply it to your to your real-life workspaces absolutely maybe unrelated is it advisable to create individual databases or multiple databases within a page sorry for the naive question asking since I'm new to notion I mean I'll be interested that's not a naive question that's that's it that's a question that all of us grapple with all the time and there's really just a lot of considerations to make because there are you know my default is to use master databases and then filtered views of it as much as possible but in a lot of circumstances that is not ideal because for example if you're using a template and if you have a template say for a website production project and you know that every website production project is going to include 10 tasks ideally you know you'd want each of your projects to include filtered views of a master tasks database however if you create a template for a website project you're not going to be able to populate that prop that there's new website projects automatically with those 10 tasks and again this is easier demonstrated than explained but if you kind of think through that on your own you'll see how there's there's trade-offs so my Tivo is to use master databases consolidate as much as possible into master databases and then use linked views of it but in a lot of circumstances you're gonna need to break them out into their own individual databases within those pages and that really is a good question and one that we all grapple with pre frequently yeah there's a couple you know like core databases that I sort of think every space sort of needs and like you said there's like the resources the projects what have you and then I I tend to make like contextual dashboards so it'll be like my gardening dashboard that has all of the databases I need inside the one page so that I'm not clicking around me personally I like to minimize the amount that I'm clicking and not and sort of removing myself from seeing all the information in one place but I still think you kind of need those like core master databases that you can pull into your pages so it's it I think the more you use notion the more you can make that does this need to be in a page does it need to be in a database I think when you're playing like how you had your expenses all in one page when you're playing I think it's actually a lot easier to kind of see it all in one pay manipulating the data almost like a sandbox page yeah and one other point about that is you want to consider the end user as well because a lot of these questions that's kind of the foremost consideration is kind of the skill level and the comfort level of the end user so like for Marie and I we might integrate some of these kind of more advanced features because we we're you know we we've built it from scratch we know exactly how it works and how you know when it comes to like repeating tasks and like these different these different functionalities we know exactly what manual steps are involved for updating that data after you complete it or duplicating the task or whatever is involved whereas a lot of the the users that we work with you know they want to as Marie said they have as few steps as possible have to understand it as minimally as possible want it to be in completely intuitive in which case you know that that will inform one decision over the other when it comes to how to separate databases and some of these questions might be repeats we might have covered this because they did pop in earlier but would a rollup be used to gain access would a rollup be used to gain a progress bar one thing I haven't checked out how to do a notion as yet I mean we did kind of talk about progress bar so I think we've sort of already covered that well we we talked about percentages but if speaking of our formulas to a one session we demonstrated very in great detail exactly how to create a visual progress bar so definitely now that you understand roll-ups because we didn't really dive into roll-ups in that session we actually mentioned that we would be covering it another time yeah here we are covering it now you can go back to the to the progress bar episode I think it was formulas 201 and that'll show you exactly how to emerge what we've learned today in roll-ups with the formulas that we used to create those progress bars Ken roll-ups be used in formulas so I'm not sure oh yeah I mean you can reference the value that a rollup creates that is that's exactly what we did when we reformatted to be able to use that currency formatting at the bottom all we did is used a formula to reference that roll-up property and then once we did that we were able to use the currency formatting at the bottom of database so yes you can reference the value that the final value of a roll-up property it can be tricky because if you sometimes with roll-ups you'll just pull in each value and it'll display it as a list which I think technically within a formula is going to translate as a string a text string so you might you know if you have like a list of numbers for example that could get a little confusing for you but the simple answer to your question is yes you can reference the values of a roll-up property within your formulas SJ is asking is it possible could you show us a way of doing a roll up on a rollup I actually don't think you can do a roll up on a roll up can you I actually don't think you can either if you that's a good question and if you if you try to roll up a roll up I think the values are going to be blank I'm not positive but let's explore that together yeah he did they did elaborate I've three relational databases let's say a B and C I have a roll up a into database B but I'm not able to get this roll up into database B as a roll up in a database C and I've done that with formulas to where like I'm pulling in my monthly revenue is is rolling up but I'm actually pulling in the formula which which is giving it the currency like so there are some kind of workarounds like yes and workaround you can't you can't choose a roll up property to roll up within a roll up but what you can do is you can create just like we did for the currencies you can write a formula and all it is is a reference to the roll-up property and then you can roll up that formula which is exactly what murray was saying they will work around but yeah okay so is that's a great question is there a way to give weight to checkboxes for example if you know stage two of four accounts for 50% of the overall work so for example in your check boxes we're kind of treating them as though they're equal of equal importance but they're not necessarily and so I imagine you'd have to give a different property and you'd have to be using an advanced formula to weight the properties differently so it wouldn't be the same way we've done it with the checkboxes well you could yeah it would probably be helpful to separate it into individual properties but you can actually do it all within a formula so natively you're not able to give weight to individual checkboxes but you could use a formula that includes you know like multiplication and add one and then add up the total I'd have to think through it but yeah I mean it's definitely possible with a formula like size property right it could be like what's the appetite of this task or what's the size of this task and you can you know if it's this give it away two for three like you've got kind of yeah yeah and then you would just like add up your Tom your some your waited some yeah so it's it's tricky it's like with anything in oceans sometimes it's like it can't do that natively but you can totally build a thing that does that it just takes a little bit of creative wizardry and understanding how formulas work okay so if you use this method and change something in your notes it will be updated everywhere I think that was related to when you were like changing the name of the category to like you know booed and beverage if you change it there it will update it everywhere that you have referenced that and manages to this is again I get back to kind of like the highest level advantages is to streamline your workspace and that's going to eliminate redundancy it's going to ensure that everything is accurate and consistent because the more manual entry that you're doing the more work you're doing and the more you're setting yourself up to make a mistake as well and then also manual entry is going to eliminate the ability to pull all of your information together and slice it and dice it useful ways as well definitely and one thing I love too is when you @mention a page right so you can like at mention any database entry or any page title and then if you change that page title that actually changes that that reference of it which is kind of nice too okay so a relation basically accesses the property of another database while a rollup lets you access any property within the sub database sort of so yeah really a relation access is the other database the roll-up accesses the properties of those databases hopefully that makes yeah relation a relation access is the item so you can just click on the item and open it as a page and then a rollup yes pulls in the values of other properties for that item random question would you work with clients in your personal notion or make a separate workspace I've heard it both ways I'm pretty sure I have my own opinions on this I'd be happy to hear William your approach oh you've been doing yeah it's it's and that kind of gets back to a bigger point about all of and that is that every notion workspace is the beauty of notion is that it balances in my opinion flexibility with like a minimal design and and it's just the right amount of infrastructure so that you can't like waste your time or go too far down a rabbit hole necessarily but it's also flexible with all of these different features so with that flexibility comes the ability to adapt every workspace to your specific needs so for all of these methods and all of the advice that that we offer none of it is written in stone the idea is just to grasp these kind of core principles and then adapt them to your unique needs so in some cases it's not going to be an issue to merge your personal work with your your client work it will be advantageous to have it all together because I consolidation it's kind of my foremost rule of thumb I love to keep things as consolidated and centralized as possible at the same time I'm pretty crazy about not blending my personal work or my personal life with my with my work life so I keep mine separate but I know Marie and a lot of your examples we're getting a glimpse into to what you're doing with your gardening and everything really it's really specific to the user yeah and when I was first working with clients inside of notion what I would do is I created a client portal that lived inside the project and so I could do what I needed to do inside the project but the client would only see what was inside the client portal and so over time as I kind of figured out the best way to work with clients and invite them in only to key pages I started creating my clients own master test databases master resources etc so initially I was kind of managing the tasks inside my own master tasks database but you cannot share a filtered view of your master tasks databases with other people so I started to create Mike you know little client workspaces inside my projects then as the clients got more comfortable and familiar with notion they were like this tools amazing I want to sign up for my own account and I would actually load those templates and in many cases if the client has given me admin privileges I was able to command shift P literally move all of our work into their workspace in in like one click so there was no rebuilding that needed to happen I was able to move all of that data in and then they had a starting point to work with their own workspace so it kind of depends not all clients are comfortable or have their own notion workspace at the beginning but if you give them a bit of a starting point you can make that a lot easier so I have Quick Links inside my space that kind of take me to those workspaces and I also pull in their master tasks databases from their workspaces into my sort of client tasks dashboards so I can kind of see it in my space but it's not natively in my space if that makes sense so there's ways you can kind of work around like how much you want to keep it in your space versus how much to kind of do externally so it's it is really up to you I think that part partially also depends how many clients are you working with with anyone given time you know how many people do you want to be inviting to your space it can get a little a little dangerous but that's very much personal preference cool that's it for the questions that popped in did anyone else want to ask any questions no no anything else you want to get into me I like relations and roll-ups are definitely one of my favorite features and I know most of my templates rely pretty heavily on them my daily journal is something that when I fill out that journal every single day that gets all of those properties get rolled up into my weekly agenda so I can see what words that I used to describe the day what was my effectiveness what was my happiness what was I grateful for and then I sort of had this like beautiful weekly report that kind of pulls in all that data and I just I really love how easy that is to do can you show the importance of having reflection time whether it's weekly or monthly or quarterly but you know you do all this tracking you want to be sure to give it its due time for kind of analyzing it and see it seeing how it can benefit you I'm gonna do a super super quick screen share back as Maria did just asked and I think the weekly agenda is one of my one of my favorite you cases can you see my screen here I guess I need to focus here you know if you can just say there we go I might zoom in here too just so you can let me know if you can see that okay yep cool so you can see I'm using quite a few roll-ups in my weekly agenda so this is pulling in all of the wind the day tasks from my daily journal the knowledge hub - all of this stuff pulls in from my daily journal effectiveness words that were used so this is for next week for example so let's say if on Monday I say yes I had flow State I won the day I did my win the day task I was anxious proud angry you know feeling romantic today energy level high energy right I just and this takes five minutes to fill in right so people sometimes give me a hard time and they sort of say look how do you get any work done this is a template I've built I've been using it for so long it's really easy for me to do this this is great right and I go through I fill all of this out it's all templated entertainment right there's my Netflix my Netflix category I could add up my expenses for that so when I close that up you'll see that starts to populate up here right so there's the words that I use there's the effectiveness this is great even the sales database is connected up so by the end of the week I've got this beautiful report and then what I do here - is this is my weekly planner but when I switch the week to review that actually shows the picture of the day and so then that becomes a report versus a plan so it's kind of like a nice different view of the same data Colon's pop - I noticed you had a category for recurring tasks and one of your task views like so I know we're like at the hour so I feel like there we might need to kind of defer some of those questions especially as we if the questions are around task management we also we'll send a follow-up survey and in that survey is an opportunity for you to make requests for future topics so whether that's when I come back or when Maria's coordinating her other guests don't don't don't get into too much of a panic if we can't cuz I know this is an ongoing conversation we're always working through you know working with everyone as they're getting a handle on all of this and I think this was like a really great intro session and you know a lot of people have been asking the go I love to see more examples in context and so I think it you know maybe there is a 201 or a next level version of let's let's show some more whether it's project-based sprint planning weekly agenda you know there might be room to just do a bit more of an advanced relations and roll up situation so people can see what it looks like in real workspaces yeah that's perfect I mean that's kind of the approach we took with formulas where we started pretty elementary and then and got into some really specific examples including those this visual progress bar so yeah that'd be a good one yeah great so you know where we're at the our a couple questions have still popped in but we'll I guess what's the best way for people to probably you know reaches out to us on Twitter to suggest any future sessions or ask questions right yeah I mean I'd say the Twitter is a great place to continue the conversation but in that survey III look really closely at the responses to that survey and the recommendations that you make there I actually have another webcast called notion at work it's more like specific to team uses of notion and so the notion team and I maintain a running list of topics that we could never get all the way through we hope your ties them based on how frequently they're recommended in those surveys so so let us know what you want to see in upcoming episodes and then the more the more that we see it's suggested and requested the higher the priority it will be and we'll make it happen but certainly feel free to communicate with us on Twitter and in the interim yeah awesome and again a link to the resources at the bottom here resources from this session to take you to that article that that Williams got on the power of relations and roll-ups there's going to be a recording of this on YouTube you can always come back here to the same URL and watch it here if you want and yeah I think that's it for today but William thank you so much this was such a great introduction I think a lot of people's minds were blown in terms of what they can do with roll-up so well that's good how much information you offer but also like make sure that everyone can still kind of get a grasp but ultimately nothing nothing's more useful than actually getting your hands dirty and applying these concepts to your own information so I encourage you to do that awesome go forth and roll up everybody have a wonderful weekend thanks so much William thank you all bye for now

Channel: Notion

Views: 18,165

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Id: PQjwQPeCyN8

Length: 63min 16sec (3796 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020