THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO OBSIDIAN NOTES | How to Use Obsidian Notes

hi this is jimmy from the productive engineer and today i'm going to be showing you how to use obsidian nodes accenting nodes is a very interesting note-taking application it's based on markdown it leverages things like backlinks and knowledge graphs to create a really compelling and interesting note-taking experience so stay tuned okay let's get started the first thing you need to do is to download obsidian and you can do that at obsidian.md the md stands for markdown once you're at the site as you can see here on my browser you just come here you click get obsidian it is a desktop application there is no mobile application that i'm aware of for obsidian however we'll talk about how you can potentially leverage uh obsidian notes notice that you've created an obsidian on your mobile devices you can do that using other applications that support markdown but we'll talk about that a little bit so first thing you want to do is click on get obsidian it'll download and then you just install it the installation process is pretty simple and then once you've installed it it should look something like this it's a very clean interface it supports both the dark mode and the light mode i'm using dark mode because it's easier on my eyes certainly you can change it into light mode by coming over here down here to the bottom where it says settings go to appearance and as you see here you have a base theme right now it's dark if i change it to light as you can see it'll populate and become light and now this is all light i don't personally don't like the light when i like i like it darker better so i'm going to go back and change it pretty straight forward there's also third-party themes you could community things excuse me that you can install so there's actually a community theme area where you can go and basically click on browse and there's a bunch of different themes here you can sort by your cursing set right now i have dark themes only even though if somebody's look light if i click off here that'll change i'll have more options but for now just choose dark themes only and if i wanted one of these themes i can certainly choose it but i like the default theme i think it's simple but it's clear it's i like the super darkness of the theme so i'll keep that we'll close that out and we'll come back to the bbp the main pane here is again very clean very simple if we start from this is the main window area this is where you'll be editing files creating and editing files you can see here you can create a new file by using the command n or controller on windows command or control o up here in this little tab this is the file explorer tab you can create a new note here by clicking that we'll do that a little bit you can create a folder basically it's using files and folders much like your desktop would use so you could create a folder and then put your files into something i'll just do that here real quick and i'll say uh youtube well i see for youtube and then click do note and say first note and now i have this note if i want to put it in the youtube folder i can just click and drag it and now you can see it's indented underneath this youtube folder i can collapse that i can expand that but that's how you create a note real quick and that's how you create a folder pretty simple if you ever created a folder or a file on a computer it's the same type of function very basic you can also sort you can change the sort order here from a to z z to a or whether your desktop is modified from new to old or old to new as well as create a time new to old or altenew so we'll just do create a time you know old and as you can see it now structures it in order of newest to oldest from when it was created the first tab i really want to show you here is sort of over here on the left hand side this little left hand mini panel you have to open quick switcher the open graph view and open mark that importer so the first thing i'm going to look at is this quick switcher that's really how you open and create file so when you click it brings up this little menu here and it obviously the first thing it's going to show me is my files if i start typing it'll actually narrow down based upon what i'm typing in real time to like the files that i'm using in this case i typed in backlinks and it shows the notes that have backlinks in the title exit it out if i wanted to create a new test doc you see that that doesn't exist so it's gonna tell me no no it's found and but i can hit enter and it'll create it as you can see here so if i hit enter now i have this new test doc i'll put it back in the youtube folder here just to keep it clean and now again we did that sort i can do sort from create time old to new you see the first note was created before that if i change it back it source within the the folder so pretty cool pretty simple now the next one and we're going to cover this a little further later on in the video is the graph view so if i click this all of a sudden you're like oh my goodness what just happened to my window well what happened to your window is now i'm going to assume using just my scroll key on my mouse and scrolling it out on this if this shows all the inner linking between all the notes that i have in my obsidian fault we're going to talk about vaults in a second but this actually just shows you all the notes that i have in this vault that and where they connect so i have it also includes things like i have a tag so if i come in here if i come in here real quick and i put in hashtag tutorial for example if i go back to graph view you should now see as i move this around a little bit the tutorials is now on two notes not just the one that it was on before so that's really cool it basically shows all the inner relationships between your notes and i find this very valuable as you start adding more and more notes what will happen is you'll start to realize that certain notes relate to each other in different ways and you also get to see the structure like you can see here actually have an orphan something that's not connected to anything which is this external links note that's not actually connected editing same thing here at this one whereas other notes like note taking are connected to two different ones so it's a pretty cool way to see how your notes lay out and we'll talk about this in a little while but i just wanted to show it to you real quick it is on the left hand panel and i just wanted to for seeking completeness i wanted to show it to you real quick if you come down here to the bottom panel you can see the open another vault and this is where i want to talk about vault so i'm going to click that real quick and you can see that it brings me up to the screen here and i have the vaults that i have the default help one that shows up by default faulty is actually the the default vault you get to work in and all of vault is think of it as like a master directory where all your files and folders work that are related could go so for example you can see here i have a test vault if i click that in this new window here you see it opened up i have nothing in it but now it's a different vault notice that those files that are over here in vaulty are not in my test vault that's because it's a separate directory think of it that way it's probably the easiest way to think of it a master directory and then if i create folders in here notice that when i create it it doesn't happen over here just happens over here i can say test enter and then i have this and then i put a document here untitled i can call it new new and i can drag it in here just like we did last time but it's a separate vault it's distinct from this and as a result when i click graph view you notice i only have that one little note there so i'm gonna close that out we'll go back into this real quick and as you can see so those are my vaults that i haven't noticed how testament one is here you can also you know you can open a folder as a vault so if you have like a folder of existing markdown files that you want to start using obsidian with you can actually create that as a vault if you have like a master folder that contains all those markdown files you can actually click and open that you can also create a new vault and basically what you do there is just click create and then you come here you give it a vault name so let's say another test fault and then i can come down here to browse and then i can put it here in you know let's just put it on my drobo and hit open and then if i hit create it's going to put a folder basically that's exactly what this is in my drobo on my drobo main directory called another test vault and if i hit that and then come back in here you'll see that another test valve now shows up as a vault option i can also delete it by just clicking clicking the x i can do the same thing here at this other one and now they're gone so very straightforward the other thing here is you have a helpful which basically just contains all the help files for obsidian so why when would i want to use a vault versus segmenting vault so if you have like i call it separation of concerns where like you might have like notes that are dedicated to a specific project or specific aspect of your life that you want to keep separate from other pieces so if you have a side hustle for example you might want to create a separate valve for that if you have a vault that may be using drop down you're having other users be able to access you might want to create a separate vault put that in something like dropbox or icloud or something like that so people can share and use those files or you can use those files on the go whereas other faults you might want to have on your native computer so you only have access to it in which case you'd create that on your local computer you obviously just keep the files there so it's a great deal flexibility there now one thing i will note that you probably just sort of inferred from what i just said is that obsidian is a local desktop type application it's not a cloud-based service so there's no there's no sort of native file ability to share your files in and of itself within obsidian but the way you would do that because it's all marked down files is you would just save that fault in something like dropbox or icloud or you know whatever you're using and then that way you can access those files whether you have a city on a laptop somewhere else you can pull up those files from your laptop when you're because those files are stored in dropbox and they'll sync everywhere or you know icloud or if you're using a mobile device while there's not enough city and application for ios and android you can use other third-party markdown editors to edit those files and the great thing about markdowns you write it in markdown and then you save it to that file you go back get back home or you get back on your main computer and open up obsidian those changes will be in there just fine because you're using an open standard type format so pretty cool now the next thing i want to talk about let's close up the vaults is creating files so let's just create a very simple note let's call this our our first note and as i mentioned earlier obsidian uses markdown for text formatting so as a result you're not going to see like in like microsoft word google docs things like that or another note taking applications like evernote where you have like a toolbar that has like a bold button and an italics button and things like that instead what you're going to use is markdown and markdown is think of it as a syntactic way of defining how you want something to be formatted by using certain symbols so let's say i want to have a heading i can do a heading one by saying pound space and say heading this is my heading heading for example and then here i could come down and say this is a subheading by using two pounds i can do three to make it even smaller this is a sub this is an h we call this an h3 header so if you look in here h1 h2 h3 for example if i want to do an h4 i can just do you get the idea and so that's how you do headings now you say well this looks horrible like i can't see you know what am i not supposed to look like what do i do like well the way i do it the way that most people do is that you render this markdown file and something that can preview it and then obsidian is a native preview or for markdown and all you do is you come over here towards more options ellipse vertical ellipses you click on that and what i what i typically do here is i do split vertically and it actually takes my note and creates a duplicate of it it doesn't really create a duplicate but it's going to be like another view of the same note here and then when you're working on notes there's two modes there's what we call edit mode which is what this mode is where it leaves me typing in whatever i wanted editing the note and as you can see over here there's this little preview button here and i click that it changes to a pencil which means that if i click that when i click it with the pencil it turns it into edit mode if i click it when it's in pre the preview icon it goes to the preview mode as you can see the formatting here is now consistent what you would expect my main heading subheading h3h4 if i come over here and i type in this is of course can help if i use the proper bolded text as you can see you just use two asterisks to indicate both you don't want to do italicized this is one oops text you get the idea so that's how you format your text is actually by doing it as you're typing now this takes something to get used to if you've ever used applications like bear notes you're probably already familiar with markdown but if you're coming in new it takes a little bit to get used to i'll actually put a link in my description for a nice markdown cheat sheet that gives you the basics of what you'll be doing so you can do things like ordered lists by just doing one dot space and then like the first item second item etc and then you want to get out of it you hit enter twice and it breaks it out if you want to do a bulleted list you just hit dash space excuse me and this is sort of what we call unordered list so this is item a let's see and if i want to get out of it enter twice i'm out of that as you can see the dash is here render is bullet points in the in this and the nice thing about this again like i referenced earlier if i decide i don't want to use obsidian anymore i don't have to do any like fancy exporting or anything to get my notes out it's already in an open format and i can use a variety of applications like bear try to think of some other markdown editors there's a variety of them out there that read mark down that you can start using those and pick up without losing anything which is really cool so that's how you do a lot of the basic markdown stuff i'm going to actually switch over here to text editing you can see if i close this out and then i create another split vertical pane and change it to preview you can see that we have way more than i just typed before so you have things like block quotes you have obviously the list you have you can actually put code in so if you want to have code snippets inside your note you can do that and it'll show up as a code block you can put links in so this is probably something you'll be doing a lot right when you take create notes a lot of times you'll be you might want to put a noted a link into something that you have so for example i can sit here and come down here say for awesome tips go to my website and what i can do here is i can just type website for example close that and then create parentheses and then type in my sample and now this you know when you look at the actual text that gets rendered it just looks like a link on the website when i click it it works just like normal because i'll pull it over and it brings me up to my website which you see i already have a beginner's guide to obsidian notes on my website if you haven't checked out my website you should check it out it's awesome and come back here you can also do things like check boxes so you can have like a little tiny to-do list like if you're creating a note it's pretty simple straightforward you just create like so if i wanted to create a new list i could do like close bracket x close space this is a checked box enter as you can see it shows up as a this is a check box if i come down here to the next item you can see it's actually this is unchecked and that's unchecked now one of the cool things is i can come over here and i can uncheck this it unchecks over here i can click here click here click here and then i can just mess around with it so unchecked unchecked i can put it back so these are clickable so obviously if they weren't clickable what would be the point if i just wanted to show that to you you could actually even create tables using this the syntax for creating a table and again i put the cheat sheet in the description so how you do this but you know you actually create tables inside of obsidian notes as well and it and they look pretty good so that's how you do text editing inside of obsidian next i want to show you how to create a note now we already did that before i think let's click new note who closes over here and you can see i can say this is a test note let's say this is test notes okay so it's a very simple note that's one way to create a note but what if i'm writing in a document so let's say instead of testing this is my project page let's say i'm typing in my project like goals of project all right maybe that's you know i'm going to type gym for example actually you know i'm gonna always create that split vertically paste so you can see what i'm doing as i do it and i can come down here for example and let's say i wanted to have a key for example and the first thing i wanted to have it here is a item here that might be timeline project timeline right now i might not have that document created yet and i can either say you know what let me go create that document right now or i can create a placeholder link by hitting the open brace open brace to bring up the the link menu and then i can type in sample project timeline that's how you do basic backlinking internal linking here inside of obsidian notes and then hit enter that document doesn't actually exist if you look over here it's you don't see it in my file folder here and then if i come over here and let's say meeting notes deliverable page just these are just random pages right and as you can see they render as links over here now i'm going to show you something pretty cool if i click the project timeline and it opens a couple things happen that document is not actually a document that link became a document it's still linked here but now it's a document if i come over here you can see perhaps sample project timeline over here if i close out of this and i split this pane again and if we come down here to meeting those notice right now meeting notes is not in here but if i click it oops if i come over here put it preview mode first click meeting notes you'll see that meeting notes is now here as well and i can do the same thing here so i can actually come over here changes and just click this again and then we close these out and then if i want to open up my project page it has my links in here now let's say i don't want a deliverable page on this like i so i don't want a link to it in this this document like maybe i was working in a unrelated document i realized that i might be working this document and i was like you know oh crap i need a note for tracking a course i'm working on so i might say uh web dev of course notes for example create that and quickly go over here and then let's say i was you know doing some more typing blah blah blah blah blah whatever it is and then late once i finish i can come over here just click web develop course you see it opens go back to my project timeline my project page i can remove this link oh i can remove this link and notice it's no longer linked here but my web dev course notes page still exists that's really cool because i find myself using this fairly often because you're in a train of thought right you're writing you're creating you know you're you're maybe working on a course maybe you're writing a document and you realize that you need to create another note to do something later right so rather but you don't want to leave what you're doing but you want to ensure that you create the notes that way when you look at your notes it gets sorted by newest to oldest you can see there's you say oh don't forget to do that i can just create that note create a link to that note excuse me continue working on my existing document then just change over click that and then it creates that document and i can delete that link if i need to so a very quick way of creating documents if you don't actually want to start working on that document but you just want to create a reference point for that so you can go work on it later so very straightforward what are your things you could do we talked about it a little bit earlier i can add tags so let's say i want to create a tag for this that's called you know projects to the key to creating a tag is the pound sign no space very important not to put a space because we put a space it's gonna think it's a heading so if i put space heading one it's a heading and i'll come over here i'll split the page so you can see and turn it to preview you see that it's a heading but if i do this pound and then i do project notice that views it as a project and if i click on project here what it will do is it'll show me it'll bring up the search icon here the search tab excuse me it showed me all the pages that have the tag project in it which is really cool if i came over here and removed it notice that there's no matches found but if i come back in here project now it shows back up so very quick and easy way of doing that and again going back to the knowledge graph if you go back to the knowledge graph now and i close this i'm going to close this real quick so you can see it now you should see project should be on here yeah as a tag it's linked to the project page so let's say i go to i can open this page by just clicking on the node and i can just add project here as a tag go back to the knowledge graphic now there should be two links to the project um yes and you see private timeline and project page now links to the tag project now you say this gets pretty messy pretty quick fortunately i think i learned how to talk fortunately they've created filters so you can come down here to filters i have files that are orphans right where they can just external link one it's not linked to anything so if i don't want to see the orphans i can just turn that off you can see it disappeared same thing with tags i just want to see my pages relationships and not necessarily my tag relationships i can turn that off as well by clicking this here and that makes that disappear as well and i find myself using that a lot if i just want to if i have something very specific i want to look at so i can pull these things around move them around you can actually move them you can actually also come here to display you can put arrows so let's say you want to see like the relationship of the relationship so what it'll do it's hard to see here but you can see like the little arrow heads here i'll zoom in a little bit so you can see it and you can do things like node size you can make the circles bigger by just increasing them or pulling down a slider here you guys need to link thickness so if you're having trouble seeing the links you can make them thicker and that should actually help with the arrow as well and it checks paint threshold it makes it brighter or darker so let's leave it normal and then you have forces which shows you like sort of how the notes relate to each other so i can do the center force and move them separate away pull and tighter the repel forces so how each node's gonna repel from each other link force they can move that as well you can kind of see that one's not really doing as much i'm not sure what that was to be honest with you in the length distance i could move how far the legs are between the things or tighten them up real tight if i'm struggling for space so very cool you can really customize the way this looks and that's how you use graph view okay so now i'm back in my sample timeline page let's say i want to add a backlink to my project page so when i'm working here i have a quick link that can sort of relate it back to the master project page so what i could do here is just hit that double open bracket and type in project until i get the project page and then click that and i'll see a link to the project page if i come over here again split vertically actually i'll spread this one horizontally just to show you what that looks like so you can split it horizontally while if you're more of a top down person rather than left right person i work left to right because that's the way we read and that's sort of the way i work but you can make a top down as well where you can have you know what you're typing in here in the preview on the bottom here i'll just do that real quick and you can see i have my preview here if i come in here and say um you can create a heading here that says uh random heading i'm really not feeling creative you can see that that types in as an h1 as an example that i have a backlink here you should now see that sample of project timeline has a backlink to bi-directionally because there's a you see that now the arrows are both pointed both ways that means that project page has a backlink to sample project timeline and sample project timeline has a backlink to project page so that shows the relationship here versus here like backlinks have has a mexican website has a link to on that page to testing text editing obsidian but text this page doesn't have a link back to this so it's a one-way link this is a link for going from here to here but there's not a link going from here to here whereas in this scenario because i set up the link i have a bi-directional link i have a link i get a project page going to here to the timeline and have link on the side of my page go back to the project page so you can get very creative in it and the great thing about this is if i could pull this down a little bit i'll close this off close this you can see here and i make this a little bigger and pull it up you can see that these bi-directional links in these links all these are shown um so you can see like right now everything's separate if i were to create you know these these are files that are linked so like this this importing audio and video has a link to a mp4 file and i'm going to show you how to import those in a minute this is a an image it probably should give it a better name but this important image has a link to an image so if i go back to graph view you can see that to my image here and say to here have a pdf here a ps page that has a link to a pdf so the thing i like about graphview is it really kind of ties everything together it makes it easier for me to see how my notes relate to each other and you know sort of the pockets of information that i've learned the last thing i want to cover today is how to import files into a note in obsidian so i'm going to start with an image of my dog here uh that's moose he's the best dog in the world totally unbiased opinion and let's say i want to add it to this note so let's say this is an image of my dog and i want to put it like right there i just click and drag that image right onto it it'll create a link to that image in my document and you also notice that over here it adds that file it's a c1 file here this one right here to my note now you say well that's not what i want to see i don't want to see a link i want to see the picture fair enough so what we do is here we go here we can do a split vertical and then just change it to preview and you can see there's a picture of my lovely dog there let's say i wanted to add a a video i could come over here to my video file let's just help somebody click and just drag that in and there it is and you see the picture of me looking a little disheveled um during one of the intros of one of my video earlier videos and i have a link right there and notice as we saw earlier that image sorry that video file is now added to my folder here in in to my vault here excuse me in uh obsidian lastly let's say i wanted to add a pdf so i have a pdf here that walks down reference i was referring to earlier i could just click and drag that in now notice this is a little different it's not quite what you probably expected when i drank today you probably weren't expecting to see some sort of window with the actual pdf in it you actually see the content it's kind of like what you see when you do drag it into notion or if you drag it into evernote for example right you see the actual pdf instead what you do is you get a reference to the title of the document and you get a open and default app icon here so i'm going to click that just to show you what it looks like and it launches preview on the mac here or whatever application you have that is the default handler for pdf files and as you can see it has it opens my document so that is a little different than some of the other applications out there like no if this was notion and i dragged that in what would happen it embedded that pdf it would actually show me a window with the preview of of the document i've got to scroll through it same thing with evernote but in this case it's a little different because it's using markdown there's no real built-in mechanism for that in in obsidian so as a result it's just going to give you a little button here that you can click to open it up in in the app it just attaches the file it's literally just attaching the file it's not has doesn't have any context for it so that's how you attach files to obsidian notes to no set of cydia notes i hope this video was helpful to you if you like this video please click the like button it really helps my channel out it really lets youtube know that this video is worth watching if you want to see more of my videos click the subscribe button i do tutorials on a variety of apps like obsidian notion evernote the google docs suite todoist etc and if you're looking to use any of these applications you should check my channel out because i probably have a video on how to do the thing you're looking for if not i'm probably actively working on it and lastly if you want to be reminded of when i release new videos please click the bell thanks

Channel: The Productive Engineer

Views: 84,367

Keywords: obsidian app, obsidian notes, how to use obsidian note taking app, obsidian for beginners, obsidian app notes, how to use obsidian app, roam research, obsidian app features, obsidian linking your thinking, obsidian app for students, note-taking app obsidian, obsidian note taking, obsidian markdown, obsidian app notes tutorial, how to organize notes in obsidian

Id: 47hOfPGsrqk

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021