Beginner Crash Course to Master Notion 2023

1. Welcome! Let me show you what you will learn in this Notion Course: Hello and welcome to the Notion all on one master class. I'm super happy to have you here because we have a course packed full of information to do anything possible. Turning you from a notion beginner into a notion masser. My name is Fred and I'm a notion trainer since a couple of years and I've released more than 30 different notion templates. Many of them were recognized by the notion official template gallery. And with that experience, I want to give you the best possible notion. Quick start guide. First things first, let's talk about notion and how it revolutionized the productivity landscape. And for that, I want you to understand, read general categories of applications. Number one is traditional coding. Traditional coding, you might know, for example, programming languages like HTML or Python. Which means you can design your very own application and it will do exactly what you need. It comes, however, with the downside that you either need to know a program language, it will take a lot of time to design the application that you need, or you will need to hire someone who is able to do that for you. Typically, this is nothing to really start off casually with more, something for large scale corporations, something that requires less resources is low code. Examples for low code applications are out system, Salesforce and SAP. You can start with them out of the box, but usually they would come with a consulting services consulting agreement, which means they will adapt the solution for you. It requires not really deprogramming skills, but you still need someone or you need the expertise to adapt the tool to your personal needs. And the last category, which is where notion fits into, is no code. Nodes, as the name suggests, means you do not need any line of code to operationalize your processes in a tool. Typical examples are Asana, Mandate.com and of course Notion, which is what we are going to talk about. These are very flexible. They come out of the box as a fully operational tool. You can build them as you go. And building means really like a Lego system. Lego bricks where you have different modules that you assemble and adjust to your needs. And whenever you feel now that doesn't fit quite well, you just reassemble your complete system as you need. The pro side is no code doesn't require any upfront cost. They are typically very cheap. But of course you need to go with what the programmers give you. Notion is a very versatile tool but still of course limited to what is possible in the tool, if that makes sense. So in a nutshell, notion is a comprehensive productivity and collaboration platform that allows you to take notes, organize information projects or tasks. And also to foster team collaboration, which is particularly of interest. If, for example, you're working with a lot of clients or a larger team, or different suppliers and you need to have a way to work asynchronous on a project. So that means across different time zones or different locations. So this is where you would want to look into notion because it really is a system that structures information. So you put in a lot of information, you can structure it in notion and as an output, you structure them into project, into a Kisor knowledge data bank or in a process, making sure that information that you repetitively need or that a larger audience need access to is organized in a central system. Whenever you think about notion, I want you to think of a tool where you can create your very own system. You can either create your very own website, a wiki, which is what I talked about or referred to when I said this is a data repository, a customer relations management system, an enterprise resource planning system, budget plan, goal plan database. So as you can see, there are dozens of different use cases. And for sure you will have your very own or you will identify your very own. You can use Notion as an individual contributor for your personal hobby or personal life organization or as a large corporation organizing information. And that's the beauty of it. Now, with all these functions and options in mind, how will I turn you in it to a true notion, master? We will do that in this course step by step and bit for bit. In part number one of this course, I will teach you all the functions, all the basic functionalities of notion. I want you to know notion in and out part two. We take this a bit further and talk about customization. In this module, we will talk about formulas for example. And in Partnerber three, which is my personal favorite, we talk about practical applications. So I will show you real life examples, for example Mclein's or my very own consulting work where I'm using notion to manage and organize information projects and tasks. Keep an eye particular on this partnerer three because it will grow over time as I'm adding the cases frequently and also offer you free templates for that. That being said, pack your bags. Your journey starts right now. Whenever you have a question, feel free to reach out to me. In the next module, I will show you how you can interact with me And with that in mind, I wish you pleasant experience. I wish you lots of success and enjoy the process. Cheers. 2. Create your Notion Account and select the right subscription!: Hello. Hello and welcome back to this course. In today's, in today's lecture, we are going to talk about not account creation. In this module we will talk about how to create an account with notion as a foundation. We are also talking about the different pricing options in so that you understand which account to choose from. For that, we will start on the Notion website. Let's jump over, here we are on the Notion website, you will find it under notion dot product or simply notion dots. On the notion website, you will find all the information around notion. But we want to first understand which account to choose from. We have three different options. One of it is three, the other one a page options. The good news here is 90% of what you can do notion is free. This is also why love Notion. If we score down, you will see the comparison between those plans as you can see. As you can see, notion free is recommended for individual contributors. As soon as you're working with a team, I would recommend to go with a plus or business option Y. Because you're unlimited for individuals, but you have limited block trial for you have a limited block trial for two plus members. What does that mean? What does that mean? As soon as you're going to share your work, which is obviously what you want to do when you're using not with more than two persons, then you will be very quickly limited in terms of the amount of pages that you can share with others. In a nutshell, if you want to go and try out notion as a team, then I would go with a plus or business option. If you're using notion for yourself to start off with, then you can definitely use the free option. Another limitation is the file uploads. The free version, you can upload up to 5 megabytes. That's perfectly suitable for documents and small attachments, but of course doesn't work if you're uploading tons of gigabytes of data, like video files or anything else. This might be the other point where you want to choose the plus version over the free version. The page history, like the audit history, the audit, all the changes that were made to the page can be viewed seven days in the free version versus 30 days in the plus version and 90 days in the business version. If you're using it just for yourself, then seven days might be more than perfect. If you're using it in a team where multiple people are working on the same page and things might be deleted accidentally, then you would want to definitely look at the 30 or 90 days option page analytics. Again, something that is not such, again, something that's not of huge relevance. Or if you're using notion just for yourself. If you're using it as a wider team, then you might want to know how much access and traffic you have on your individual pages to optimize those that have exceptionally huge traffic or your users. Apart from that you will find a limit in. Apart from that you will find a limit on the free version. When it comes to site domains, you can use Notion as a website. You might want to look into custom domains if you're using it as corporation or as a wider team. If you're just using it for yourself, then you will be perfectly fine with the notion domain. Other things that differentiate the versions are team spaces, so you can create private spaces that are not shared with everyone in the business and enterprise version, which you can do in the free and plus version. We'll come to that when we talk about permissions and also automation. Notion offers in house automations on databases means you can set up routines and processes in Notion directly. In the free version you're a bit limited on that account. We will talk about this when we talk about automations in general. This will visualize what we're talking about. We have another slide limitation in the free version when we talk about sync databases. Databases means that you're administrating just one database, but it will be updated in various other databases as well. So we can and connect data bases with each other where you're limited on the free version to only one database and unlimited in the and business version of not everything else doesn't play too much of a role. If you ask me something else that you might want to be aware of is the admin and security part. When you go for the enterprise version, of course you can integrate notion into your corporate security landscape. That means security settings such as single sign on and much more is possible in the enterprise version. But this is really just relevant if you're working in large scale corporation. Last but not least, you have, of course, priority support if you're on a paid plan. As you're on a free plan. To summarize, in 9% of the cases, the free version is more than good enough because you can start off with all the functions and you can expand as you go. Usually if you're on a small team or just want to opt into notion to see if that's a viable solution for a team. Again, the free version might be completely enough. I would recommend anyone, I would recommend, in general, everyone to go and start with a free version as you can upgrade later on if you find the limitations on the free plan limiting for your need. As we have discovered the different plans and decided to go for the free plan, let's log in or create an account respectively. In order to get an account we click on Get notion free. This will populate our login screen. We can sign up with our work email address with a general e mail address. We can also sign up with a Google account or an Apple account. Once I added my e mail address, I will click Continue with Email, and I will get a temporary login code in my inbox, which I then can start off and log in to. I will paste the login code here and then click on Continue With Login Code. I would continue pasting my work email address here and click on Continue With Email. I will get a temporary login code where, which I can retrieve from my e mail inbox. And I would paste the login code here and click on Continue with login Code. After having clicked on Create an account, I can add a photo if I want to. I can add my name and set a password. Afterwards, I can decide whether I agree to Notion sending me marketing communications about Notion to my email inbox if I do not want to. After that I can either add a photo, give me a name like my username, and I can select a password. I can make a decision on whether I agree to Notion sending me marketing communications about Notion or not. Then I can click Continue. Afterwards, I can decide on whether I want to use notion for my team, personal use, or for school. I will select personal, click continue. That's it. Now I'm a notion and this is my start screen for notion. In this lecture, you learn about which account might be usable. In this lecture, you learn about which account plan is the best choice to start off with. And you learned also how to set up your account appropriately. 3. Quickstart guide - learn the Notion essentials in 180 seconds: Welcome back to this course. In this lecture, I'm going to give you a very high level quick start guide, which is by no means a replacement of any function that we are going to dive deeper on later stage. This is purely tended If you're short on time, time is a constraint and you want to kick things off right now. So let's jump into it. This is our welcome screen after we have created our workspace. Means our account with no ship core thing here is to remember that notion isn't too different to any other text processing program that you might be aware of from all day life like Word. The core feature or the primary purpose of notion is of course to record and share information. I text information, we start a new line by clicking anywhere into the document. And then we start writing what we need to write. We add a space or go into the next line by pressing answer. Hence, we are in the next line. And that's it. Of course, you don't want to have all plain text. You also want to format your text. And this can be done by simply highlighting the text. And then a new context menu opens up in the context menu. You can do everything that you can also do inside Word. For example, adding bold, italic, or underlining format. You can change the text size by clicking on text. There you will have different text styles like a heading text, you can change it to the bullet list or to do list whatever is required right now. Next thing to remember if you're short on time is that you can add different elements to your document. An element or called block in notion is anything beyond text. Let's open up the Context menu to see what I mean. I go into the next line and open the Context menu by adding the command. Here you will find all the basic and advanced blocks that you have available in notion elements that you can add. You can add, for example, again list a table, a heading, a numbered list. Just go through the entire list of things that you can add. And of course you can add media files as well. Now if you're not too certain or don't want to scroll all the way down, you can also simply search for the element that you want to add. For example, if I want to add an image, I simply enter Image and it's auto populating me the suggestion image. Now I click on Image and it is asking me whether I want to add a stock photo, whether I want to add a link from another webpage, or whether I want to upload my very own bi. Just remember maximum file size in the free plant is five megabyte. Next thing to remember is that on the left hand side we have our navigation menu. In the navigation menu we find our search. We'll find all the notifications if anyone is pinging us inside Notion and waiting for an edit. For example, we'll find our settings where we can also change notion from light to dark mode. Again, I will show you more in detail later on and you will find the hierarchy of all your documents. Now in ocean you have documents, but these documents can also be file drives. Imagine you pair word with the Explorer. If you want to change the location of a document, you simply can drag and drop it into another document. In that very moment, you see quick note appeared here. That means quick node now lives on the Getting Started page. If you want to see all the pages that are on another page, then simply click on this toggle and you find all the documents that live on this specific page. If you accidentally deleted a web page and you want to recover it, just go to trash there, you will find all the deleted pages from the past seven days. On the right hand side, you have the sharing capability of notion. If you click on Share, you can either invite someone with an e mail address to give exclusive access to your document, or alternatively, you can publish your page to the web. That means everyone with this link has now unlimited access to your web page. You can limit access by using one of these toggles, but unless I unpublish my web page, it is visible to anyone with the link. So be careful if you have confidential information on your web page, that's it for the moment. As promised, rest assured we will go through each of these settings individually, step by step, so not missing out on anything that I've showed right now. So stay tuned and I'll see you in the next lecture. 4. Where is what in Notion? Navigate with confidence: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we're going to talk about navigation and the notion user interface. Why is that relevant? Well, for first time users, it might be a bit overwhelming to see the notion interface and to understand how it works. Let's jump over into notion. Here we are, back into our newly created workspace. First things first notion is organized in so called pages. Pages are actually documents. Documents in turn are similar to files in Word. Just imagine every page is equal to document equal to file. The main difference between word and notion though, is you do not have to save any of your work. Because as long as you're online, all the files are automatically saved. Which is great because as long as you're online, you cannot lose any information. This is the main section in which we are going to type out information or reading information. Now on the left hand side, you will find the navigation bar. In the navigation bar, you will find all the different settings, documents and connected apps. Starting out with the pages, I told you every page is equal to document and every document is equal to file. More or less, put things simple, so that means you will see all of your documents on the left hand side. Every page here is a document. The big difference now to word is that you can combine documents into each other. You can build a registry of multiple documents. Just imagine, I want to have a high level document which is the man hub. In the information hub, I want to have all the other links to the other documents and I can simply drag and drop the other pages into my notion hub. What has happened? As you can see, we have arranged all the documents under our central document hub. This way we also created links in our main document. We have moved the location of these pages into the central page. This way we can organize links and information, cluster them like topics or chapters, which makes it easier for users to interact with the information. Of course, you can consolidate the page content by clicking on this arrow and you can unfold it again by again pressing on the error. This way you can always easily identify which pages are stored on your main hub page. What else can we do on this navigation bar? Well, first of all, we see our account name. We can identify if we are, for example, in our own workspace or in someone else's workspace. Here you would see other workspaces. Next up, we have the search bar. The search bar searches through everything in notion, but not only the pages, the page content, but also the meta data. For example, if you're looking for something that was created at a specific point in time, like a date that is located somewhere specific, or you might not remember any of the media data, you just remember who created the page. You can search for all of that inside your workspace, that's super handy, and you can turn on all the filters in here, or you simply add your search into the search bar. Next up you have an inbox notion is quite a collaborative tool. That means it's intended to work with others, with team members, clients, suppliers, whoever on your workspace. That means you can split up parts of your work where others can comment or add information. In some occasions you would like to get a notification on the work others have done, so you're not missing out on information whenever someone is working on one of your pages, pages that you own or that you have created, or if someone is tagging you in a page, and I will show you later on how to do that, you will be notified in your inbox, so all the notifications will be centrally stored here. Next up, you have the setting page. On the settings page, you have a multitude of different options to choose from to customize your account. We'll go through each of the settings in a later video. Just remember, this is the central place to administrate members of your account, guests on your account. The appearance of not notification, settings, billing, everything that's related to your account. You will find here. Next up you can also create a new page. This is a dedicated button for it to create a new page. If I do that, it will create an untitled page and a pop up field. But I can also enlarge it to full screen. Let's go full screen. I just call it test. As you can see, it created a new page. We can also add a page down here as a separate option. Next up, you will find the Notion Calendar. The Notion Calendar is a central calendar to manage all of your deadlines and dates that you have stored inside your notion. We will go over the notion calendar, more detailed in a separate lecture. Below that you can create a team space. Team space is a dedicated area where you can invite parts of your team or your entire team into it. The pages in the team space are available to the members only. That means you can have in your workspace 100 members, but invite into your team space five members only. Below that, you will find templates as it's sometimes very daunting to create a whole new notion page on your own, you will find hundreds of templates to choose from various different use cases. Again, templates is an own story, which we're going to talk about in a later video. You also have an import function which is here. The import function helps you to migrate your data from other databases or documents into Notion. And finally, we have the trash. The trash is maybe the single most important feature in notion because in particular, if you collaborate with several other people, it might happen that either intentionally or unintentionally, data gets lost. The trash is where you want to check if you miss out. On a page on the right hand side, you will find sharing settings. Every page in notion can be shared. These permissions are on a page level. That means you're not going to share your entire workspace. If you share a page, you have two options here to choose from. You can invite people or you can share entire link. Again, this is a feature that we're going to talk about in a later video. Next up, you will find the common section. Here you will find all the information or comments that others have done on your page. You will also find an update section. Here you find all the trailing updates for the past seven days. If you're on the free version, if you have upgrade to other versions, it might be 30 or even 90 days of history that you can see. You can favorite a page, for example. If it's a central element of your work, you need to view it on a daily basis. Then you can kind of bookmark or favor this page with the star on the very right. You will have style export and more. Here you can adjust for yourself how you would like notion to appear. For example, you can change the font. The text can decide whether you want to use a full width of the page. You can lock a page for edits, you can turn it into a Wiki duplicate, delete a lot of customizations that you can add to a page. Also, you can add connections. Connections are external applications to which you can link your page to. Again, all of these will be subject to a later video. In this lecture, we have discovered the most essential features of notion, the core structure of the user interface. In the next lectures, we're going to dive deeper on each of these sections. 5. What is a Notion block?: Welcome back. In this lecture, we're going to talk about notion blocks. Why they here, how to use them, how to transform them. Let's kick things off. When you start using notion, you might encounter the term blocks and wonder, why do you need to care? Well, because notion is organized in blocks. A block is nothing else but an element on a page. Imagine a word document where you got a heading, where you got an image, where you got text. All of these are blocks in notion. If you look at this image, you can see that the heading, the text, the video embed, as well as the database is a block. Everything is a block. And you can compare a block a bit like a set of Lego bricks. You assemble the Lego bricks as you wish to create the sculpture that you want. Once you feel, no, I don't want to have it like this anymore, I want to rebuild it, You just rebuild it? Similar concept applies to not. If you say I want this heading to go here, you just do that. If you think this notion heading should go here, you simply do that by drinking and dropping it around. Same with images. This is one of the key features in notion versus other tools like Microsoft Word, in my opinion. Because if you ever tried to move an image around in a Word document, you might mess up with the Ormat, which isn't the case with n. That's a big perk in my opinion. Let's jump over into notion and explore the first set of basic blocks in my Notion workspace. I'm going to create a new page by clicking on you page. I will give it a title saying Basic blocks. I press Enter to jump into the first row. Now I'm presented with an empty page and I want to fill it with information. But I want to not only add text, I also want to add a heading first. How do I do that? By opening up the block menu with a command. By doing that, a context menu is opening up. It's offering me all the basic blocks that I can leverage in Notion. First basic block is text. Let's add. You see nothing has changed because the default block that you're adding in notion is the text block. A text block works like this. You start simply writing down what you need to. You go into new line by pressing Enter and you go into next line, and so on and so forth. Now as you can see, if I'm hovering over the lines, you see I have this drag and drop. I can hear that means I can drag and drop around this line of text to the position that I want to. It's either at the end of the document, right in the middle, or even next to it. So I'm creating two columns of text so to speak. But going back to the text, I can either just move one line around or I can mark multiple lines and move them all around at once. It's that simple. Instead of marking everything, copy and pasting around to change the position of text, you simply drag and drop it. That's the beauty of notion. Next I want is potentially a heading. And if I scroll down, you see I'm now jumping over two other basic blocks. But no worries. We're going to talk about all basic blocks. I just want to make sense of them and cluster them together so that we talk about them in the appropriate amount of detail and time. If I want to give my text a heading, I can do that by clicking on heading one heading, one is formatting it according to a heading. And I say, for example, this is the introduction. Again, I will move it around by simply pushing it to the beginning. Then I might add additional texts, and I want to give it another heading, one saying this is chapter one. Now I might want to structure my text a bit more because I might have not only heading one type of sections, I might also want to go into more detail. Let's say I have additional material to chapter one and I want to cluster it as Chapter 1.1 or one. I select heading number two, I will name it Chapter 1.1 If I have no multiple lines of text and I need to scroll a lot, I want to find an easier way to navigate through my text. Obviously, what I can do then is I add another line of text, go to the command, and scroll down to advanced blocks. Advanced blocks is nothing we are going to talk about too much. Right now is just one thing I want to show you out of the advanced blocks, which is the table of contents. As you can see, it has created a table of contents based on the hierarchy of headings that we have chosen. As you can see, my both heading one style headings are in the hierarchy. One of the first, Chapter 1.1 which is heading two, is dented into heading one. I could also add a heading three. Let's say this is Chapter 111. As you can see, it has created this hierarchical structure. And I can of course add even more text if I want. I can add a divider simply to visually divide sections by each other. That's a nice thing to style your page if you want. That's of course not necessary. It doesn't have any impact on other formatting settings. It's just a styling element. If you want to also this divider, I can move around by dragging and dropping. Now, what if I want to change the look and feel of a text and want to turn it into, for example, a heading? This is also super easy. I'm just highlighting the respective text passage. Click on this, pop a menu where it says text and select the respective block I wanted to turn in. Let's say I want to turn it into heading two. I just do that by clicking on heading two. And this way it transforms to heading two. If I want to transform it back to a text again, I will simply highlight the text. Go on the pop up menu and select text. This way it's formatted back to text. As you can see, the concept of basic blocks makes sense. It's super easy and convenient to move things around, to convert them into other blocks, and to structure information. The key thing to remember here is that everything is oranized in blocks. Formatting isn't really an issue, nothing to really worry about. You can rearrange your blocks whenever you want to stay tuned for the next lectures where you're going to talk about more basic blocks. 6. Create simple lists and toggles in Notion: Hello and welcome back to the course. In this lecture, we're going to talk about more basic blocks in notion. Where we're going to build up on the last video where we talked about how to create basic blocks and what the concept of blocks in notion is about. So let's jump over into Notion and we are back into our basic block age. As mentioned, this lecture will be all things lists in notion. And the beauty in notion apart from the basic block methodology and concept is also to create visually appealing lists and structure data. That's really a powerful perk that we got with notion. In this lecture, I'm going to show you how by pressing the command, we open up our context menu of basic blocks. As you can see, we have plenty of choices to choose from. When we talk about lists, we have to do list, a bullet list, a numbered list, and a toggle list. Let's kick things off with the to do list. Let's imagine you want to collect tasks. You can of course, do that with bullets, but why not using a checkbox style of structuring information? So let's say you have a to do list. It can also be a shopping list. I want to style that as a heading. Let's say this is a heading one, By adding it to do list, we can simply put all of our tasks into the list and go to the next line and it will auto populate the next check box. Let's say we need to buy groceries, update computer, clean the house. As you can see with every enter I'm pressing a new line appears and a new check box appears. If I want to delete the last check box, I simply go on the delete button and maybe one more to go back to the previous line. If I have completed my task, I simply can click in the checkbox and you can see it's graded out. We checked the checkbox and it as also a strike through format to our list. We can continue doing that until we are at the very end and our to do list is over. Now I can of course uncheck if these are reoccurring tasks or I delete my to do list. But this is of course not the only form of creating lists in notion, let's continue with a bullet list. For that I will create another heading and I will call it bullet list Again, I will open up the context menu with the command and I will go onto Bulleted list. With bulleted list we get a bullet point. And I will note down what I have to, let's say groceries, update, clean, whatever it is. It's the same methodology as a to do list. When I press Enter, I go to the next line and it's adding automatically a bullet list. But choosing a bullet list from the context menu isn't the only way to create a bullet list. I can, of course, also simply use my keyboard. By pressing this bullet line and followed by a space, I will create a bullet list. What else I can do with a bullet list? I can format it onto different hierarchies. If I press Tab on my keyboard, then it will indent my bullet list. I can create a structure. I can do that twice or three times. Can even do it a fourth time, even a fifth time. I can continue as long as I want to create a hierarchy of information which helps me to structure the information as we go. Next list is the numbered list. Numbered list is, as the name suggests, a list that instead of adding bullets, it will add numbers if you want to visually show the prioritization of tasks. For example, then you can add these numbers. You can start writing information down again. Pressing Enter jumps to the next row, giving you the next higher number. You continue until the infinite. I will also give it a heading just to stay consistent. We'll call it numbered list again. We also have an alternate way to create a numbered list by simply adding a number manually, for example, one dot and then pressing space, and you create a numbered list by that. Also, here you can create a more structured list by simply pressing tab on your keyboard, it's indenting your list, and you create a more structured hierarchical numbered list. Last but not least, we talk about the toggle list. A toggle list is a great way to show more or less information at the user's pace. You can make a decision on what's the most relevant information and the user, reader, consumer of your document, can then themselves decide on whether they need more information. This will make sense in a second. If I show you how to do that, let's select Tolist. Let's say we want to provide information on opening hours. We call it opening hours. What I can do now is to unto the list and add additional information. Let's say set. It's nine to 12. It's ten to 11. Only what I can do now is I can consolidate the information behind this. Till this way someone who's visiting my page will only see opening hours. They can decide on whether they need more information, they want to dive deeper on that information or not. This way you can, for example, arrange links, additional information, whatever you feel this is good to have on my page, but way it's not the most important information at this given point in time. It's a great way to style your page to hide information. Provide a gated mechanism based on which the user reads through your page as you want them to. In this lecture, we talked about list blocks in notion. We talked about how you create them, how you style them, and how you arrange information in a structured way. Stay tuned for the next blocks in the next lecture. Cheers. 7. When and how to use a Notion table: Welcome back to this course. In this lecture we are going to talk about all things, notion tables. If you like to structure information into grid view, then stay tuned because in this lecture we're going to talk about how to create and edit a table. I will also give you a guideline as to when it makes sense to use a table versus, for example, a database which will be subject to another video later on. So let's jump over into notion We are back to our notion workspace. And I created already a headline that's called table. And in order to create a table, guess what we need, of course, our command. So we scroll down to tables. As you can see, it creates a default table with a two by three grid. Let's imagine we want to create a customer friendly way to communicate our opening hours of our shop. A table is the favorable solution. I would say we start off with the days in one column and the hours in the other column. It might be that we have opening hours, Then on fright set, then we might want to add Sunday as well. But we reached the limit of our table. What do we do now? We hover with our mouse to the end of the table. You can see a plus button will appear. And we either can just press once we add another line, and we can repeat that as much as we want to, or if we need to add multiple lines at once. Then we hover again over the plus press and hold our left mouse and scroll all the way down. We just move our way down towards the grid view that we find acceptable. In this case, I go back because I just need one more line. Same applies to the columns. If I go to the right hand side, I either can just press one the button, so it's adding another column. Or I press and hold this button and I just pull it to the right. I can just the width of the page. If I want to do both at once, like adding columns and lines, then I have this plus button in the corner down here. I hope that you can see that I press and hold it. And this way I can play around with width in the length of my table. As much as I want to, I complete my table and I will add some. Now I want to add the hours. Let's imagine Monday to Thursday we have 1014. Then on Friday it might be longer, 14 to 15. And on Sundays, very short until 11. What is missing? Now we have of course, headlines in our table, and we want to give it a more visually appealing structure. How do we do that? We go on the options and we say we have a hetero. What happens now when we add a hero with a header? We have a grayish background and we have made the text bolt, which helps to distinguish between the information of the headline and the actual table content. The same works also with the first row. Let's say the first row is also a headline. Then we go onto the option and say we have a header column, which doesn't make sense right now, but just that you get an idea of how that works, what else can we do with our table? Now we can say that this table in this size is completely appropriate because it's just small amount of information. We do not need the full width of the page, but what if we want to use it for the full width of the page? That isn't a problem either. We go back into our table and click in one of the cells so that our menu is appearing. As you can see, we have these two arrows which go into different directions where we can select to fit the table to the page with, let's do it. Click on that, and as you can see, it's now filling the entire width of the page. We have it as a dedicated spot, so it takes up the entire width of the line in our document. If you want to delete or move around our table, then we either can simply click again into our table and click on the three dots where we can delete or duplicate our table. We can also copy the link to this block. That way if someone is clicking on this link or entering this link into their URL, then they will be directed to this table. Otherwise, we can also move the table around. As every block we can drag and drop it to the appropriate place where we want it to be. On the menu. On the left hand menu, we can also delete, duplicate, literally anything that we also have in the other menu. It's just a replication. We can also met specific lines or columns. Let's say I want the first line to be formatted into specific color. Then I click on this pop up menu on the left hand side, which is this one. In there, I can select a color text color. Let's say it should be orange. We can also select a background color, maybe red. If we want to highlight that information, we can do the very same for the column as well. We can decide on a color or a text color. As you can see, it's overriding the format that we previously selected. Else we can also add additional lines or columns. If we click on Insert Above or Insert Below, then we can directly create a new line. Same also works on the column side. We can insert left. This way we add another column to our table. Apart from that, we can also clear the entire content from our line. So if I do that, you see it's now empty. And if we say we don't need the entire line. So we not only want to delete the content, we also want to delete the line itself. Then we click on Delete. This way you can organize and structure a table as you want. As promised, I also wanted to give you an impression on when it makes sense to use a table versus when it makes sense to use the database. In notion, it makes sense to use a table for any information that is more considered to be static or temporary. So that means information that is not regularly updating or changing. And also data which you do not need to filter a lot for it makes sense to have a table that is pretty static and simple, which you do not really need to work with. For example, a timetable opening hours. Anything related to that makes sense. A database in turn, is intended to be a place to store dynamic information, Information that can either change because it's client data and you want to change the status of your client. You want to add information frequently or delete information frequently moved to new process status. So anything that is really dynamic, you want to use the database for also information that you really actively need to work with. For example, through filters, through automation, or through using it in the negative process. In this lecture, you learn about tables in notion, how to create them, how to edit them, how to format them in a visually appealing way. And you also got an idea on when to use a table versus a database. 8. Notion pages - Creation, Linking, Moving and Deletion: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about notion pages. We will explore how to create a new page, how to move pages around, and how to link pages with each other. Just be warned, I will use the word page a lot of times in this lecture. But first things first, why do we even care about pages? Well, notions, essence and core feature is to manage information as it's so good in it. We want to keep as much information in notion as possible as our database grows. We want to give it a structure because we want to find our information. Again, we don't want to end up searching for forever. This is why we want to create individual pages, breaking up information into smaller bits and pieces. Think about it like different word documents that you have. So instead of having one word document with 1,000 pages, you create smaller ones to cluster the information and to make it more handy also in terms of sharing information with others. You can share a dedicated page instead of the whole document with someone, if that makes sense. But that's enough of theory. Let's go into practice. And jump over to not back in our notion workspace. We have our basic blocks page. Everywhere where we can write down information is essentially a page. Basic blocks is a page. This page can continue until forever. I can add as much information as I want to and could continue. There is no end of the page. You're writing as much information here as you want to. If we now focus on the left hand side of our navigation menu, we see some pages already. These pages usually have a hierarchy. We have so called top level pages, which is Information Hub and Basic blocks. And then we have sub pages attached to it. In this case, information Hub has the subpages personal home, task list, journal and reading list. These are attached to the information hub and they stay physically on the information hub. That's a very important point. If I click on the information hub, you see all the pages on the information, they stay on it. This means as soon as I delete such a page, if I delete this link now click on Delete. The page is gone, it's physically deleted. Never delete such links if you're not sure you want to delete the content that's behind it. Now what can I do with these pages? I can move them around. I can drag and drop this page out of the sub page and making on top level page. Now it's not connected to information hub, it's gone here and it's an own self standing page. I can make it a subpage by simply drag and dropping it in it. Again, I can make an entire top level page, even a sub page. If I drag it into the basic blocks, you can of course unfold the hierarchy this way. We made information hub and everything that is a sub page of information hub, a sub page of basic blocks. You might now ask, how can I create a new page inside a page, IE. Create a sub page? You simply go onto blank space, press our command, and then you take the second entry, which is called page, embed a sub page inside this page. If I click on this, a new page is generated, currently is untiled. I will just call it subpage. Subpage is a subpage of basic blocks. If I go back to basic blocks, you see the entry subpage. I can continue this until the infinite means. I can go in the hierarchy as deep as I want to. I can create a sub page of a sub page of a sub page of a sub page. The more granular become, the more structured the information is. But of course, the less handy it is to administrate. Because we have a lot of sub pages, I would recommend not to go that deep, maybe just two or three levels. In practice, instead of creating a page in a page, create a sub page, or moving it into a main page, we have a third way that allows us to keep a page completely separate from other pages. And I will show you what I mean. Just imagine we have another top level page that's called Test. We want test to be referred into Basic Blocks because maybe Basic Blocks is our information hub where we have all the links to relevant resources. But we do not want to actually put test into basic blocks. We don't want to become test a sub page of basic blocks. When is that relevant? Well, notion is also about sharing information with others. Very easily you can share an entire page with someone else which we're going to talk in a separate lecture because this is super important. If I want to share basic blocks, I might not want to share the content of test. But if I share basic blocks, everything that's physically inside basic blocks will be shared with others. If I want to stay test separately but still want the link inside basic blocks, then I will do the following. I go to basic blocks, go on and empty space, press and screw all the way down to link to page. Now it's suggesting me the top level pages that are available. In this case I use test. Now something special happens. You see that the page gets an arrow. We also see that the subpage also has an arrow, and we see that the test page is still a separate top level page. What has happened? We have created a link towards a page, but we have not moved the actual page. When I click on Test, I will be directed to the page, but as you can see with the highlight on the left hand side, we are accessing the distinct page, but not a page inside basic blocks. This link here just showcases or indicates that we have created the link. Every link that we create always gets an entry. If it's just a view or a link, it gets this error on the test page itself. On the top level page, we received a so called back link. What's that? A back link means that this page is referred to from another page. This way, we can always check which other pages are referring to my page. If I want my page not to be referred at all, then it would be concerning if we got a back link here. And if you click on the back link, you see which page is actually referring to your main page. If you want to delete the link, then you go simply back to the basic blocks. Click on the link left hand side of the link, and then click on Delete. And the link entry is gone and the basic blocks entry is gone. Don't say, I didn't warn you, I talked a lot about pages. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. In this lecture, we discovered the features of pages. How to put them into a hierarchy, how to create a new page, how to make a page a subpage, and how to link a page. We also understood what a back link is. That being said, this is enough pages for now, and I'll see you in the next lecture. 9. Notion Callouts and Quotes: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we're going to talk about quotes and call outs. With that, we're concluding the basic block section. Why would you want to use these two blocks? As mentioned, notion is a system that's all about communication and information. With the growing database, you might be overflowed with information so that some information may get lost. That actually matters. With quotes and call outs, you can give them a dedicated spot so that everyone is aware of what you want to tell them. So let's jump over and look how this works in practice. Here we are back into our notion workspace. And I created already two headlines for quotes and call outs. Let's begin with, we have our standard text, we write something down. Then we might want to highlight an information that was posted by someone else. We want to quote someone or something out of another context. How do we do that? We go with our standard command, which is the command, and we scroll down towards where we can capture a quote. What you can see now is we have this bar on the left hand side which is visually highlighting that there is an information that is dedicated or that's important. And if we want to quote something from another source, we simply add the quote as we want to. And then we might want to add the source which is Confucius. We can then press Enter and continue our text in the next line. If we want to extend the quote because the code is longer than just one line, then we press Shift on our keyboard, or keep shift pressed and press Enter. We can continue this until the infinite and make our quote very long. Of course, you can use the quote also to highlight information. Simply, it doesn't have to be a quote. But of course, as everyone has used this to be a quote, you should not misuse it for other information if you want to highlight specific information. For example, let's imagine you have a very long document or very large information hub, and you want to show temporary information that require attention of employees, your colleagues, or clients. Then you could use a call out box. This call out box, just imagine that you're working in an office and the coffee machine broke down. You want to inform everyone that the coffee machine is broken down and the repair team is already alerted. Because you want to avoid that, everyone is calling the repair team, then you can use a callout box. How does that work? We go into our slash commands, scroll a bit down until we reach call out with a call out, we get such a box that has an emoticon on the left hand side, which we can change and then we can add information such as coffee machine is down, repair is underway, something like this. Now if we want to extend or expand on the call out and we want to go into the next line, then we can of course, simply continue writing. If we reach the end of the box, it will jump down into the very next row. But we can also manually trigger going into the next row. Again, we need to press and hold shift and press Enter. This way we're going into the next line of text. If we're just pressing Enter, it will jump out of the box, which is not the intended way we want to handle the information and press Shift and type what we need to type down. Of course, we can format text in the call out box as we want to, so we can make it bold. We can make it underline whatever is required to make the impression of the call out box that you want it to give. Then we can change the emoticons. We can of course, add emoticons from the standard set of emoges, but we can also add icons to it. Notion has its own set of icons where we can choose from a variety of icons. Or we can upload our very own custom icons. If for example, our company has its own brand voice with a set of icons and we want to import them, then you can stress out on the brand voice, of course. What else can we do with the callout box? We can change the color coding of the callout box. This way we can make it even more prominent. We click on this button on the left hand side of the callout box, and then we go towards Colors. And you pop up is showing up there. We can not only change the color of the text, we can also change the background color of the callout box. For example, let's say I want my color of the text to be blue. Then I'm clicking on blue, the color changes. If I want to change back the color again, I press on this button on the left hand side and go onto Color and change the color as I want to. Same applies to the background color. I can either choose a background color, for example, red to make it really prominent or alerting. If I want to make it more minimalistic and with less style, then I just go on color again and click on Default Background. With default background I just get a white box that has just this border attached to it. Something else that's super handy about call out boxes. You can move them around as every block in notion. The good thing here is that you do not need to highlight all lines that you want to move around. You just move the entire call out around as a block. Let's say you want to have it here, you just move it up. You can even integrate it into your quote if you want to, or vice versa. You can have the call out here and move your quote into the call out. This way you can combine those two features that even works with other types of blocks. For example, if you have a to Do list, we can add it to Do List, and we pull this block into the color block or the quote. This way we make it very versatile. If we want to move entire parts of the page around. We can even put everything into the color box and move the color box around, if that helps. In this lecture, you'll learn about call outs and quotes, two ways that are super useful to highlight information. With that being said, we conclude the basic block section. Well done so far and I'll see you in the next lecture. Stay tuned. 10. Advanced Blocks (Table of Contents, Toggles, Headings, Columns, Breadcrumbs): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about advanced blocks. And this is good news for you. Why? Because you have successfully completed the basic block section, which in turn means you can use notion out of the box. You can start writing texts and style it on a basic level. So that's a very good fundament to add the advanced blocks on top of it. Why are they called advanced? Well, not because they are specifically complex, just because they have a very specific use case and are less universally applicable as the basic blocks. But let's look at them in practice. We are back into our notion workspace and I want to show you in this lecture, the table of contents heading. Toggle list, columns and bread crumbs. Let's kick it off with table of contents. Actually, this is a repetition out of a basic block. I just want to close the loop as it is technically an advanced block. A table of contents always adds structure to your document. In particular, if your document is very long, you have various chapters and you want to guide the reader through your document step by step. Then it makes sense to give headings and structure your information with a table of contents. In order to create a table of contents, we go to any place on the page, add a blank space, and we use our command. We scroll down the advanced blocks are at the second half of your hop. A menu, There you will find table of contents. As you can see, it's creating a table of contents with jumping points. That means if I click on a specific headline, it will jump to the respective point in the document. Let's figure it out. In this case, it's bread crumbs. Let's make the document a bit longer. I'm clicking on bread crumbs. As you see it's scrolling down to bread crumbs. It's an incredibly handy tool to add on structure. How do we distinguish between headings that are recognized in the table of context versus normal text? As you can see, if I'm typing normal text, it's not going to pop up in our table of contents. So how does that work? Well, with formatting our text into headings. So a heading is supposed to appear in our table of contents. And how do we do that? Either we mark our text, so we highlight it. Click on the pop up menu and then select heading 12, or three, heading 12.3 The difference between them is the hierarchy heading one is the top heading, two is the sub level he, heading three is the sub level of heading two. If I make this heading one, this setting two, this heading three, as you can see, they are all differently formatted. This is the largest font, this one is a bit smaller, and this one is the smallest in the table of contents. This hierarchy shows up by slightly dented positions, so that means you can really see how the content belongs to each other and how they integrate into the hierarchy. If you want to create a heading out of the blue without reformatting an existing text, you use again the command and scroll down to heading one, heading two, or heading three. This is how you create a table of contents and add on structure to your text. Next up, we already talked about toggle list. Toggle list. Just as a quick refresher, we open up the context menu with our slash command and we scroll down to toggle list. A toggle list is an ideal way to expand on information on the user's reference. That means we can give it a headline. Let's say opening hours. Then you can open the toggle and add additional information. For example, to fry, then we get Sun. You can open or close the toggle list. Expand on information. This is just a styling element helping you to organize information in a proper way. But there's also another way of using toggle list. If we open up the command and scroll it down to the toggle headings. Toggle heading is identical to the heading format that I just showed you. It's also a hierarchy to heading one. Heading two is a sub level, heading three is the sub level. Let's format a toal heading one. We give it a name, so let's say this is heading one. As you can see, it's popping up in our table of contents. We can use the heading to again expand on text. Instead of writing our document in a long format. All information next to each other with headings separating between those sections. We can also decide to use a list of toggle headings, which we are then expanding on the content with the benefit on. Making them appear in our table of contents. If you want to format a text into a toggle heading, that's the same way as if you would format a normal text into a normal heading. You just highlight it. Go on to text, scroll down to toggle heading 12 or three, selecting togalhading one. It's again, popping up into our table of contents Simple, isn't it? Having talked about table of contents and total headings, I'm going to clean up the page just for visibility, to make it a better overview columns. What is a column? A column, you may know from a table, that means you're arranging information next to each other in parallel blocks, so to speak. Let's say we have a long text, even more text, and we have even more text. Wouldn't it be cool instead of reading from top to bottom to display it in a parallel way. For example, if we want to create our page just like a magazine or a book. So how do we create a column? We simply mark and highlight or text that we want to make it a separate column. Drag and drop it next to the very first line of text of the other column. Put it there. As you can see, it has now created two columns, but we want to get rid of the space in between. We again highlight the text on the left hand side. Pull it just next to the first line. That's it. We created two columns. We can even create a third column doing the same like this. And we can even create the fourth column. It's been, just highlight the information, put it on the right hand side. If you think four columns still are not enough, just take the fifth one, pull it to the right. As you can see we have five columns. This is incredibly handy to, again, structure, visualize information on your web page. This works not only with text. It works with all elements in notions, whether it is a table, whether it is a picture, you can organize them in columns. That's super easy. If you say you want to start using columns right from scratch, means when you just opened up a new document, you want to create columns instead of holding them manually as I did. Then you can also select columns from our slash command. Just press slash, scroll down to the advanced blocks. They come right after I blocks and database, and there you will find 2345 columns. Just select the right amount of columns that you need. Click on five columns, and as you can see, it has created five columns. If you already have a text and don't want to manual pole the information next to each other, manually create the columns, Then you simply can mark or highlight this one line of text. Go on the button, click on Turn Into on the left hand side, and then go down to 234, or five columns. Whatever you need, select two columns, for example, as you can see, we have created two columns in parallel next to each other. This is a super simple tool to style your text. Last but not least, I want to show you bread crumbs. What is a bread crumb? Bread crumb is actually just a navigation path that you can showcase on your page to see how pages integrate into each other. If you just have one top level page, that's pretty easy because it's just one level of pages. But if you have multiple sub pages, then it might become very difficult to understand where this exact page belongs to. Let's create some sub pages to showcase what I mean. In order to do that, I will use my command and select page, create a page, call it sub one. And I will create another page, call it sub two and maybe another one called sub three. Bread crumb is actually what you see on the left hand side. It's showing always with the separated the path, the navigation path that you need to take to reach the current sub three Sub three is a sub page of sub two, of sub one of advanced blocks. But you can also showcase this bread crumb directly on the page. If you, for example, want to give your user a more handy way to navigate between the pages you select for that the command scroll all the way down to advanced blocks until the very end. And select bread crumb. You get the navigation path links that you can click on. So if I click on sub two, I'm directed to sub two. Or if I click on sub one, I'm directed to sub one. So that way you can display the navigation path on every subpage, giving you a direct access to the individual subpage without the need of opening up all the sub pages, the entire directory, or clicking through all the pages that are linked. So as you can see, this is quite a daunting thing to do if you want to quickly navigate between the pages versus just clicking advanced pages through a bread Cr. Well done. In this lecture we talked about advanced blocks and kicked off a new chapter in our learning path. You learned about table of contents, columns, toggle headings as well as bread crumbs, all elements that will help you to facilitate your information hub. 11. Maintain Notion pages with ease - use synched blocks: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about sync blocks. A feature that will not only save you from headaches, but also will help you to claim back your most precious resource, which is time. But first things first, what is the sync block? Imagine you're serving a lot of clients and for every client, you have an individual page in notion. Let's say you have 100 clients. So 100 pages and you want to show on every page your contact details. Now you can of course, start in copy and pasting your contact details individually, but what if your phone number changes? Do you really want to spend your time to change 100 pages manually? No, of course not. And this is where sync blocks come into the game with the sync block. You have one piece of information which is your contact details and you link this block to the other blocks on the client pages. Means once your contact information change, you go into the contact details. You added your phone number and it will update on all the other pages handy, isn't it? Let's look at it in practice. So we are here in our notion workspace and we want to create a sync block. So let me create one by pressing the command, and then we scroll down to the advanced blocks until we find a block. As you can see, we have here a little diagram on the right hand side which shows you that the information can stay up to date because of linking quantum pieces together. Let's click on a sync block and create content. The content is Hello, my name is Fred. I want to copy and sink this block to other pages. I click on Copy and Sink. Now I create another, call it page two. I added it and I pasted in. I will add another page, calling it page three. I'm copying in again our sync block. If I go back to my advanced block, I want to change the information because I feel my name is not fred anymore, my name is. Maybe I go in and what happens to the content blocks on the other pages, they update as well. As you can see, it shows hello, my name is Mark, and here as well. How do you identify a block? Block always has this red border. If you click into it, you see on how many pages you're editing right now, the information. If we click on Advanced blocks, this is our original source of truth in order to manage the information, but you can also manage it on the other pages. If we want to stop this block from syncing with other blocks, then we click on the three dots on the right hand side. Go down to Sink All. If we press this, all blocks became standalone. I click on Senal. As you can see, it turns back into a normal standard block. If I now change the name back to fred, the information won't change in the other blocks, it is still mark within the S block. You can add an unlimited amount of information. Just press Enter, continue writing. You can even add other blocks into a sink block, for example a heading or a bullet list. You can simply continue and they will stay up to date also in the other blocks, as you can see here. Now going back to my initial example where we are dedicating one page per client, Do we really want a client to go in here and either intentionally or unintentionally change any of the data that I want to show just to them? No, of course not. In order to protect our pages against these unauthorized dits, we can lock our page. We do that on the right hand side. If you click on the three dots and then select the toggle lock page. If we now click on that one, the page is locked and no one is able to edit our page. You see, I can type as much as I want with as much effort as I want, and I won't be able to change this page. However, I'm still able to edit this block, add a new line or multiple lines. If I go back to my page, you see it has automatically updated. So in this lecture, you'll learn about syn blocks. Syn block is a great way to distribute one piece of information to multiple pages without having the headache of maintaining all 100 pages but just one source of truth. With the log function, you can protect your page against unauthorized editing at all times. That's it for this lecture. I'll see you in the next one. 12. Embed additional content seamlessly into Notion: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about media files and embedding content directly into your notion workspace. Until now we have used Notion to capture text base information. But in order to use Notion as our central information hub, there is something missing. We also want to add audio files, video files. We want to capture images and maybe other content from the Internet. Lucky as that notion doesn't stop at text based editing, it also incorporates exactly these features. Let's have a look at it. Here we are, back in our notion workspace and we want to add some media files to it. Question first, how do we do that? And what media files can we add in order to find out? We use our slash command, add a slash, and then we scroll down to the heading media. As you can see, we can add an image, we can add web bookmarks, video, audio code, and files. Let's start off with an image. When I click image, I have the option to upload my very own image, to embed a link, to use the stock image, or to add a gift. A gift is a short animation. Let's add an image from our own database. I click upload file and I need to choose my file that I want to upload from my file directory. Once completed, my picture is loading in and is starting to render. Right now, I can change the size of my image by simply dragging and dropping the right border of my image. As you can see, I have here my cursor to make the size of the image larger or smaller respectively. Alternatively, I can also use an image from embedding a link. In order to do that, I'm looking up on Google Images, an image that I would like to upload. I select an image here or like this one, and I will right click on the image. Then I select Copy Image Address. I go back to Notion Workspace. I'll do a right click on the embedded link side, Click Paste, and click on Embed Images. As you can see, the image is now embedded with the advantage of not downloading the image but pulling it directly from the web page. At the disadvantage, of course, if the source image is gone, if the web page shuts down, my image might get lost. If you want to, you can of course download it. Alternatively, you can use also the unsplash stock library and select simply a photo From the library. You can search for an image in the search bar. Same applies for a gift when using an image. I'm scrolling up again. When using an image, you can also decide on how you want to align the image with the rest of the page. Do you want to have it centric on the left bound or the right bound? That really depends on how you want to structure your notion workspace. Below that you can create a caption, for example, describing what you can see. This is sometimes important for search engine optimation. Here I would write a map of Europe just to describe what we can see next to it. We also have a download button, so you can also download images from Notion to your personal computer. And on the right hand side, you have more actions by clicking on the three dots. Under the three dots, you have a default set of options to choose from. You can delete the image, You can duplicate it. You can view the original, which guides you to the original source of the image. Let's click on it. As you can see, it will show you a larger scale of the image itself. Go back to notion and again open up the more actions. You can also replace the image here. If you decide on, hey, I want to show another image, you can simply click on Replace. The good thing here is this logic applies to all media files that we're uploading. If I make a bit of space and add our command and we're going down to our media files, I can do the very same with web bookmarks. Here, I just add my URL of the website. I want to show notion. Let's imagine this side is what I want to store. I copy it with control C or by right clicking and clicking on copy, I go back to my Notion page, right click into Paste and click on Paste. Now if I click on Create Bookmark, it has created me the respective bookmark and I click click on it. So I'm guided to the respective website checking out the other media blocks that we can add. We also can upload a video by simply pasting the video L into here. I click on Themed, and as you can see, it just populates the respective video. But in turn, if I click on the three dots on the More action and I click on Replace, I can also upload my very own video. Just be reminded that both for images and videos in the free plan, you have a five megabyte upload limit. So that means you cannot upload incredibly large files for a photo, this would work for video. This is kind of limiting as video files are usually larger. Another media type that you can embed is audio. So if I express slash scroll down to media, you find audio. Audio works the very same way. You choose a file, upload it, or respectively embed the link into the your El bar. If you want to upload something that is neither video nor an image, nor an audio, then notion still got your back. Just enter the command, scroll down to media and add a file. With a file, you either upload directly the file or embed the link. This can be, for example, a document, a PDF file, or whatever. There's almost no limitation on which files are accepted or as you've seen, we skipped one media block which is the code block. We talked about the code block already under the advanced blocks. If you're interested in adding code to your notion side, just go back to the respective lecture. That's it for the media. Now, I also want to show you how you can embed even more things into your notion page. For that, I'm going to delete what we have uploaded here. Press delete and go back to our command. I scroll down to the blocks of embeds, and as you can see here, you will find a lot of different online applications and tools which you can embed directly into notion. It can be a Google Drive file, it can be Tweet, Google Maps, Igma Maps. And there's so much more to explore, the way to set them up is always the same. You simply click on what you want to embed, for example, in this case, a Google Maps map, and you add the respective link of your map. I pace a map in here and click on Embed. As you can see, it imported the map. I can even view the map on full screen by clicking here. And apart from that, I have all the very same tools as I had with the images and the other media files. I can resize the entire screen or shrink it down to the original. Alternatively, you can look up all the different applications that have a dedicated embed. For of course, you can always simply copy and paste the link also directly into notion. And you might ask, why would I want to use these dedicated embeds? Well, because they are already optimized for their size, for the type of content. So in order to make your site look professional, I would always recommend to use the respective embed application of the embed block if that's offered for the application that you would want to show a notion. In this lecture, you learned about media blocks and embed blocks in order to showcase even more information. Aside from pure text based information, you can add images, video files, audio files, code blocks, and also any kind of other file that you would want to centrally store. Also, you can embed content from other applications such as Google Maps, Google Drive, Dropbox, and so much more. That's it for the current lecture. I will see you in the next. 13. Notion Math and Code Blocks: Hello and welcome back to the course. In this lecture we are going to talk about two very specific advanced blocks, namely the block equation and the code block. If you're working with a lot of code in your documents or with math equations, then stay tuned and let's jump over into Notion. We're back into our notion workspace and I've created a blank page that's called advanced blocks with two headlines, Block equation and code. Block equation are math equations. Of course, we can add our math equations to our normal text that we are writing down, but it might be a bit complicated to read or to identify the respective equations. Or we might not be able to use the rightful math symbols in order to give it a designated place where we can showcase our equations. We are adding the block equation. How do we do that? We add our slash command. We go into an empty spot, add slash, and scroll down to the advanced block section, where we find block equation to display a standalone math equation. As we click on that, you see we get a box that's caught at a text equation and a specific pop up field in which we can fill our math equation. For those of you who are deeper in the topic of math equations, notion uses K tax to render math equations which support a large subset of latex functions. As I'm not a mathematician and I don't know anything about math equations, let's keep things simple. Just to give you an impression on how this looks like. Let's add a very simple math equation, which is three plus four equals seven. As you can see, it's highlighting our math equation. And once I'm ready, I simply click on Down. As you can see, my equation is rendered in a central spot. Of course, you can change this equation by simply clicking into it, changing the formula, or deleting it. We go back to zero. Next up we have code and we can display here in a similar way as a block equation. We give it a dedicated spot to avoid formatting errors. If we're pasting the code directly into our notion text to add code, we simply use our command and scroll down all the way to the code block. Mermaid. For those of you who are into the topic, you know mermaid is already a code to showcase diagrams. And not only can you display code, but you can also transform the code, the Mermaid code, into a diagram. I will attach some resources if you want to showcase a specific diagram. So that it can be either flow chart or can be pie chart, bar chart, whatever it is, it's made out of code. So you need to do a bit of deep diving to create the code that you need to import it into notion. But just for you to get an idea, I will add a bit of sample code in here. As you can see, it's rendering my diagram. And I can also decide on whether I want to showcase both the code and the rendered diagram. Just the code or just the diagram. That's a helpful tool to, again, style a bit around your notion page. Now if you're not up for a mermaid code but you need any other code, then notion can display all those codes. As you can see down here, it has a selection of different code languages that you can select from, for example, Abab or anything else. Of course, Abab can't be read deleting it, but you can now add it and it will format your code in the relevant programming language. Something else that you can set up is the so called P code. P code means if your code line becomes incredibly long, it will add a line break so you don't have to endlessly scroll to the right hand side. That's just a handy feature to improve usability of your notion page. If you want, you can add a caption, a so called caption, to your code, giving the reader a bit of an explanation on what the code is about. Let's add a bit of explanation here which helps identifying the use case of this code block. That being said, in this lecture we talked about math equations and code blocks. 14. Maintain Notion pages with ease - use synched blocks: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about button automations. If you're not yet fully convinced notion fan, then this might change your mind. Imagine following scenario. You're the proud owner of a coffee machine with a press of a button. The coffee machine will roast the beans, grind the beans, brew the coffee, and fill up your cup. What I just described was automating manual task. And the very same thing is possible in notion as well. Sounds cool, let's look at it. In practice, we are back to our notion workspace and we want to create a button automation. All we need is an empty space or slash command. And we scroll down to the advanced blocks, which is in this case the button block. Run custom automations with a click. This is exactly what we need to. Let's click on the button. As you can see, it has indeed created a button. We can give it a name. Let's say this is Test, true teen. We can also give it an emoticon if we want to. I will give it this airplane in this color. And then what we see is we have a trigger. The trigger event is the button itself. We cannot change this. This is static, and then we need to add an action to it. If I click on a action, our pop up menu appears with all the actions that are possible. We can insert a block. We can add a page to a database. We can add a page in a database. We can show and ask for confirmation to execute the step, and we can open a specific page. Let's insert a block first. When we click on inserted block, we can decide on whether this block shall be created above or below the button. In this case, we want to have it below the button. Let's imagine you have specific meeting minutes for a meeting that you need to capture each and every week, week in, week out. Wouldn't it be cool if we can autopopulate meet minutes structure already? This is exactly what you can do here. Let's say these are the meeting minutes or day, month. Here we could say these are the topics. The good thing here is we can pre integrate blocks into this button automation, almost all the blocks that we know already. In this case, I will insert a bullet list. Let's add the bullet. We have topic 12345. Going back, I want to have the to do. Let's add a heading we add to do, then we add to list. To do list, we call it 1234, maybe five. That's it. This is our first automation. I'm clicking on Done, because we set up out automation. If I click now on the test routine, it will do exactly this. We have our meeting minutes. I can note down the topics. That's it. Once we have a new meeting, I will again click on it and we have new meeting minutes. This is just, of course, one example on how to use this button automation there much more. But let's go back to our setter menu. We get back by clicking on the gear icon on the right hand side of the button. We click on it and then I can addit our automation. If I click on the three buttons, I can either add a step above or below. So we can actually combine multiple actions with each other. And that's very powerful because we can let the button automation do multiple things at a time. For us, the important thing to know is if I'm adding multiple steps, the automation will go through each and every step by the order of steps. That means if I'm adding a step and I add a step above, I'm adding another block. Let's call it one. It will first create this block and then this block. If I feel now I want to change the order, I simply drag and drop the respective block automation to have it in the rightful order. What else can I do here? I can duplicate this step above, can duplicate the step below. I can delete it, and I can also change the order of events here. But for now, I want to delete those steps because I want to show you something else. I want to show you how you can add a page to a database. Don't you worry, we have not yet covered databases. I will dedicate a whole section to databases, so making sure that you learn every bit and piece about databases. This is just to show you that automations also connect to database. Just imagine a database is kind of like an intelligent table where we can capture dynamic information. Every database entry is actually a page in notion. With the click of a button, we can create this new page in the database. Let's do that. We add a page or select, add a page, select database. I've created a test database. Then every database entry needs to have a proper name. So we can give it a name, let's say test one. And we can also define properties in our database. As I said, this is now very high level. We are going to dive deeper on this more at a later stage. I have a property that's called tax. The tech can have a value one or two. These were all predefined by me and in this case I want to have the value one. Then I can also define that I want to add a page in the notion database, just taking the very page that I've just now created. I could add another property of it if I want to. Let's say I want to replace tag one with tag two. This doesn't make much sense because the page was just newly created. If I wanted it to have take two already, I could selected by adding a page to the database. But just to show you that this is possible. And I also want to open the new page that I just created. When I click open page, I will select the page. I want to open up the newly created page. I can decide on the viewing pane, so I can either use Center Peak, which is the central pop up. I will show you in a second what this exactly means. I can do it bound to the right hand side or can open up the new page. In the full page view, I go to Center Peak first. Then I also want to have a confirmation step in between, Let's say before I create this new database entry, I want to get the confirmation whether I really want to do that, to avoid hitting this button by accident, I click on Show Confirmation. I can customize the confirmation message to what I need. I can customize the text of the continue button, so the accept button, and also customize the cancel button. Now I of course want this confirmation page to show up very first before any of these steps have executed. Because if it was an accident, I want to cancel the action right now and not after they have occurred. This is very important to make this confirmation the first step into our automation. Now I'm ready and I click on Done and we will have a look at what this all means. I click on my test routine. First of all, I get my confirmation page, which is this one. As mentioned, you can customize your message, the continue button or the cancel button. Now, of course, I want to continue. And what happens now is it creates the database entry and it will open up this database entry. I click Continue. As you can see, it has created my database entry with the test value two. This is now the center peak view, but I could also view it in full page or in side peak. Full page would simply be full page as the name suggests. When I go back to my database and this is the first time you will see a database. Again, just for demonstration purposes, we will capture database in a later stage. When I go to my database, you will see that the record test one has been created with the tag value two. This is all customizable. And what can we use these button automations for? What are use cases that might be relevant? Well, we can use this button, for example, for internal processes if we want to request something. If we want to provide feedback to something, if we want to showcase that there is a buck, then we usually use databases to record all of the information. With the click of a button, I can create such a new database entry and direct myself into this database entry. So I could add here information on, hey, this and that is the buck right now. Could you please have a look at it so we can build up a structure that we just need to replay over and over again, saving us tons amount of time. In this lecture, we talked about button automations. A way to ease up our life by saving time by automating specific tasks. For example, recording information in a very same structure over and over again. Or to create database entries. Databases is a topic that we've not yet covered, but the only thing you need to remember for right now a database is like a dynamic table, where you can add information. To end with the button automation, you're able to automate the creation of database entries through a specific scheme. This might be a good idea, for example, if you want to capture feedback, request information, if you want to provide input to something, or if you want to inform others on a software buck for example. But of course, there are much more use cases for that and I'm 100% sure you will make good use of the Barton Automation. That's it for the current lecture. I will see you in the next one. 15. Lets build: a CV in Notion (Exercise): A low. And welcome back to this course. What would be a course without any practice? Exactly, it would be boring. Boring stuff is hard to remember, since I want you to make the most out of this course. We are going to practice now a little bit. Of course, this is non mandatory. If you want to skip this lesson, just skip it. However, I highly recommend you to practice a little bit. Our exercise today will be to create a very simple CV, a curriculum guitar, for our career. Let's jump into notion and look at the task. Here we are. I've built myself a very simple CV with a headline with some core data, an image. We created a professional summary, a skills overview, and an experience with a table. Down here we have a sync box with a call out feature. Now you can pause the video here to take this as a template and try to rebuild the exact same thing. Once you're ready, you can play the video again. And I'm guiding you through each and every piece of this document so that you get kind of a solution on how I have built this. If you want, you can pause the video now. All right, we are back with the solution. I will guide you now through this document. We're starting off the document with the heading. That's the default heading of notion, so no need to really format it. I just typed down my name. Next up, I've created two columns. How do we create two columns? By using the command and scrolling down two columns, you can also type the command. I just created two columns. Down here where we have now two. Then I created on the left hand side a heading two. That's this one where I entered the details name, press Enter again, heading two, and then I added the H on the right hand side, I used an image, I created an image block here. I uploaded it from my computer. And so we have arranged in this dual column set up. Now I'm going to lead that one. This one is again a heading two with a bit of text down here to just complete the professional summary. This is followed by another heading two, This section where I visually showcase my skills. I again created two columns. Again, with the column command. I created two columns on the left hand side, simple text. On the right hand side, I added emoticons. Emoticon is added with the command, and then you simply enter Emog. I use the star Emog to indicate my proficiency with these skills. Of course, you can change that as you need. Next up again, a heading two followed by a table. Of course, with this table, I could have made the first row a header row. So let's do that right away. I added here simply a table view. And I created specific columns like role title from, I added to more columns, in this case two and responsibilities. Then I made this table full width and expand it on the right hand side. By pulling the right border slightly to the right. Since to and from are just years or dates, we can make them smaller, giving more space to the responsibility tab on the right hand side. Again, readjusting the size. This way we can create a simple grid view of our previous work experience. I'm going to delete this for a moment. And then I created a think box. Why think box? Well, maybe I have my contact somewhere else already. Maybe I don't want to manage my contact details everywhere because I'm lazy. Hence, I use the think block. Inside the think block, I created a call out. The call out was died to not having any background color. Again, go to Color and select default background. This way we just have this light box with the white background color. I kicked it off by writing contact here, and the contact was formatted to bold as a standard formatting. And below that I added website and e mail, but not with any bold formatting. So just a standard format. As you can see, this is quickly done. If you're using the basic blocks that we have used so far, this shouldn't introduce anything that we haven't talked about until now. I highly recommend you to practice it. If you're confused with one block that we just talked about, then I highly recommend you to go back to one of the other lectures where we talk about these blocks in detail. Well done. This was your first practice exercise. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Otherwise, I will see you in the next cheers. 16. Setup your first Notion Database: Hello and welcome back to this course. I'm super proud and super excited that we reached this point in our journey. Because right now we're embarking on the Notion Databases which is the core feature of notion to work and live with data. That's the essence of notion is database. And database is notion that starts with the differentiation between what's a database versus what's a table. A table essentially is aesthetic view of information. A grid view where we can arrange columns and lines accordingly. Static in this respect means that the information should not change too much. Means we might use a table, for example, to showcase opening hours, to indicate responsibilities. But nothing that's too dynamic. Why? Because we cannot really apply filters, We cannot really play around with the data. So it is not really meant to be a work instrument, rather a tool of visualization. Instead, a database helps you to manage and maintain data in a structured way. We can work with it in terms of filtering search. We can apply logics to it, automatisms, so we can really arrange our workflow around database or vice versa. The database helps us to maintain our workflow. Also, we have the option to choose from specific properties, like columns that only allow certain data formats As an input means, if we want to collect in a specific column a phone number, we will select the phone number property only allowing phone numbers to go in there. It's a great way also to upboost and improve your data integrity because if you're working with multiple persons, which you cannot really control their actions of whether intentional or unintentional, the database properties will prevent from either intentional or unintentional incorrect entries into the wrong columns. So that's a great tool to have up to date and correct information database is a very big topic. They seem very intimidating at first, but I promise they aren't as complicated as you might think. So bear with me. Give some rope. We are going to dive deep into database in a series of videos. But rest assured, we will go through this in a step by step approach covering every bit and piece of the database. But that was enough of theory, Let's jump into it right now. We are here on our notion workspace. And I will call this page simply database. And in order to create a database that's pretty simple, we just use our command as always. And then we scroll down until we reach database. I don't want you to be confused now with table view, board view, This is all stuff that we take care of later on. Right now, the only relevant thing is we want to create a database either in line or full page. What's the difference? Let's try out a database. We create a database as a block. This means we can create data and information before that. We can create a to do list or whatever we want. We can work before or after means below the database and we can also move around the database as a block. This is great if, for example, creating a document where we want to reference information to the database or vice versa. Or we build ourselves a dashboard with different other metrics and we just want to visualize information. But this might not be the ideal solution if you want to create a database, for example, for your customer clients, for your transactions, for your projects. Because there you want to have a distraction free environment. And also you don't want to accidentally move around the tables, So let's create instead a database full page. Those two databases are exactly the same by the way. They do not differ in terms of functionality or options. They just have a different setup. Because a database full page is itself a full page. So that means we are now creating a database on the database page as an individual page. I will call this now database full page for differentiation. Welcome to your first database. How does it work? We have columns and we have lines, where every line is representing an own entry into the database. And every entry means every line is an own document that lives in this database. If we're opening up one of the three records that are completely empty, you see we will open up a completely new page and we can also go full page on the top left of this window. Once we go full page, we see we can give it a title, so call it test number one. And we can assign different properties. We will talk about these properties later, but this is the example I've referred to. We have a dedicated property just for phone numbers, which will not allow any other entry but a phone number format. Below that, we can add comments. We will come to the commenting and review functions at a later stage. And then we can add text. It's just like a page. So we can add any kind of blocks that we want. Once we're done with this page, we simply go back to our database, and as you can see, it's indicating that this page now contains content. If we want to move the position of this database entry, then we simply drag and drop it to the respective position. If we want to delete it, we simply highlight this one line and go on the Delete button. If we want to delete more than one entry, then we select those two with the highlighting function, and then we click on Delete. If we want to create a new database entry, we either create one by clicking here on you or on the blue button on the top right. Let's click on New, and I will create a test entry. And that's your first database, as I said, super simple. Nothing too complicated, nothing to worry about. We're going to pause here because in the next lectures, we're diving deeper on every bits and piece of the database functions. In this lecture, you'll learn about how to create a database and also what's the difference between a database full page versus a database in line? If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. 17. Basic properties of your Notion Database (Text, NUmber, Sing. Select, Multi Sel): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to dive deeper on the basic properties that we can add to our notion database. And for that we will jump into the topic right now. All right, we are back to our database, full page that we just created in the past lecture. And now we want to explore some of the basic properties. As mentioned before, properties are kind of like a gating mechanism to ensure we are only allowing certain data formats to go into our database. Up boosting our data integrity and preventing from unintentional mistakes. The way the properties work, they are actually columns, and as such, we have them arranged on top here. The first column needs always to be a text field, Means we can enter anything here, we can add text links, numbers as much as we want to. This first one is also equal to the title of the page below it. If we change the record here also the title of the page will change. Next up, the default value that is always coming up. The default property is a so called tax. Tax property is a multi select property, so that means we can use tax to cluster information. Just think of it like a label and we can stick multiple labels. For example, on your phone it's like an iphone or an IOS, it's a small or large phone. And with all these labels, we can rearrange our information at a later stage. If we want to add a label, we just start typing. So we want to, for example, classify a vehicle. A vehicle can be fast, A vehicle can be slow. A vehicle can be large. Large, A vehicle can be small, can be cabrio, can be super car. As you see, we can add unlimited amount of different tax. Of course, some texts do not make sense. Car cannot be fast and slow at the same time. It cannot be large and small at the same time. Attack usually makes sense if you can assign more than one property to an individual record, but this entry should not be unique. We can allow multiple entries. If I want to get rid of an entry, I simply go in here and click on the X. I remove the unintended properties from the text. If I want to change the options available, I can either drag and drop them if I want to make them appear in a different order. Or I click on the three dots in order to delete them, to rename it or to arrange another color. That's a multi select field. What other fields do we have to use inside notion? We have a text field which is similar to the first one. Means we can enter any information that we want. It can be text, it can be numbers. It's not limited by any means. Next up we have numbers. Number feels only allow numbers. It doesn't need to be a phone number, but it needs to be a number. And it can be infinitely long, It doesn't matter. And we can format these numbers if we click on the property and then addit the property, then we go into the settings of our property. We can change the name of the property from number to something else. We can change also the property type from number to anything else. And we can select the number format. This doesn't have a format as of right now, the format is number, but we can also add number with a percentage or for example a currency like Euros. Then we also can decide on whether we want to show it as a true number or as a progress bar. A number is appear like this. A progress bar looks like this. A progress bar needs to be divided always by 100 so that we can create a progress. Let's imagine we are now switching to ten, for example. Then the basis of the progress bar is 100. So we can set our own scale on how quickly we want to move this progress bar. We can also change the coloring of the progress bar and we can decide on whether we want to show the number or just a progress bar. We also have a P in view function. This works like if I just use a number and we have a particular long number like this. If we're wrapping, you see we get a line break in between here. This is like a visual thing. If you want it to become a line break, then toggle it to wrap in view. If you do not want this to happen, then simply disable. And then it's summarized in just one long line. If you disable it, you get, of course, more space. If you have, for example, the list full with lines, then you get more space to visualize or display more lines at a time. Now, something else that we can do in every property is we can add a property description. This is sometimes handy if we were, for example, describing different metrics and working with a wider team, and not everyone understands what number means. So we can, for example, say this is the budget for the year, just to give you an idea. And then we close the entire property. And someone who wants to understand what this number represents clicks or hovers on this info image. And then on the right hand side, it's getting displayed what this is about. If we want to rearrange our properties, we simply can drag and drop them. We can change the order. If you want to delete a property, then we can simply right click on the property. We can delete the property here. You can also duplicate your property if you need to. You can also freeze up to column. So that means if you have a large database with more properties, then you can display at a time. So imagine you're having like 2030 different properties, which is an easy thing or to reach a notion, then you can freeze it. So that means this number property will always stay visible, irrespectively of how far you scroll to the right. So that can be handy to demonstrate the most important information inside your database. Also, you can hide information in view. If you click this, it will disappear, which doesn't mean that the information behind it is disappearing. It's still on the page. So if we are opening up the page, you will still be able to see the number format, just a way to clean up the and to adjust it to your needs. Next property we want to talk about is the opposite of our tax. This was a multi select field, and now we talk about a single select field. A single select field makes sense if we want to capture a property where only one property at a time can be, right? So let's imagine I'm a landlord out of like 23 flats. And they can either be occupied or not, but they cannot be both at a time. So this is where we want to use the single select. And the way it works, we have already opened up on the right hand side, our property menu. We can give it again a name. We can, by the way, also give it a different icon if you want to. We can also remove the icon if that's not necessary. And then we can add options. One option can be, for example, occupied or they can't. Again, we have the rep in view function. We also can change the options means the name. We can delete them, or we can change the color coding of our options. If we have more than two or three options, we might want to sort them. We can sort them either manually or we can also sort them alphabetically or reverse alphabetically. That's up to you. Now, if you're selecting from a single select property, it will look like this. We select occupied, and as you can see, if I'm now trying to also select vacant, it will simply change to vacant. So this is a great property if you just want to allow one property at a time to be true. Next property we want to look at, we are skipping Multi Select because Multi Select is actually tax, we already talked about, it is a status. The status is a great tool to visualize or indicate, for example, in a process how far we are with the process, have we not started yet? So is it part of the backlog? Is it part of the to do list or did we already start so it's in progress or it's already complete? We can select those status in here. It's also just a single select field. Now you might be asking, hey, why should it take status instead of select? Well, the status has more downstream effects in terms of managing and visualizing data later on. Because the status not only comes with the status, but also with the status groups in the to do list. We can, if we go to edit the property, we can add more substeps to it, for example, not started. Or we can say it is assigned but started. We can have, for example, another option that's called waiting for edits. As you can see, we can be more granular in this three step approach. Again, we can change the color coding the name. We can also set it as default. And we can also change the group which this property option belongs to in the Context menu. We can also change the way it's shown. For example, we can either show it as a select means as a dropdown, or we can also make it appear as a checkbox. It's either checked or unchecked. Then we are, however, losing on the sub steps. I will go back to the select status and now we have all the statuses in here. And this gives us the option to, at a later stage, rearrange the views by the current status groups. Everything that's in to do, everything that's in progress or everything that's completed. That's it for now. In this lecture, we talked about tax properties. Tax single select, multi select status properties, as well as number of properties. In the next lecture, we will continue with the next round of properties. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 18. Basic Properties (Date, Person, Checkbox, URL, Phone, Meta Data): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are continuing our path on learning all the properties that we can add to our notion database. Let's jump into them. We are back to our notion workspace and we will head directly to the properties. Last time we ended our lecture with a status property. That means the next property is our date field. The date field is interesting because we can set it to date ranges. We can use it for individual dates, but we can also become as granular as collecting times and time slots for an individual day. In the settings menu of our property, we can set the date format to different styles. We can either take the full date, we can take month, day, year, different versions to accompany different geographies. Or we can use a relative date. That means we can say it's tomorrow, this week, next week, but it's a bit less defined and less strict as the other date formats. We can also select on the time format. Again, it depends on whether we want to hide, by default, the time, or whether our preference is to use a 12 hours or 24 hours format. If we go into the field format, we see that we have here a date picker, a little calendar. We can move forward. We can move backwards. We can also jump to a certain time. Let's say we want to go to 2020 and press Enter. Then we are moving to March 9, 2020 and can select the respective date. We can set ourselves a reminder, for example, one day before on the day of the event, two days or a week before, if that's for example, a due date and we want to just be reminded of the due date. We can also decide on whether we want to include an end date. So we're turning a date property into a date range property which is technically nothing different, but we can just collect this additional information. As I said, if we want to become more granular, then we can also include the time. That means we can, for example, book a time slot or record a time slot for the exact same day. If we want to clear out the date field, then we click on Clear. And if we want to change the date and time zone format, then we click here and can change also the time zone, which is an additional setting to the property setting we just looked into. The next property that we want to dive deep on is the person property. The person property is great if you, for example, want to assign a responsibility to a specific property. Or if you want to get notified about every change for this respective database entry in the property settings, we can decide on whether we want to have a limit for this data field. Either it can be one person assigned to a task, to a database record, or we can say we have no limit. That means that 2030, 50 people can be responsible. So that really depends on how you set up your workflow. You could, for example, set up a person property for responsibility where you set the limit to one person. And in addition, you could have a separate person field where you don't have any limit and you call it just spectator. Or viewers or notify me so that people can sign up for notifications. You can also set default value, so if you want, for example, that every person who creates a new record is automatically responsible for the record. Then you go to the default and set to created by. This will set the person creating the record always by default in the driving seat. The next property we want to look into is the files and media upload. This is a property where we can attach files, links, audio, video files to the table, but be aware of that. In the free plan, we got a five megabyte upload limit. So we cannot upload large video files or large audio files. We need to limit really to 5 megabytes. If we want to upload something, we can go here and click on Upload. Then you can select from any file on your computer to, for example, upload a PDF or any other media file, or you can embed a link from an external resource. But remember, this file will then only be available for as long as the link behind it works. So if the data file is getting deleted on the source of truth, then you won't have access here anymore. So consider downloading it and uploading it directly to your database. Next up we have a check box. Checkbox is great to indicate process steps, like sub process steps. Let's imagine we are still our landlord and we want to rent out a property and we want to manage every step of the process. We want to create the Post for social media that we have a vacant room. We want to screen candidates, we want to check on the documentation, we want to prepare the contract. Every bit and piece of the process could be a checkbox. And if you're collaborating with others, we can then simply said, okay, this process step is checked, we're done with it, and hence it's proceeding to the next step. Next up, we can also collect a URL. If, for example, you are a social media company and you want to collect resources of external websites that serve as an inspiration, then you can collect URLs. In here, you can decide on whether you want to show the full URL or if you want to wrap it to the most central URL. Let's try to collect this URL of this notion page. If I put it in here, we are now wrapped it to the most essential part of the URL, so it will show notions and the rest is like aggregated. But if we want to show the full URL, we just toggle this one and then we get the full URL. Next up we have the e mail property. The e mail property will again, only allow data to enter that has an ad domain behind it. There's nothing really to set up. It needs to be the rightful information we can use it to add. For example, Notion@gmail.com This is an e mail address or an e mail address format. So this will be allowed as an input. Next up, we have the phone property. The phone property we have here very limited settings. Actually no settings. The phone property will only allow number formats to go in. Everything else won't work, a measure to protect the integrity of your data. The last thing I want to discuss with you are so called meta data data about data which is the created time created by last edited time, last edited by, and the ID. This is information that we can add to our database to verify who has created information and who has changed information and when it was last edited. This helps us to verify and keep information up to date. For example, if you see a database entry or two similar database entries that have different last edited times. Let's say one was last edited two years ago and one was edited five weeks ago. Then you know which one is the most up to date. And the way this thing works, these are actually completely automated fields. So we add the created time, we can change the date and time format as with our date field. We can also add the created by. This will automatically pull in my information because I've created it the same thing for last edited time and the last edited by. If we use the ID as a property, this will create a unique ID to your database. So let's imagine you want your prefix of your ID always starting with cast as a customer. And then you can see in the preview that every new entry will be cast 1234. The good thing here is even though you're deleting previous entries, it will continue counting, so we are not in danger of overriding an ID that we have used before. Once an ID was used, it's gone. If we update the ID, then click on Update the ID, it's recreating our ID structure. If we create a new entry, as we've done right now and scroll to the right, you see as its continue counting, we will pull the ID all the way to the front. Now I'm deleting this entry and we're creating a new one. As you can see, it's giving us cost six and not cost five. I know this was a long lecture, but we made really good progress on the properties because we have now concluded on the basic properties. And the next properties we take care of our advanced properties. That means there are a lot more to explore and set up. We're dedicating full lectures to them. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 19. Databases templates - manage repetitive tasks: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about how you can create templates for database records. That means if you have processes that require the same content structure inside your database, means for example, you need to record invoices or work requests always in the very same way. Then you can create templates in order to pre populate the structure in which you want to collect this information. So let's jump into the topic. All right, we are back on our notion invoice tracker. And an invoice tracker should have, of course, a similar layout every time we created. So how do we make sure we get the very same layout? Let's go to the new button on the top right. Instead of click on your new, click on the drop down button on the right hand side. This will open up the replication feature. For a certain page formats we want to click on new template. This opens up our template wizard. Let's say we want to have every new invoice called New Invoice. We want every new invoice to be attached, for example, to Josh, because the good thing here is we can create as many templates as we want to. We could create a template for Josh, one for Fred, and one for Mark, under the condition, of course, that we do not have many more other clients. And we need to send the same invoice over and over again to the very same people. Next up, we could set a fixed amount of the invoice sum, let's say 150. So we say this is the new invoice for 150. We have set certain properties now to a fixed value. Next up, we can style the layout of the properties a little bit. Maybe there are certain fields for example, or the calculation fields that are in that, relevant in the view. When we create a new invoice, we can hide them away from the default view. For that, we do a right mouse click on a property, go down through property visibility, and then we can decide whether we want to show a property. Always hide it when it's empty or always side. Let's click on Always Side, because we might not need this information right now. This property, we might only want to show it when it has a value. Let's click on Height. When empty, those properties aren't gone, they're just hidden below this one. So we can open it up if we click on this drop down button. As soon as I'm adding a Due date here, for example. As you can see the invoice Initiate Payment by Field is now popping up once we delete this entry. Also this property will be hidden. Again, this helps to clean up our invoice layout and only put the focus on those properties that matter right now. For example, those that require an input in the moment of creating the invoice. Next up, we can define a format. Let's say we want to add the invoice details, we're adding a heading. Let's say this is invoice details, then we're adding a divider. Then we add the items. The items are one, 4 hours times 103 hours times $550 each. Online resources which are included, the total payment is something like this. So of course, you can design the entire invoice out as you want to. This is just an example, right now we are done with it and we are clicking back. Now we can either create a new invoice, this will be a blank invoice, or we can decide to go with our new invoice template. If I click on the invoice template, it's creating the new entry, opening it up. And it's also pre populating our format down here. If I want to make this template a default template so that every time I'm creating a new invoice, it shall have this layout. Then we click again on the drop down button, click on the three dots next to new invoice, and set it as default. Now we can define whether we want to set this invoice as a default for all views in our notion database. We haven't talked about views yet, but views are simply different arrangements of the information that we see in our database. This is a table view. We can also arrange it as a list, as a gallery view. And as we continue to add different views, this will add up as a tab over here. And we can now decide if this invoice should be the default for every view or just for the view that we are currently seeing right now. I'm simply saying this is for the table view only, but we can define that later on as well. Now if we click on you and new invoice will be created with our template respectively. If we have other templates, it will always select the new $150 invoice as a default value. If you want to add our invoice, then we go back to the template menu, and then we click on Added. This will bring us back to the template editor. Now we can define that a new invoice is generated based on the template on a specific cadence that makes sense. For example, if you have fixed or fixes with your clients and for every or fix you can create an invoice. Or another use case might be you have a weekly meeting and every weekly meeting has the very same agenda which you want to pre populate without doing it manually. Or if you're writing a journal and you want to have your journal records always be styled in the very same format and you don't want to miss out writing your journal on a single day. For that, we go back on our dropdown menu. Go on the three dots and go on repeat. On the repeat, we can set the cadence to either every day, every week, every month, or every year. You can decide what the cadence should be, or we can turn it off completely. Apart from that, we can also duplicate our template. If we want to duplicate it and change it a little bit to have another template, then we can click on duplicate or we can delete it completely. So it's completely gone out of our template repository. If we want to have an empty page as a default, rolling back to square one, where every page that we're creating is an empty page, then we simply select the empty page. Click on the three dots and set it as a default. Again, we were asked if it's just for this view or for all views. In this lecture, you learned about templates for database records that you need to replicate or reiterate on, on a fixed cadence, or every time you pull the information in, you can set a default layout that you wanted to appear in your database. And also you can style the properties by hiding them away. Use cases for that can be meetings, journaling, task management, or as shown in this example, invoices. If you have any questions in regards to this, please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 20. With these notion formulas, you can solve 99% of all problems: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about notion formulas. If you have ever used formulas in Microsoft or Google Sheets, then this will be an easy win. If not, don't worry. We are here to go through this step by step. For some people, formulas might look a bit intimidating. But I promise you, even though they are like 80 different formulas, in the reality you might need maybe 610 different formulas to solve 99% of the problems. I speak out of experience. I've also started from the point where you are right now for everything else, you will find a cheat sheet that I've created for you, explaining every formula in detail with an example in the video description. You can take the cheat sheet whenever you feel blocked or don't know which formula to choose from. For now, let's start off with the formulas and jump into notion. All right, we are back on our notion database and this is a test database. Just imagine this is customer data. We have here some records, some numbers, some dates that we collect in potentially a zip code and a country code of the respective entry. Now we want to make use of our formula property, and we do that by clicking on the plus and then selecting formula out of the property repository. We want to rearrange it to the numbers at first because we want to start working on numbers. The way this works is we click simply into the empty field. This will open up the Notion formula menu. This window consists of a central prompt intake, where we can add our Notion formula. We get a preview of the results. We have some properties and the formulas on the left hand side. As you can see, there's a lot of different formulas to choose from. We won't go through each and everyone just through some highlights, the most used and the most important ones for the rest, please refer to the cheat sheet that's in the video description. In the middle, you will find a quick explanation of every function. And it will also show you the syntax that you will need to use in order to get a result. But let's start from the beginning. The first thing that we see is that we have all the properties that we have created in our database available, so we can use any of the values here for a formula. First, we want to create a very simple calculation like a normal calculator would do. So we're using number one and adding it to number two. This is how it works. We are simply adding numbers. And we get a preview down here. Once we are done, we simply click on Done. As you can see, it is applied to all the records. We can use this formula to calculate all the different operators. So we get the divider, we can use the multiplier, and we can use the minus. It just works out. Something else that we frequently need to use is the so called comparison function. We can compare number one against number two, and if it's true, we get a checkbox. If it's not true, we get no checkbox. Let's try it out by simply using number one. And then we do two equal signs. The two equal signs mean that the both entries need to be the same in order to get the check box. Finally, we are adding number two to it. If I click now on, done, we get unchecked check boxes. This is because the two records aren't the same. Let's change this property to a normal number, not a percent, and create similar records. For example, here we will simply add a five. As you can see, it gives us the right checkbox. We can invert this equation by simply removing one equal sign and adding one exclamation mark. This will invert the formula by stating those two numbers should not be the same. Only if they are not the same, we will get a check box five is the same, hence the checkbox is empty. And here, the two numbers aren't the same. This is why we get the checkbox. A use case for this comparison might be, if we are saying, this is the percentage of number one, this is the current percentage of a task. Let's say we are currently at 10% and this is 100% We want to compare those two numbers, of course, we need to change it to the equal sign. Let's put it this way, the current value. This is target value only if we reach the target value, the job is done or the task is done, and hence we getting the completion status. This formula, we could rename it to Completion Status. And this might be a use case for using the comparison values. Another formula that I want to introduce to you is the if statement. The if statement is a very simple equation where we verify if a condition is true or not. Let's say if this field number one is empty, then we want to show an alert. If the field is not empty, then we don't want to show an alert. How does that work? We go into our formula field, we create an F function. The function starts off with an if statement. We open up the breakers, and then we say empty. There's a verification step of the number one. We are checking if number one is empty, if that is true. Now with the comma, we're separating the condition from the output value one, which is the output when the condition is true. If that's true, if number one is empty, then we want to showcase an alert. We're doing this with the quotes, the alternate output. We are again separating with the coma. We just put empty quotes, so that means there's no output whatsoever. And then we closing the equation, Now we click on Done, and the formula is empty, y, because number one isn't empty. If we are now deleting the number, you can see that we get an alert here indicating that number one is empty. That's the first if statement that we learned here. In combination with an empty verification, that's also great for data integrity. Let's imagine we have a customer database and we want to verify that all entries are filled. So we could, for every entry, create such an alert that informs us if there's an entry missing. Now something else that we can do with numbers is we can calculate, of course, percentages and something like sales tax or the end price. Let's say number one is indeed the price. Number two is the tax amount. We are changing this property back to a percentage down here, and we say the percentage on this product is 5% and this one is 10% First of all, we want to calculate the tax amount by simply calculating the price times the tax. That's it. Then we wanted to calculate the final price. We are duplicating this property, we call it. Then we go in here and simply add the price plus the tax amount that we just calculated here. And click on Done This way, we calculated price times tax equals the end price. If we want to, we can of course hide the step. We can also combine those two steps in one calculation. I just separated them so that the calculation is easier to next. Calculation I want to show you is with dates. Let's create a new formula and we push it forward to the dates. Let's imagine this is a date payable of an invoice. We say due date now we want to with the formula. If we have already exceeded the due date, and if we did, then we want to create an alert. Let's jump into it. We need to start off with an formula. And we want to check whether the due date is smaller than today's date. And we can call in the today's date as a variable with the now statement. Now, opening closing brackets. That's by the way. Whenever our formula is incomplete or has an error, we get this error message down here and it will explain us what's missing. In this case, our if statement is far to be complete, so let's continue. If today's date is greater than the due date, so we exceeded the due date, then we want to get an alert. If not, we don't want to get anything, we just close it down. As you can see, today is 9 March, so we have exceeded the due date here and we get an alert. Versus this one is not getting an alert because it's still in the future. Something else that we can do with our formulas is to add certain days or to deduct certain days from a date property. Let's go in here and we can use the date at function to add certain days to a date. We are using date number two here. After we have referred to the respective date to which we want to add days to, we need to define how many units we want to add. And I'm intentionally saying units, in this case three. In the next condition, we need to define what kind of currency we want to add, whether is days, years, weeks, months. We can define that by an opening and saying days, closing quotes, then we close the records again. If we now click on Done, you will recognize that we have added the days to the date. Number two, The very same thing works with subtracting day. If we select date Ad, or simply just the Ad, then we add sub tract. Then we can also delete three days from the previous date that we have here. Also, we can calculate how many days are left. For example, if this is a due date and we want to know how many days we have until we reach this one. In order to calculate that, we want to calculate the distance between now and the target date, which is date two in the currency days. We are closing this property and click on Done. As you can see, it is calculating me 29 days from the ninth till 31 March and 41 days until April 20. This is a great formula. For example, if you have a approaching due date and you just want to see how much time you have left. Something else to keep in mind is a formula to connect different fields with each other. Let's imagine again, this is our customer database and we want to create a unique customer ID based off the properties of the customer. Let's say it's the name, it's potentially the Zip code, it's the country code, and maybe the date when this person became a client of us. These are, in our case now, enough properties to create a unique alphanumeric code based on which we can identify the client. In order to create now this code, we simply connect different fields to each other. We first select name, then we take the plus state, two plus zip code, plus country code. Now if we click Done, you see we have an entire string of all the records that we have added here. If we want to format this in a bit nicer way so that we can read it better, then we simply add in between of the plus a add space, potentially connector another space and another quote. You can see we have now structured the information a little bit better in order to give a better readability to all the components we just add what we created in between of the pluses. Have we now click on Done? We have successfully formatted our formula towards what we need. That's it. We have successfully applied the most important formulas to our notion database. If you ask me, these are the formulas that I would recommend you to somehow remember. I mean, you don't need to learn them by heart. Of course, you can use the cheat sheet to go through these, but I guess these are the ones with which you will solve 99% of all the problems that you face when you want to work with data and want to manipulate data in a certain way. If you have any questions, if you feel there's any formula missing that you would like to have insights into, then please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I would see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 21. Notion Database - Ingest data from external sources: Hello on, welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to explore external connections to your notion database. So if you're using Github, Google Drive, Figma, or Zendez, then listen because you can import information from those sources directly into your notion space. In particular, for the case of Google Drive, this is a great way to, number one, overcome the five megabyte upload limit that you have on the free plan in notion. And number two, you do not have to recreate your entire file structure in notion. So let's jump into notion and figure out how. All right, we are back on our notion workspace inside a database and we want to click now on the plus to explore those connections. As mentioned down here, we see the currently available connections. We have the Github connection, Google Drive, Figma, and Zendesk. This is a great way to pull in information that you have stored on these systems in order to enrich the database that you have right now. Let's try out for Google Drive, the sign up process and the connection process itself is similar irrespectively which connection you want to build. So we will figure out at hand of Google Drive. Let's click on Google Drive, it's opening up a new column. Let's open up the column. And we do that by simply clicking inside the column. Now we have two options to choose from. Number one, we can paste a Google Drive link into this column. We need to make sure that this Google Drive link is however public link, so we do not need any permissions to access it, otherwise, it's just a link. And we can pull the information in or number two, we can connect our database directly to Google Drive. And this is what we're doing right now, so let's click Connect to Google Drive. It's opening up a paper window. We need to select our account. Confirm permissions. Again, confirm permissions and after a few seconds, we have connected successfully our notion account with the Google Drive account. As you can see, it has confirmed the connection. In order to attach a file to our newly created property, we simply click into the property. And again, we either pay the link to the Google Drive file or we can scroll through all the available files by simply clicking on our account name. This will open up paper menu and we can select a file which is now attached to the property. We can as the file by simply clicking on it. This will open up a new tab in our browser where we can view the file in full size. Or we get a preview down here. If we want to get the direct link to the original file, then we simply click on the three dots and copy the link to original. With that, we can access the original file on our Google Drive. If we want to detach the link between the file and our property, then we simply need to click in the top right corner of the respective property cell. Then we can delink the file from the cell. And we can repeat the process simply to attach a new file if we want to get rid of the connection, because we say we don't want to have any personal files anymore in here. Then we simply go to the Settings and Members menu. Click on my connections, select the corresponding connection, click on the three dots, and select Disconnect account. This will work the very same way also for Github, Zendesk, and Figma files. This was a short one showing you how you can connect external sources towards your notion database so that you can directly import files and information into your database. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture cheer. 22. Database Connections (Link and Rollup): Hello and welcome back to this course. Sometimes there are things that just go better together, such as mobile phones and signals, or plants and water. The very same thing can apply to data structures as well. Just imagine you own a business where you have a database for your client data and a database for your invoices. Now, wouldn't it be cool to connect those two databases together so that you are always aware of which client made you, how much money or which invoice belongs to which client. And also in turn, you could even pull information from one database to the other. So when you create a new invoice, you don't have to manually write down the address of your client, but you can pull it in automatically. So there are numerous arguments to connect those two database together. And in this lecture we will have a look at notion database relations and roll up fields. Let's jump into it. All right, we are back on our Notion workspace. And in our Notion workspace we have created a little client tracker. It's a very simple, a database actually, where we collect the name of the client, a date since when they are our client and the phone numbers. We could of course, add multiple more properties, but for our example, this will work out. On the other hand, if I'm going up a level, we have an invoice tracker where we record the invoices that we are sending out. Also, we want to collect potentially how much money we made with an invoice, so let's call this invoice. It's a simple numeric field, number field. And we can't collect the sum in US dollars just pulling it over. Invoice one was 50 bucks. In invoice two was 100 bucks. Now we want to connect those two database together. And we do that by simply clicking on the plus on the right hand side. Then we go down to relation. Once you click on relation, we need to define which database we want to relate to. We are using the client tracker now. Notion has opened up the property settings menu here it confirms again that we are connecting it to client tracker. We can also give it a different name, but I just wanted to call it client tracker for visibility. Next up we can define the limit. A limit means how many records can we connect to each other? Should it be a want, one relation, or can we connect multiple records with one individual record? In our example, it would make sense to go with no limit. Why? Because one customer can have, of course, more than one invoice. It makes sense if we are opening up this relation to no limit, otherwise, we would set it to one page. Next up, we also want to show it in bidirectional way. If we toggle this off, it would only show up on our invoice tracker. But if we're toggling this one to the right hand side, then we get this relational field on both ends. Let's connect it and add the relation, and it has created us. Now this relational field, as you can see, it's indicated that this is relational field with this arrow. We had this arrow already when we talked about external connections. Whenever you're connecting something, then you have this arrow. Next up, we need to connect the invoices to the respective entries in our client tracker. So we have to map the information. For that, I simply click into the field and I am now searching for the respective client. To attach the invoice two, I'll say this is Fred. I want this one to go to mark this where we have now created the relation. If we want to get rid of the relation between those two entries, then we simply click on the minus, as we have allowed more than one relation. We could potentially also add Josh here on the invoice track review. It might not make that much sense because usually one invoice goes to one customer and not to multiple customers unless we're splitting the invoice. But in this case, we keep it as one. I'm clicking now out of the relational field now, as indicated, I want to pull in some basic information from Mark and Fred, so I don't have to manually look them up for that. I am creating a so called roll up. A roll up formula is like a look up formula in Google Sheets or in Microsoft X. We can actively pull information from other databases or other tables that meet a certain condition. The condition here is the relation between those two entries. We are on our Property Settings menu. We can change the type of the relation from roll up to something else, but roll up is what we want to. We can also change the name here, and now we need to select the respective relation. As you can see also the Google Drive relation shows up. All the relations that you've created for a single database will be pre populated. In this view, we can search for the respective relation in case you have dozens of different relations on top. Here, let's select the client tracker. Now we are defining what property we want to pull in. Let's say we want to get the phone number. Then we can even calculate. We can show the original, we can show all unique values. We can count stuff. We can count fields that are empty, count fields that are not empty, and we can count the percentage, which doesn't make much sense, since these are phone numbers. Of course, maybe next up we want to duplicate this property, but instead of the phone number, we want to understand when they are our clients. Click on added property and change the property to the client since fhere again we want to show the original. So far, so good. We connected those entries. Now let's look into the client tracker and see what we can do with the invoice tracker information in the client tracker. Now that we are back in the invoice tracker, we have also created automatically a property field for the relation inside the client tracker and it's also showing which invoices are related to the individuals. Now we might want to understand how much money we made with each individual clients. We are using a roll up formula and we want to collect information from the invoice tracker. Instead of the invoice number, we want to have the invoice sum. And we don't want to have the original, we want to have the total sum. Now if we go back to our invoice tracker and we are simply adding a few more invoices, then you will see how these properties behave with more than one record assigned to it. Let's say this is again 50 bucks. We are adding invoice number four which is another 150 bucks. And we are connecting this one again to Fred and this one also to Fred. Now if we go back to our client tracker, we'll see that the sums have added up, so we can see the total amount of money that we made with each client. Of course, you can transfer this example to a lot of use cases. It could be, for example, houses versus individual flats. It could be bookshelves versus individual books. It could be individual files versus file drives. It could be departments versus employees. Or it could be categories versus individual entries. Whenever you need to sum up information by a higher category or you simply want to connect to records, then it makes sense to think about a two database design where you connect the databases with relational properties and pull information with a roll up property. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture cheer. 23. Notion Database Button Automations: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture we are going to talk about notion button automations in your database. If you now think that sounds a bit like a repetition, then only because you're right. We have already talked about button automations, but in the context of integrating them into a page directly. However, in this example, we are placing this button as a property into our notion database, giving us a chance to semi automate different steps of our workflow in our database. So let's have a look at it. All right, we are back on our Notion workspace and we are in the client tracker. And in the client tracker we are connecting our client tracker with the notion invoice tracker. Wouldn't it be cool? Now if we simply go to our client tracker and with a click of a button, we can register a new invoice. This is what we're going to try out here. Let's click on the Plus, and we go down to Button. Let's click on Button. And you will recognize this property layout because it's the very same as with the button automations that we integrate it into our notion page. As always, we give it a handy name, we can give it a label if we want to. And then we simply have a trigger. The trigger is, the button is clicked. Next up we can add the actions with the click of a button. We can add a page to another database. We can addit a page in another database. We can show the confirmation. We can open the page that we've just newly created and we can also addit any property that we have in here. So right now we want to add a page to the invoice tracker. So let's go down to the invoice tracker. Invoice number can be blank. Let's call it new invoice so that we know we have to add some more information to it. We want to set a due date by, for example, today. And we want to set the invoice sum to $100 So that makes sense if you have a limited amount of services, of course, where you might create a button for the $100 service, $50 service, and $25 service, just to name it. Right then we want to add another step. As a next step, we want to add the page. We want to attach this page, like the page where we click the button towards the newly created page, and therefore we are selecting a and select the new page which opens up directly. That's it, We want to give it a proper name. Let's add new $100 invoice as a name and press Enter. And we are now exiting the menu. Let's test it out. We click on Ne hundred Dollar Invoice. As you can see, it has created a new invoice in the invoice tracker, it has already added the sum to the roll up field. And let's go into the invoice and check out how that looks like. It has created a new page with the right sum and the right due date. That works out fine. We can of course, add multiple button automation. If we stick to the example of adding a new invoice and let's say you have three services, then it would make sense to, for example, create a button where you say, this is the new $50 invoice. So that you can trigger the respective invoices with a click of a button. We would simply again add the page, then add the page. We could also show the confirmation or open the page directly afterwards. So we are redirected to the page that we just created to add the respective details if we want to. As you can see, this isn't much different from the button automation that we added directly to our Notion page. It gives you lots of opportunity to semi automate processes that you would otherwise do manually. And also it's up boosting your data accuracy because you're entering the information just once and it's then repeating the very same step over and over again as always, the example of creating a new invoice is transferable, whether it is to create a ticket for a bar, a ticket for a new work, request a new task of a project, or adding a new agenda point to your weekly meeting. As always, if you have any questions in regard to the notion button automations, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 24. Notion Database Automations (Paid Feature): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about Notion database automations, which is the next level of notion button automations. With Notion button automations, we trigger semi automated workflows by pressing a button. If we even want to get rid of this button push, then we can opt into Notion database automations, but beware, this is a paid feature. So here we are hitting the limits of the notion free plan. If it's worth the money, this is up to you to decide. Let's figure out how this feature works inside notion. We are back to our notion workspace and we are entering our invoice tracker where we still have our button automation. So if you remember, with the push of a button, we can execute certain steps. And the very same methodology works also with notion automations. And we can create a workflow by clicking on the bolt on the top right of our database. By doing that, we can add a new automation. You will recognize this interface as this is the very same workflow as for the button automations. We can add a trigger. A trigger event can be literally anything that happens inside this tracker or inside this database. We can trigger a workflow by adding a page, any page to this database, or by the change of any property, or we can use a specific property. In this use case, I want to change the invoice number by clicking into the check box and confirming that an invoice is paid. In this case, my trigger is the check box paid, needs to be checked. I click on Don. This is my trigger. And now I want to add an action. In this case, I want to change the property of the invoice number, which is our very first field, and I want to set it into the paid mode, so simply adding paid as a node here, And that's it. I could add other steps. I could, for example, addit any property inside this database, but I could also addit pages in other databases and I could also add another page to a database. For example, I could trigger an automation on my invoice tracker saying, whenever a new invoice is created, it should be assigned to a specific client if that makes sense. If there's for example a dedicated invoice tracker just for a client and I can connect my notion account to your slack account. Means when there's a change in my notion database, it triggers a notification to my select channel or as a direct message. I will show you this at the very end of this lecture. So let's first continue with our automation. So we have selected paid set to check, and set invoice to Paid. We click on Create, and now our database is up and running, so let's test it out. I will click this invoice to be paid. It will take a few seconds until the automation executes, and it has changed the invoice number to paid on the left hand side, as you can see, this is a very helpful feature to automate certain steps into your workflow. If we click on the bold, we cannot only change and edit our automation. We can also pause it temporarily or delete our automation. Now I want to click on Added. As always, it will execute the automations from top to bottom. So based on the actions that we have defined here, it will just go from top to bottom. In the very same order, we should arrange the steps that they make sense. In this case, I want to delete my action and add the notification to slack. This is actually the only free automation that you can set up on the free account. All of these actions are not enabled on the free account, but the select notification is enabled. Let's figure that one out. We are selecting slack. Now we need to select a select channel. And it's telling me that we have not yet connected a select channel to it. We connect it by clicking on Connect. The next thing that we need to do is we need to actually sign into our workspace. If you have a workspace, then you can click on Find your Workspace In Slack. I will log into Slag with my Google account because this is a linked account already. So I confirm it. I give all the permissions necessary and I will select the appropriate workspace. Once I've connected my slack workspace, I can now select the channel that I would like to reach out to. So in this case, I'm selecting notion Punk, click on Safe. On the other hand, I'm logging into Select just to check out if my automation is working. So I've set up the automation. I've opened up slack in another browser tab to check out if the automation is working. So let's figure out, I'm now adding a new invoice. Just call it test. Now, I will set it on pad. We will have a look if the automation is triggered. And as you can see, it has sent me the notification into my select channel. So this is a very handy feature. In this lecture, we talked about notion automations, a way to completely automate workflow steps in your notion database. As I said, this isn't a free feature. It's up to you to decide whether you want to pay an extra fee to get this function, or if you also can live with pressing a button on the button automations. 25. Notion Database Entry Dependencies: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about dependencies between tasks. You might remember that we talked about splitting databases into two if the data structure requires it. Our example back in the days was we have a database for invoices and a database for clients. Both require their very own database. Why? Because the data structure is just different. It doesn't make sense to try capturing invoices in a client database that is just collecting data points for clients and vice versa. So it makes sense to split those two. But what if we want to stay on one database because the data structure isn't any different? Let's say we have a big task and we want to just become more granular and break this big task up into smaller bits and pieces. For example, to collaborate with others or to outsource a task. Now this is where dependencies and sub level items come into the game. And I will show it to you a notion. So let's jump over. We are back on our notion workspace and I've created a little work tracker. Very simple thing. In the first column, we have the task name, we have a status bar, we have the Dubai column, and we have the assigned person to it. This is great if we have a simple process or simple task that does not require any more detail. But what if we want to break it up into several components so that we can say, okay, this part of the task is being dealt with by another team or another colleague. Now this is where we want to add a sub level to our task. And we do that by clicking on the three dots on the right hand side of our database. And you go down to sub items. Then you click on Turn on Sub Items. And what happens now is that we are adding another layer to our task or to our database entries. If I click on the new item, this item will belong to task number one. So it will be attached to task number one. And I can call it, for example, Task 1.1 This is adding a hierarchical sub level to task number one. And I can continue by adding, for example, Task 1.2 and I can also add Task 1.3 Now, this gives me the option to take Task 1.1 and assign it to a different person. For example, if Task 1.1 is being dealt with finance department, I can just assign the finance department and they would know which part of the process they are responsible for. It's a great way to organize work and to split things into smaller bits and pieces. If I want, I can become even more granular, even more detail, and add more sublevels to it. So as you can see, if I even untoggle Task 1.1 I can add Task 1.1 0.1 and I can become even more granular in breaking this one up into Task 1.1 0.1 0.1 Of course, the more granular become, the more administrative work is required to keep everything up to date. So try to find a good balance between breaking up the task in smaller bits and pieces, but on the other hand, keeping it manageable. As you can see, the data structure isn't changing and we can collect the very same data points and manage the very same data points inside the subtask. I can assign persons or I can adjust the columns to what I need to. This is a great way to keep things organized and to have the oversight of your project and task completion. Next, what I want to show you is dependencies. A dependency is if we just deselect all those subtasks. A dependency means that a task can either block another task or can be blocked by another task. Let's imagine we have task number two. And let's imagine task number one needs to be recoplete first, then task number two, and then task number three. That means if we look at task number two, task number two is blocked by task number one and is simultaneously blocking task number three. That means it doesn't make any sense to start with task number three when task number 1.2 haven't been completed. In order to showcase and visualize these dependencies, which can become very relevant if you have complex topics or complex processes where the gears need to fit into each other. We are opening up our database on the right hand side, and then we go on Dependencies, and we are going to turn on Dependencies. Let's click on Turn on Dependencies. As you can see, we have technically created simple relational columns. This means we create relations between tasks and not between databases. Let's stick to our example of task number two. Task number two is blocked by task number one In turn, task number two is blocking task number three. This is like a balanced exercise. Means as soon as I'm adding a block by or blocking task, the opposite will happen with the task that we are just assigned. When I add blocked by task number one, we will get a blocking task number two in task number one. This is indicating in which order, kind of, we need to complete our task. This feature becomes even more sophisticated when we go into our date field and include an end time, because now we are able to capture a date range until which we want to complete this. Respective task. Let's say task number one goes from fourth to seventh. Let's say task number two goes from eighth to 11th. Let's say task number three goes from 18th, 22nd of March. Now we are just adding time lines to it. Wouldn't it be great if we could visualize those on our calendar and this is definitely possible. Let's add another view to our tracker. Actually, we have not yet talked about views. This is a separate lecture, but I just want to show you how this works. We are creating a timeline. This timeline is called time line view and I click on Don. As you can see right now, we are just visualizing the very same information in another order. Instead of a table list view, We are now switching over to a timeline. We have task number one, which is blocking task number two which is blocking task number three. We can show these dependencies with these arrows and all the subtasks are organized below it with the toggle feature turned on. This requires that you always enter a start and an end date for your task in order to make this work. We can also change the dependencies of these tasks in this tracker by simply deleting a dependency by clicking on this X, for example. Now if I want to recreate a dependency, then I just attach it back to the respective task. We can even add another dependency by simply dragging and dropping the arrow. The thing that I just skipped a few seconds ago in our dependencies is how the calendar should behave if we're moving around task. As you can see, if I'm now moving task number two, it shifted task number one because logically we still are dependent on task number one. Task number two cannot start before we have not finished number one. If you want to change this behavior, then you click on the menu on the right hand side. Go to Dependencies, and you click on Shift and maintain time between the items. This way, the shifting of one item will move the entire project to the left or to the right. The time relation, the time distance between those tasks will stay intact. The other option that you have here is do not shift automatically. If I'm now shifting around, it will mess up with my times, but it will not automatically adjust any of the timelines itself. The default value, if I go back to the dependencies, is shift only when dates overlap. So that means I can move task number two around and it will only have an impact on the previous or the next task if there is a date overlap. As you can see right now, this is a great tool to manage tasks and projects and to make sure, number one, we have the oversight of a project. Number two, we can get granular and manage inputs from various teams or various colleagues. And we can use it as a tool to make sure that our timelines are realistic and then we're not messing up with any workflows that need to be followed in a specific sequential order. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video. Cheers. 26. Lets build: a Notion Invoice Tracker (Exercise): Hello and welcome back to this course. This lecture marks a little milestone on our journey to become a true notion master. Why? Because we have successfully completed the notion foundational properties and databases. And we also talked already about the formulas. This is kind of the most important thing that you need to know about notion database. Of course there is much more, but if you want to reduce it to the most essential, you completed it already. That's great. In order to continue on our path and since formulas are super important, you get it right. This is another exercise lecture. The exercise scenario I've prepared for today is a little invoice tracker. As always, this is completely voluntary and you can skip the lecture. But I highly recommend you to keep on practicing as much as you can. So let's jump over to Notion and look at the example. All right, we are back on our Notion workspace and we are here on our invoice tracker. Every line represents an invoice that we want to keep track of whenever we are adding a new line. This is a new invoice. We have a due by date, and we have also a paid checkbox and an invoice storage. So we could upload our invoice into this database. Now this checkbox triggers something. Whenever I press paid, I update the status into nothing. So the total status is empty, the payment status is okay. We are also calculating the remaining days until we need to pay the invoice. And we also calculate the day by which we need to initiate the payment pay all formulas, they are just support formulas to break the big formula into certain smaller components. Actually, I just want to see at the very end just the total status. So I want to understand whether I'm overdue, how many days I'm remaining, and I want to understand by which date I need to initiate the payment so that I'm not at risk of being overdue. In the end, I would simply hide those two. You can pause the video now and in a few seconds I'm going to review the solution. So take a bit of time and try to recreate. Think about the solution. Think about the formulas. We have talked about all these formulas before. And give it a try. I will see you in a few seconds. All right, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed this exercise. And don't worry if things are not working out at the very first time. You're here to learn and it's completely okay to take the course at your very own pace. Coming back to the solution. Let's go through it step by step. The basic properties we have already discussed. I think this is nothing new. Let's maybe start with the support functions that we have created. Maybe the date status first. We want to understand if an invoice is overdue or if not, how many days are left for that we have created and if formula. So first of all, we're comparing now versus the Dubai. As soon as now the Qd date is larger than the Dubia date, then we are of course, overdue hands. The first reaction on if this is true is overdue Alert here. If this is not true, so means we have still some time to go. Then we are combining a fixed expression, which is the remaining days, together with a dynamic component, which is the date between the due by date and today's date in the currency days. This leads ultimately to remaining days four or overdue. The other thing that we want to verify on is whether or not the invoice is still to be paid. This is why I've created another formula for the payment status. As soon as I'm taking the box, it's switching over to paid. Very simple formula. We are simply checking if the box here is empty. And if it's empty it's still payable because then it's not paid. And if it's not empty, it's paid. So we can switch over to paid status. And finally, those two formulas speak into the total status, which means we are simply checking is this box checked or not. If it is empty, then we want to simply showcase the payment status so it's still payable. And we want to also give the date status. Means we have remaining four days. If it's not payable because the box is checked, we just want to display nothing. This is the logic behind it. And of course, you also have a date subtract formula attached to calculate the due by date minus three days so that we know when we need to initiate the final payment. All right? I hope this was a fun exercise for you to do. If you have any questions on the formulas, consider revisiting the previous lecture where we talk about the formulas in detail. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 27. Notion Timeline View and Notion View Settings: Hello and welcome back to this course. You start getting bored by the default list view of our databases then, don't you worry. We are now embarking on to exploring different views in our Notion database. And I promise you can design your very own database in the view that you prefer. Let's jump over into Notion and explore them first hand. We are back on our database, our work tracker, and just as a little repetition, we talked about the timeline view before. The timeline view is just a different visualization of our list view, where we can define the timeline and visualize the timeline and the dependency between the task. We can zoom in and zoom out on our scale on the right hand side, from yearly view to an hours view, a day view, or a month view. As you can see, we are changing then the granularity on how much we want to zoom in, which just helps to manage our information. We can go back and forth on our timeline by these errors, or we can go back to today by clicking on today. Other than that, we also have an open and calendar function. This opens up the notion calendar, which is a topic for itself. I'm going to talk about that in a separate topic. If you want to create a new item on this view, then you simply go on the left side and you click on. By doing that, you can give it a name, press Enter, and that's it. This is how you can create a task. Also on the timeline view, else we have certain settings that we can adjust for our view. We can of course, change the layout by clicking on layout. So here we have different other layouts that we are going to talk bit by bit. We can decide where it should pull the timeline from. Just imagine we have multiple date fields in our notion database. Then we might want to select a specific column that it should pull the dates from. In this case it's the Dubai. If we would have more date columns, then we can select a different one if that's the right forum. Next we can decide on whether we want to see a table on the left hand side which gives us a line for every task. And we can unfold also the subtasks. We can do that, of course, also in our timeline view, but this just helps us to see a list of all the tasks on the left hand side, because maybe there are some tasks that are out of our current view which are indicated by these errors. But with this view, you see all the tasks at a glance. Going back to the layout settings, we also can decide on how many table properties we want to show. In this case, we are only showing the name, but we can also enable other data points to be shown in the table on the left hand side. We can manually select them by clicking on this. And we can also go on the timeline and decide on which properties we want to show here, the more information is shown on our timeline. Going back to the property settings, we can also decide on how we want to open up a page if we click on a database entry. So let's click on, for example, this task. It will now show up in the side view. But we can also define a different view if we want to. Let's click on the layout and select, for example, Center Peak, which means we get a pop up in the middle of the screen. Or full patridch means we're jumping on the entire page. The last thing to decide on is whether or not we want to show a page. Can Page can, if I simply click on a page, is an icon that we can select on the top row. We can also add a cover, an image, to a page. We'll talk more about this when we discuss the page styling elements. We can also add an icon. An icon can be an imoge. It can be either one of these emoges, an icon from the notion templates. Or we can add a custom emoge if we want to. Closing that one down, as we have enabled showing the icons on our timeline, the icon will pop up here. Next up in our menu, we can select again the properties that we want to show. Similar view as we just had before. We can filter by certain things. Let's say we want to only show things that happen after 8 March. We can decide on the property that should be our decisive filter criterion, in this case, Dubai. And we can set the filter to, for example, start date is relatively to today, or maybe today. This way we can filter out all the other tasks that might be irrelevant. These filters are dynamically, so that means they apply at every second. Once we move forward and we are on the 21st, the task number two won't be displayed anymore. Check always your filters. You can also combine different filters. If I go out here, we can add another filter and can filter, for example, by status and only showcase information that are, for example, done. I can also delete the filters by simply going on the filter. On the three dots on the right hand side and select Delete. Same, I go on the arrow on three dots and select Delete Filters. Now if I go back to the main interface, we can also sort the views. By clicking on the sort view, we can decide on what should be the decisive column or data point by which we want to sort the information. Let's say name is the decisive criterion, then it will sort the view by the name. The filter menu on the left hand side gives you an indication on the currently applied sortation. We can change the sortation, change the respective property. We can change whether it should be ascending or descending, and we can add in different sortation. We can put multiple sortations into it if we need to. If we want to reset the view to default, we click on Reset. If we want to save the view for everyone, then we click on this button. Otherwise, the view will only be visible to us. Next up, we have the Group functionality. With a group functionality, we can group together tasks and we can group them also by different properties. Let's say we want to group them by status. This means, as you can see, it's now grouping everything that is not started in progress or done. This might help to visually indicate in which status our tasks are right now. Other grouping mechanisms could be, for example, to group by customer, by invoice date, or by the day. You can group it as you want. In order to change the group property, we click on Group By, and there you can define the respective property which shall be decisive for your grouping. For example, if you want to group instead by the Dubai date, then you can do that. As you can see, it's grouping by the last 30 days or the next 30 days. You can also decide on how it's going to group the date. So we can either use a relative date. We can group by the day, either week, the month or the year. Again, we can sort it as it makes sense. We can decide on whether or not we want to hide empty groups or not. If I de select hide empty groups, then there is a group that's called no due date. So there might be a task that has not yet assigned a due date that would pop up here. But if we want to hide those empty groups, then we simply select the toggle on the right hand side, providing you a cleaner overview of your tasks going back. The remaining options are subs dependencies. We have already talked about this in the previous lecture. We have a so called load limit. This indicates on how many tasks are going to be loaded, right from the beginning when you open up the page until you have to scroll down and it's reloading. That means it is just limiting the first preview to, for example, ten pages, 25 pages, or 100 pages. The less pages you select, the faster the response time off the notion page will be. Below that. We also have the automations which we already talked about so you can build yourself on workflows inside Notion. You have also the option to lock your database, so that means no one else can edit the database aside from you to avoid any unintentional changes to your database. It can also copy the link to view this database. If you click on this and send over the link to someone who has an account with notion, they are able to directly view this page. We can of course duplicate this view if you need to, and we can delete this view. In this lecture, we talked about the timeline view. We also talked about the settings that you can apply on a view. Of course, these are a bit different depending on the view that you're going to install, but generally they are more or less the same. In the next lectures, we are more focusing on the view itself rather than on the settings, even though I will give a quick indication on the settings. But if you need a detailed explanation on the settings, please go back to this lecture to get the complete explanation. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 28. Notion Calendar and Board (Kanban) View: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about the calendar view and the board view in our database, giving you two more options to choose from to visualize instyle your dashboards according to your needs. Let's jump over Interina back on our work space, we have our work tracker opened. In the last lecture we talked about the timeline view. A view that is somehow similar but still a bit different is the calendar view. Clicking on the plus as we are opening up our new view and then selecting calendar view. As you can see right now, it has created ourselves a calendar. What's now the difference between the timeline view and the calendar view? The timeline view gives us a horizontal view of our timeline. Means we are working from start to finish to the right hand side. Whereas a calendar view is really what the name suggests, a calendar, we are not really seeing the dependencies between tasks, but we can see for which days we have planned our tasks, so we are occupied. So instead of showing a timeline kind of view in between of the week days and the weeks, we will see a bar that is extending over the calendar, gaming us a good bird's eye view on what's currently going on. Of course, we can open the view in the calendar. The notion calendar is a separate feature that is quite a big tool that we enhance. We are going to talk about it in a separate view. We can scroll through the calendar by the arrows and we can jump back to the current day by clicking on today. Else we have certain settings that we can set. Of course, we can change the layout. If we click on the layout, we can select the respective property by which we want to sort our calendar. We can show the calendar as month or as a week. We can turn on or off the weekends to be presented to us, giving us either just the business days or the full calendar. Again, we can decide on how we want to open our pages and whether or not we want to show page items. I'm flying a bit through the settings right now because there was an extensive explanation already in the previous lecture where we talked about the timeline view. If you want to get a detailed explanation of what all this means, then please go back to the previous lecture. If you go out the layout settings, we can select our filter, our sortation, our sub items, dependencies, automations, everything that we have discussed already previously about our database views. Nothing different to the calendar view. Another view that I want to show you that helps, in particular if you're having a very task heavy and process heavy workload, is the board view. The board view might remind you of a Canman system. Why? Because you can set it up as a Canman. So what is the Canon? A Cain is actually a work system productivity system, which categorizes your tasks and your processes in three stages. The three stages are not started in progress or done. Why is it a good idea to use a Canman system for productivity management? From my perspective, there's no better way to get a quick overview on the work assignment as of right now with a Can View. Because you directly see what needs to be done, what is already in preparation, and what is concluded. It's giving you a very simple but effective way to manage your workload. How do we create a Cavan in our board view? First of all, we need of course, a specific property to refer to. This can either be a tag, so means a multi select property or the status property. The status property is great. Why? Because if we go in the status property, it already comes with our three groups to do group in progress, group, complete group. We can of course, get more granular in the statuses and subs status. For example, here I created an not started assigned in progress, waiting for approval and done status, so we can become more granular. The default value here is that we are getting all the subs statuses as individual column. But we can also change it, as I said, to a menu by clicking on the three dots and going on the layout. And then group by status. If we then select status by group instead of option, you see that we are now having just three columns in here. This is the puristic canon view that I was talking about. If we're working on this view, we simply shift the task from one column to the next one. If I start working on task number one, I will push it into task in progress. And if I completed task number four, I will move it over. As soon as I'm shifting the tasks, the status will update automatically on our status bar. This is a very handy feature if you have a lot of tasks that you work simultaneously on and you want to maintain oversight on it. Other settings that are specific to the board view, if I click on our three dots in the layout menu is the card preview. So we can decide on whether we want to show page cover, for example, the image that we've selected in the page. We will talk more about the page cover when we talk about page styling, but in general, you can select a cover here and you can decide on whether you want to show it. Another setting that you can take is to decide on showing a card preview with the page content. This way, if you go on a page and add a bit of content, you will see a preview on the card itself. This makes it easier to identify the task if the task name isn't self explanatory and you need to see a bit of the page content as a preview. Next up in the layout settings, we can decide on the card size. Do we want to have it small, do we want to have them medium size, or do we want to have them really large size? That depends on your preference on how you want to manage your tasks in the work in the board view. Next up, you can decide on whether you want to fit the image. If we go to the card preview, select page cover and toggle this one. You see that it will go with the original size of your cover with the nets. Next setting Rep Ball properties. If you are showing more properties on the cards as if we would go here and select other properties and the properties would be longer than the cards with, then you can decide on whether you want to wrap. This means you add a line or not. So it depends on your preference, what you want to do here. Below that, we can change the grouping that we selected. We can define on whether we want to color our columns to have a better oversight. And we can decide how we want to open the pages and whether or not we want to show the page icons, for example, for those two. In this lecture, we talked about the Or view in comparison to the timeline view and the board view, as well as we also understood how we can set up our board view as a Cam, as a means of productivity management and improving our efficiency. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. 29. Notion Gallerie and List View: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to conclude on the Notion database views and we're concluding with the list view and the gallery view. So let's jump into Notion and check them out on our Notion workspace. I have created a little bookmark tracker. And this bookmark tracker has just two columns. On the one hand we have the name of the site, and on the other we have the URL. This tracker is in a table view of our database. The table view can be more or less universally applied, but sometimes it's just too much and overflowing with information. So let's figure out a leaner way to visualize limited information. And we click on the plus to open up another view, and then we select the list view. List view is a really simplified list of things. If I just ted the view, you can see that we have just a consecutive list of all the different bookmarks. As always, we can adjust the list according to our needs. For that, let's check out the options that we have in our layout menu. However, they are very limited when we click on a page, if it should open up in a side view, center view, or as a full page on whether or not we want to show H icon. So this is very limited, but what we can add to the properties, if we want to also show the properties, which I did right now, just closing it down, then you can see that we're showing the properties on the right hand side. And the way we are displaying properties is generally different than other views because they will distribute over the length of this list. So giving us a very minimalistic style element to visualize data Else we just have the standard settings such as filter sort, group, sub items, dependencies, and automations. If you want to have a detailed explanation of those settings, then please go back to the lecture where we discussed the timeline view, where we are going to explore all the features in detail. This is the list view, as I said, nothing overly spectacular. Just a minimal version of our table view. The other view that I want to show you is the gallery review. And the gallery review is, for example, great. When we talk about a contact database, let's imagine we are having a client tracker. On the client tracker, we have certain individuals. We have the name, the clients in state. We have the phone number, So a couple of relevant information for our contact database, but we might want to visualize them in a more flashcard style of view. In order to do that, we click on the Plus, and then we select our Gallery Review. On the Gallery view, as you can see, it will change the view into a board view, but without the columns that we used to have over here we can customize the cards that have been created. Right now we can decide on whether we want to show the card preview as a page content. So that means if we go on the page and we, for example, make notes and say notes of the last call and we add some information here. Then in the view, in the page preview, page content preview, we would see all those notes. If we instead, for example, want to show the cover images, for example, the images of our employees. If this would be an employee database, then we can of course, go to our layout settings and select cover image instead. Here I've added some stock photos of some individuals. As you can see, this gives us a good overview of individual persons. Of course, we can select the card size. Whether it should be small or they should be large really depends on how we want to use them. We can decide on whether we want to fit the images so they are as a complete image on our card. We can wrap the properties if we want to. We can decide on how we want to open the pages or if we want to show the page icon. Now if we go back, of course, we can also adjust the properties that we want to show. For example, if it's relevant for me to also indicate the phone number or the total turnover, then we can do that in here. This is a great way to build our order dashboard and visualize information in a very consolidated view. In this lecture, we concluded the notion database. We with the list view and the gallery view. You have now seen all the different views and know exactly how to set them up and in which use cases they make sense. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 30. Notion Templates - find, use and create own templates: Hello and welcome back to this course. In the past lectures, we talked intensely about how to build out our database, how to arrange the views, and how to visualize the information as we need. And this is great, being able to build something from scratch the exact way we want it to be without writing any line of code. But sometimes we don't even have the time to do this, Sometimes we just want to start out without even giving a thought on how to structure our database. And this is the moment where we're super glad that notion offers a notion template gallery which is the topic of today's lecture. So let's jump on Notion and figure out how we can save ourselves time and haddock. We are back on our Notion workspace here. We got our trackers and now we want to create a new tracker. But we do not want to start from scratch, we want to use one of the pre packed templates. And good thing is that there is a very extensive notion template gallery. And for using this template gallery, we simply click on templates on the left hand side. It couldn't be more convenient and you will find a long list of different templates for different use cases, different categories of your life. So to directly jump into a project, on the top we find suggested templates. This is referring back to when we initially said, hey, I want to use notion for work, for my personal use or as a team. This will influence the suggested templates also being influenced by the previously selected templates. From the template gallery, you can see we start here from the very simple to do, list over projects, task, task, sprins, meetings, dogs, wiki, whatever it is, you will find it here. You will also find product specific templates. Marketing, engineering design, start up operations, sales, recruitment, HR, IT, and stuff for individuals. You can even use Notion to do journaling. And of course, there are different templates for different areas in our life. So there are templates for work, for school, for personal use, for projects, wikis and dogs notion will provide us always with a preview of the template in the middle of the screen. On the left hand side, we can decide on the individual templates or the categories on the top on the different areas of our life. In the middle, we will see the preview and we also got a search bar. Let's imagine I want something for task management. I would switch back to work and look up task. You can see this gives me a list of two different templates to choose from. If this isn't enough already, then we can click on more templates. And this will guide us to the extensive notion template gallery, where you not only find templates created by notion itself, but also templates from other creators. And also from me. Here you will find tens of thousands of different templates for almost every use case. If you want to select a template from here, let's say we want to use this book tracker. We just go on the book tracker. We always will get an indication on whether this template is three. Some templates are premium, so just keep an eye open on the free templates. We click on the template again, we get here a preview. And if we want to get this template, we simply click here. Sometimes this will redirect us to an external page. Not all the templates are hosted on the Notion template gallery. Sometimes you will be redirected to an external page. Don't be scared. If it's free, it's free. If it's not free, it's not free, just check it out. In this case, I'll simply click on Get Template. And this will open up now the template from the Notion Template gallery. And it's starting to duplicate the tracker into my Notion workspace. This might take a bit of time depending on the size of the template, on the sub levels of template and the files in the databases. Once it's ready, the template will be populated as a new page in our notion workspace and we can start using it. Sometimes there is like a manual off the template that explains the basic workflow of the template, sometimes not. It really depends on the creator and how they style their template. When you go back to the primary notion template gallery, which offers only templates directly by Nan, created by notion. If you want to make use of one of these templates here, then you simply click on again get template and this will populate the template in here. Sometimes the template might also look like this. Of course filled with information but with a dark mode labeled. And you wonder how you can import a template from a fellow creator. Then you go on the right hand side and check if there is a duplicate button on the top right. If there is, then this is good news because then you can import the template directly into your workspace. If there is no such duplicate button, then it might not be intended for duplication E, not intended as a template, or it is a paid template. So you need to pay to unlock the duplicate feature. In this case, if I want to duplicate this template, I just click on Duplicate. And it will recreate the template directly into my workspace. And here it is. Well done. In this lecture, we talked about notion templates, which is a great way to save on time if you're busy or simply don't want to reinvent the or start from scratch. I invite you to have a look at the notion template Gallery. As I said, many of them are for free. The notion templates from notion itself are all for free. So there's a great value add in using those templates. I wish you a lot of fun exploring the templates and I'm curious to know which use cases you will use the templates for. So have a look into the gallery, and I'll see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 31. Notion WebClipper - save bookmarks directly to Notion: Hello and welcome to this course. Do you also find it sometimes hard to manage your bookmarks? Save it for later, to read through them, or to organize them in an actionable way, then you're just like me. And the good thing here is that notion has a tool for that. It's called the notion Web clipper one and all tool to manage and organize bookmarks in an actionable way. Sounds good to be true. Let's find out in Notion. We are here on the notion website and we have selected the notion web clipper, which you can find under nano web minus clipper. The web clipper is an extension for your browser means for Chrome, Safari or Firefox, you will simply install it. And it gives you a way to save a page with one click, storing it into your desired destination, means in a data bank. Then you can make it actionable by, for example, categorizing it as a book, as a resource, or as an inspiration. This way you can stay organized at all times. How does that work? Let's find out. For the case of Chrome, we simply click on Install. For Chrome, it will direct us to the Chrome web store where all the different extensions are available, and then we click on Add to Chrome. It will ask us for confirmation whether we really want to add it to Chrome. I do it now. It will download the package and we'll install it. And now we have installed the tool. How does it work? Let's imagine we want to save this notion Wikipedia article to our database. And we read through it, but we find our, we don't have the time to read through the entire article as of now, so we want to store it for later. So we click on the icon on the top right of our newly installed tool, of our web clipper. And then it already identified the title of the page which is Notion Productivity Software Wikipedia. We can of course rename it to whatever style we want to organize our bookmarks database with. I call it just wiki minus notion. Then we need to decide on which database it should go into. I want to add it to the bookmark database that I created before, but here is also selection of different databases that it found. Let's look at bookmarks. We'll just scrape your Notion workspace and then I'm selecting the bookmarks database and I will click on Safe. Now, I can either open it in Notion directly or I can of course, manually go to the respective tab. But in this case, it has already created the page. On the notion side, it has not only given me the entire link, but also saved the entire article to my notion database. If I go back to my bookmarks, I will see there is the new notion page. And of course, I can add some kind of properties in here. So for example, if I want to add a new property to the database, I can do that by simply clicking New Property. Then I could select the multi select feature and add some categories, let's say books, wiki articles in Spo, whatever it is. Going back to the properties and exiting the properties and re selecting the property settings. I want to of course show the multi select. I now want to assign the specific category to my Wiki page. I'm opening up the page and then I go to the multi select entry, and I will define it as a Wiki entry. If I closing now my page, you will see that it added here, the Wiki entry. Of course, you can also work, for example, with categories. Let's say you have a category of to be read or archive or deleted. So you can group the individual records in your list view or table you whatever view you're preferring. You can manage the information directly inside your notion workspace. In this lecture, we explored the notion web clipper as a simple widgit for your browser. In order to safe and store content into your notion database and to stay organized at all times, check it out. I will put the link to the web clipper into the resources so you can install it and make up your own mind. Cheers, and stay organized. 32. Lets build: a Notion Expense Tracker (Exercise): Hello and welcome back to this course, Congress for Mastering the Notion. Database videos. I know this was a pretty intense series of lectures that you went through, but don't you worry, once you master and understand notion databases, everything else will become super smooth in notion. If you feel now intimidated, that's completely normal. Rest assured, I've been in the very same position and the only way to get better is exactly practice. This lecture is indeed again, another exercise. As always, this is completely voluntary. If you want to skip to the very end or skip the entire lecture, feel free to do it. However, I highly recommend you to practice and to become real master in notion databases. As always, you can watch the video until the mid, where you can pause the video. Just try to build the database yourself or build the project yourself. And then watch the video until the very end, where it will give you a step by step solution on the entire thing. Of course, I will also attach the template into the video description so that you can download it and you can see every bit and piece of it firsthand. That's enough for a moment. Let's jump into notion and look at the exercise. We are back on our workspace and this exercise is an expense tracker. We are building ourselves an expense tracker where we can capture in and outflows of money on a daily basis. How does this thing work? This is a dashboard. Indeed, we are building a dashboard, and this will include everything that we have done before. This should not be containing any new element to you. First of all, we have here a headline with an expense tracker. Then we got four different views of two databases. So let's start off with the databases first until we understand how the rest works out. So we have a database that contains all the transactions. We have the transactions named on the left hand side, we gave a category, income or cost. We give a total sum of the invoice. We want to have a status whether it's paid or overdue. That refers back to our checkbox, whether it's paid or overdue. We have a date payable. We also have a due date that we're displaying through a formula, so kind of adding the due in front of the date. We also have a total sum where we are calculating a plus or a minus or positive, or a negative value in front of the sum itself. And we have a connection to our categories and moving over to the financial categories which this tracker connects to. So we have a relational field in the financial categories. We have defined every category as in very own entry. And we're using the roll up function to view and summarize the total sums from the all transactions tracker. This is possible with a relation. You will need to work with a relation and of course, with formula. So going back to our dashboard, we have here a simple view of our categories, summarizing the total sums we have. On the left hand side, a new transaction field which is nothing else but a view of the all transactions filtered. I will give you a little hint here to where name is empty because every entry has a name. You won't see anything here besides the new field. This is kind of a button that we created here. Below that, we have the unpaid invoices. It's another view of the all transactions dashboard. And we have here all transactions, which is again, just a view of the all transactions database. That being said, I know this is a lot of information, might be confusing at the moment. Try to get as far as you come. If you're stuck, either pause, look at the template, or go to the solution. It's not at all a shame if things do not work out at the very beginning. Enjoy the exercise. And you can pause the video now. All right, we are back. I hope you enjoyed this exercise. So let's break down our database and dashboard. So first of all, we go to the all transactions database. Actually, we just have here a normal table view of our transactions where every new record so to speak, is a new transaction. Next up, we have here a single select property. Because it can be either a cost or income. It cannot be both at a time. How did we do that? We simply added the choices, nothing to spectacular. Next up is a simple numeric field where we collect the sum. Nothing to fancy. I will go over the native fields first and then we can talk about the formulas in depth. The next native field is the date payable. It's just a date field. We get the paid check box. Yes, no, we got an attachment property. Also very simple, straightforward. Next up we have a first formula. We check if something is paid or not. And this works of course, with two if functions. We check in the F function if empty paid. So that means the checkbox, if the checkbox is empty. If this is true, then we check the date between today and the date payable, and we want to have the result in days. If this is greater than zero, then we want to show that we are overdue. Because if we have a positive value here, then we are beyond the date payable. If this is not true. So if we are below zero, then it's still payable because if we still have time and we have not checked that box, then it's still payable. Once we check the box, though, it is already paid because then it doesn't matter how much overdue we are or how much time we have left, then it is just paid. So this is the alternate ending, so to speak. Again, we have two if function if number one, then the first outcome is another if statement. And then we concluded with a paid kind of connecting two if statements. The way it works is simple. We click on Paid, it will change to paid. We deselect paid. And then it will simply check and compare the today's date versus the date payable. Today is 2024, and this one is 2023. If we go and change this one to 2025, just as an example, and I click on 7 February, it will change to payable. Next up, we have the Due date in order to display the due date with the due in front of. And I will show you in a second why I have created this extra step. We created simply a connection between the due we added as a phrase. Then we format date payable. We use the format. Why? Because we want to display it not as a number. If we just would connect the due with date payable, it would give us a number, return a number, which of course is nothing that we can work with. With the format feature, we are turning it actually into a true date. This is why we need it. This might be a new element where we haven't talked before about. So just be aware that this is something that you need to take care of. Next up we have the total. The total is just an if statement. If the category is not, we have an imation mark and an equal sign is minus cost. Then it should just display the total sum because the total sum is always positive. But if it's a cost means we want to have a minus in front of, then we calculate zero minus the total sum so that we get a negative value in front of. This is also just for a visual impact and to also calculate the sum correctly. Otherwise it would just calculate everything and this wouldn't equal the correct balance. Next up, we have our relation property to our finance tracker categories. So this is a simple relation, and once we have a new cost that we have incurred, so I go into the field and I would select the rightful category to put it onto. And then I have a total display. So means I put the total in front of, again, I'm using the total with $1 plus format total to get this formatted value. Now if I go back to the financial categories, so what do we need here? It's a very simple database. We have just the names. I've added an icon in front of this one just for styling purposes, you don't have to do that. And next up we have a roll up function so that we can pull in the total sum of all the category expenses in there. So if I use the income, it is positive, everything else should be negative, and we have a total balance sum down here. So if we go back to our dashboard, how do we create our dashboard? This is also not too complicated. Of course, we start off here with a heading one. Again, here I told you how this works, so essentially, if I delete it right now, this is just a view of all transactions with a layout gallery and filtered to the name. And the name is empty when the name is empty. Also, this one is empty since we should not have any cost that we have not categorized with a name, The view isn't showing anything else and we can use this plus icon as a plus button to simply add a new transaction. What else we got? As you noticed, this is just a gallery view of the categories that we have. In here, it's showing the exact same information. This is a table view on the dashboard. We simply have the gallery review, so nothing different. Then we have the unpaid view on the left hand side, which is just a gallery review, again of our expenses. I want to show here all the overdue expenses. So I go on the filter and select Status Overdue. The status is the calculated Datus that we have created and I want to see here all the information, all the properties that matter to our dashboard. So I want to understand if it's overdue, indeed, when is it due? What's the total sum and whether it's paid or not? So that I can also take that off in here directly. And this one is just a table view of all transactions. It's not really filtered. It's just sorted, I guess It's sorted by the date payable. Yep, it's sorted by the date payable. So nothing to fancy and this is organized in a two column design. I hope this was fun for you to do and you were able to recreate some of this. Don't you worry if you felt stuck somewhere. There's so many ways to build out your dashboards. And just because I do it this way, it doesn't mean that you need to do it the same way you can develop your very own style on how you want to build your dashboards. This is just an example, an exercise scenario for you to get practice. Well done. Thanks for joining this exercise and congratulations for completing the entire database section. You did great. And I'm sure that you will also enjoy the rest of the course. So stay tuned. If you have any questions on the exercise, please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 33. Notion Dashboards - Create yourself a cockpit of control: Hello and welcome back to this course. There's a topic that we need to urgently address with our database after we have discussed everything about them. We know the settings in and out. We know how to build our views. We need to find a way, how to build ourselves personalized dashboards. Because if we have full page databases, they are great to consume data, visualize data, and work with data. But sometimes we just want to get an overview at a lens with the most relevant information. For that we are going to use database views. These are actually just copies of databases that are staying up to dated at every point in time. So whenever we change something, they will also update automatically. But we can arrange them and move them around, kind of turning a full page database into an inline database as a block, so that we can really style and build out our dashboard. So let's have a look into and find out how that works. We are back on our notion workspace and we have different trackers. I've added a few, for example, a personal to do list, a task and project tracker. We have our bookmarks work tracker, so a lot of different trackers. And do we really want at the beginning of a day or at the end of the day to go through each and every tracker to understand where we are or what our to Ds are for the day? No, of course not. We want to have a consolidated view of the most relevant topics and only if necessary, we want to go to the source of truth database and look at all the data at once. So how can we do that? We are going to an empty spot on our workspace. Use our slash command, the good old slash command. We haven't used it for a while. We scroll down towards database, you see we have here some table view, board view, gallery view, list view, calendar view, timeline view. These are actually just views onto an existing database. When we're using any of these views, we are actually not building a new database, we are just referring back to an existing one. Giving us a preview that we can style with filters and we can sort the information and we can really build out our own dashboard. So let's start off maybe with a list view, first of all. And now it's asking us, okay, which data source is it that we want to make use of? Let's say I want to have a quick overview of my bookmarks. So I will select bookmarks and close the entire thing. As you can see, now we have created a list view of an underlying database, and this is indicated with this arrow. So it's like the relation arrow. This is indicating that this block is only a database view which does not have any limitations. Means we can change data, access data all in here. And when we change it here, it will also change in the underlying database. And why is worse? But the good thing here it is just a block view, so we can move it around and give viewing permissions to other teams on other Wikis without giving them the underlying database itself. If we are opening up the page hierarchy on the databases and the trackers, you will see that this view is displayed like an on page without being an on page. We are seeing here again the arrow and this indicates that we are actually just referring back to an underlying database. And the underlying database in this case is the bookmark database. This is why it's called view of bookmarks. Now in the list, what can we do with it? We can use it as any other database. First of all, we can decide on whether we want to show the database title or not. So again, this is element of style and we can consolidate the information a little bit. We can also apply filters, for example, we might want to only show data that is related to Wiki entries like this. Then we want to maybe call it with a heading number one. This is Wiki resources. We can also hide the filter by clicking on this way. We filter it down only to the relevant information. This is the first part of our dashboard. Now maybe I also want to see my personal to do on my dashboard. I'm adding another heading, number one, we'll call it maybe. Another information that I want to see is the tasks that are high priority. I need to take care of them today, I will call them high tasks, go one step below and add a database view. I will just look up for data base and then I will select a table view Source I'm going to refer to will be task and projects. I am closing this one down a little bit. I certainly do not need all the information that's in here. I will customize the view as to what I need. For example, the SNE, I won't need this information, I will need the status. The due date might not be relevant for this one and I don't need the summary. I will also hide this one else. I maybe want to apply a filter. So I'm adding a filter based on the priority. I only want to see stuff that is high priority. I will hide the database title again. This way I can see my high prioritasks. If I want to give myself more space and rearrange the views that I have already, then I can go on the three dots on the top right. We are going to talk about the styling elements of an notion page in a separate topic. But we will select with giving us the room of the entire page with. Now what I can do is I can add two columns. For example, selecting two columns, column one and then I get column two. I can pull those two, the heading and the database itself, into the left column. I will pull the other two, the wiki resource and the database view into the right column as well. What I've done now is created a consulate view. I can look at multiple information at a time. I could also add a new wiki resource on the right hand side here, simply adding it. And the same is possible on here. Of course, I can also, for example, add the gallery review of my client tracker. So let's add a gallery review. And I will add the client tracker in here. I can also push it to the top. Let's put it here. And let's add another heading, heading, one where I say this is clients, I might only want to see small cards here. Let's go to the Layout Settings Non card Review and select card size small. We have a very small list in here. This way I can see the most important information. I see the numbers of my top clients. I see my high prior tasks. I also see how much money I made with them. If I want to add another tracker to it, add another table view. Let's select the invoice to here. I'm going to close that down adding another heading, one, calling that one invoices. Invoices. I will create another two columns, dial like this. For example, I'm selecting those two blocks, moving it to the left hand side, the clients moving to the right hand side of the columns like this, like this. Get rid of the database, title like this and like this for my invoices. I actually just want to see if there's any overdue invoice. I select my invoices and what I want to see is actually just the total status and that's it, closing everything else down to see also the status of my invoices. And maybe I want to actually change the layout of my invoices. Maybe also to a gallery view, changing it as a preview to none. And then selecting the properties, only the status, maybe the total sum and the invoice amount. Closing that one down, I could filter down to my formula where it states over due that I only see overdue invoices. This is our final product with our very own dashboard. In this lecture, you learn about database views, which is a great way to simultaneously show information from different databases at one place. Creating yourself a very own personalized dashboard with the metrics and information that truly matter to your business. The next lecture, we will do a little bit of exercise so that we can train and practice building ourselves a very own dashboard. Stay tuned and I see you. 34. Notion Page Setup - understand the most important settings: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about notion settings so that you're exactly aware of what you can choose from in terms of options to customize your account on our Notion workspace. We are going to access the settings if we click on the Settings and Members tab on the left hand side. This brings us to the central account overview. First of all, we have here our invite link so we can invite new members to our workspace. We have an overview on all the members that we have right now, all the guests and all the groups that we have created. On this view, we can, so to speak, manage all the different access regimes. We can define on an individual level what people can do. So whether someone is a workspace owner or just a member workspace owner has more rights in the workspace. So they can delete staff, they can delete entire workspace, which a member cannot do, in order to more easily manage roles and access permissions. You can also create a group. So for example, you can create a group for multiple persons being a team member, multiple persons who are admins. So if an access right shall change, you do not need to apply to every individual member, but you can apply it to the very same group. A guest in turn is just someone who is able to view all the databases, but they are not able to work with the materials inside your workspace, and hence they won't encourage charge for you. It depends on the plan that you're on a notion. If you have a limited amount of guests that you can allow to go into your notion workspace for free, or if you have an unlimited amount of guest. Next up, we have the Account overview. Here we can change our e mail address, set our password, and two step verification. However, the two step verification is actually a paid feature, so you won't have it on the free plan. Next up you have support. You can give the notion support access to your database if you have any trouble with any of the settings. You can also log out from all devices. If you feel that you're accidentally still locked in in device that you do not have access anymore to, then you can log out of this device in here and you can of course, delete your account, but this is danger zone. Once you delete your account, all the information are of course gone. Next up you have settings you can decide on the appearance of your notion account. I've currently turned on the light mode, but there's of course also dark mode and you can use the system settings below that. You can decide on which page should open once you are re entering notion, should it be the last visit page or the top page in the side bar, this is up to your discretion. You can also open links in the desktop app and you will also find here the link to the desktop app if you're more preferring to work locally, which doesn't mean you can work offline, it just means that you have a dedicated application on your computer, but it does require, of course, a stable Internet connection. Next up, you can set the time zone automatically using your co location. For that it needs to detect where you are right now in order to set the right time zone. Or you set the time zone manually. You can do that here. You also can here customize your cookie settings and you can record your view history. Or if you don't want to, you can choose to not record them. Also, you can decide on whether you want your account to be discoverable. Means that other people can search for your account across your workspace or with the notion, if you do not want that, just toggle this two off. Next up we have notifications. You can enable push notifications, slack notifications, activity notifications. So it really depends on how much appetite you have for information, what's going on on your notion workspace. I typically would recommend to turn them all off in the beginning and then add them gradually once you feel you're missing out on information. Because usually it will be a very high information overflow that you receive. Because every change to every database will trigger a notification, go in here and decide on your own how much information you need. Next up we have connections. Connections are relations to external applications. In this case, I have one with notion drive and slack. But there are much more. We will dedicate a very own video lecture to connections because there's much more to know about than just where to find them. But you will see all the active connections here. So if you're sharing the account, if you're using a workspace with multiple team members and you want to check what other accounts are linked to your notion account, then go check here. And you can also get rid of the connection. If you click on Disconnect the Account, then you can delete the account connection. Next up, you have the language and region where you can select the language and you can whether you want your week to start on Mondays or not. Below that, you have your workspace setting before that. All of this is an account setting, means that they only apply to your personal account. But once you're using a workspace, workspace settings differ from your account. Workspace settings can be completely different from what your account looks like in your workspace settings. You can of course, decide on the name of your workspace and you can create an own icon. You can either upload one or pick an emoji, whatever you want to. You can also connect it to your very own domain. If you have an own domain address secured, you can connect it in here. And you can also decide on which e mail domains you want to let into your workspace domains. If you only want to allow your corporate e mail addresses to be able to register in your notion workspace, then you can define this in here. And you can also select your public homepage and connect it to your Notion workspace. Below that, you can export all of your workspace content. So if you want to create regular back ups, this is a place where you can do that. Next up, you can export the members. However, this is only a paid function, so it works only in the business settings or the business tier. Below that you can set the analytics. So whether you prefer to collect the page views, the amount of page views or not, you can decide this by toggling to the right or to the left. Below that, you can delete the entire workspace. This is again danger zone because once you delete your workspace, you will lose access to all the data that's in the workspace. We discussed already the people settings. Below that, we have the different plans available, giving you the overview of what plans you can use of. Next up you see the building options where you see all the bills that you have incurred, the charges, as well as you can manage your VAT numbers, as well as your payment method. Below that is a very crucial security feature. The sites that are public, sometimes you publish and share a site with others and you just forget about it, and you might add additional information to the site. You will easily figure out if the site is public because it will then get this blue banner on top here indicating that this site is public. Also on the sites, you will see all the different pages that are publicly available. You will figure out the link and you can also view the site. Also, you can configure the site settings here if you want to unpublish a site. This is your end in court to unpublish the site and also to give the permissions. What you can do with a page that is online, very important to know and sometimes good to revisit. Frequently below that, you have the security tab. A lot of these things are only available for business and enterprise customers. So have a look here, if this is relevant for you, consider upgrading to the respective accounts. Next up, we have the identity and provisioning. Again, a lot of things only available for business and enterprise accounts. Have a look down here and see if there's any relevant feature for you. Below that, you will find all the connections that are connected to the workspace. So again, you have personal connections that you do on an account level and there are workspace connections connected to the entire workspace. So it's basically the same thing, but just on a different level. Last but not least, do you have an import feature. These are the services from which you can import data, tables, files into your notion workspace If you're using Asana, if you're using X, you might use CSV. If you're using Monday.com or Quip, you can import all of that into Notion. And down here you can also upload work documents, pop files or latex equations into your notion pages. That's it. That's a rundown of all the different settings with some explanations on what to do for which plans they are available. So it's good to go through this occasionally to check which connections are live, which pages are online, which pages are shared with the entire world. And if this is really what you need to do, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 35. Notion Page Styling - make your page accessible!: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about page styling. Beware, this might contain some repetitive elements, because here and there in the course, I have already touched upon those points. However, I wanted to make sure as a full master class, to provide you the full big picture and to dedicate an own lecture on page styling. So if you feel this is too repetitive, feel free to jump to the next lecture. If you want to learn about page styling in an all on one lecture, then stay on for now. We will jump over to notion. We are back on our notion workspace. And I've created a new page that is currently empty that I call page styling. When we style a page, I want to start from top to bottom. First of all, we can add an icon to it, something that we have discussed in the past. But I don't want you to miss out on this as well. So we can select memoji can scroll through, it can also select one of the notion provided icons which you can find in here. You can filter and search. Or you can select a random Mogi or a random icon next to it. You can also select the color. You can decide on whether you want to be asked every time for a color. Or if you untoggle it and select then a color, then this will be the default color. To go forward, I will select a random icon for now next to it. You can also upload your custom icons if your company has one or if you want to create one, for example, on camera, which is a very simple graphic tool. If you want to remove your can simply click on Remove and then it's gone next to it. We can add a cover. A cover is like a very broad image that we can attach to our page, which gives a bit of flare, which gives a bit of styling element to our page. We can reposition the image because as you can see, it's very broad. Very few images will have the ideal size, the ideal resolution to fit directly into. Here we can click on Reposition and simply drag and drop the image to meet our preference. Once we're done with that, we simply click on Safe Position. We can of course, also change the cover and select either from the gallery, we can select from some color ingradient images, some Nasa archive images, some patterns. We can of course, also upload our very own image. We can link something from an external resource. However, if that external resource is at some point in time deleted, then we won't have access to it in here. Or we can use the stock image library from unsplash. We can of course, also search for certain images. And if we want to get rid of the cover completely, we click on Remove Next. Something else that we can adjust in terms of styling. We can select the default font of our page. We can either go with a default font, very modern and minimal font. We can go with serif font, or we can go with a monophont. Just select the font that you find most appealing. If I now start writing, for example, just some random letters, we go back here, then you will see what impact it has on the page. Styling serif is a bit old fashioned but very good for publishing. We got mono, which is a very minimal font, which is ideal for drafting nodes or creating nodes next to it. We have the option to select small text. If we want to have more space or give the page more space for more information, then we can select small text. And we can also go with the full width of the page. That means we take the full page dimensions from left to right, giving more room for information. In particular, you can use the full width if you're creating a dashboard, if you're using any kind of database that contains a lot of information. If you're just having a page with text, I would not go with the full width because it's much easier to read through a narrow passage in the middle of the page, closing down the popular menu on the right hand side. What other style elements do we have apart from, of course, headlines? We talked about headlines in the basic blocks. Already we can style our letters and our sentences and our lines. If we highlight words or sentences or lines, then we can decide on whether we want to have a bold italic, underlined. We can also strike through. This looks like we want to get rid of this part. We can also market as a code, so if we're pasting something into a page that is actually code, then we can rebrand it or reform it into code. And we can also create an equation, so adding latex and mathematical equations to our notion page next to it. We also have the text color. So we can change from the color of the text and the background color of our text. If we go with default, then we have the default black color without any background and we remove any background that we had there before. Last but not least, we have the symbol with the D symbol. We can mention people on our page. We can create reminders a date or we can also link to another page. We talked about this already when we looked into the Wiki functionalities where we used the ad symbol. So instead of using the ad over here, we can simply go to an empty spot and create the ad symbol which opens up the very same menu. In this lecture, we talked about page styling elements enabling you to create your very own and very personal customized page. 36. Create the Notion Wiki with the click of a button: Hello and welcome back to this course. Imagine the following situation. You work for a company and you're tasked to create a central data repository. Search is a wiki, so you want to have a central store where you manage and host all the policies processes and any other information that's relevant to everyone. But you want to make sure also that content is verified as up to date and that you have a clear information structure. Does that sound like an administrative nightmare? Well, maybe not with Notion, because Notion offers the feature to turn any page into a complete wiki at the click of a button. Sounds too good to be true. Let's find out. In Notion, we are back on our Notion workspace and this is our page where all the trackers that we have created are living on. We want to turn this thing now into a wiki, addressing all the pay points and all the requirements that we just mentioned. So means we want to have a verification tab. We want to have clear responsibility and we want to have a central store with a clear information structure. How do we do that? We go to the right hand side of our notion site and we go on turn into Wiki, press the button. Now we get some information on how that will change to influence our page. But we are brave and simply try it out without reading what has happened. We have created a simple list view database. So it's an actual database where all those pages are located on. We can delete those spaces, this is necessary. We can also keep it, it doesn't matter. And now we can change from the list view to a all pages view. And the all pages now features the owner of the pages. By default it's me because I've created them. We can also see who last edited them. We can add text as to what this belongs to, so we can add additional information to our wiki. And we have a verification property. And this verification property is for the owner of the page to verify the content. So let's click into it and look at the different steps. We can validate the content for seven days, 430 days, or for 90 days if we want to. Or we can say this information so low level it will be relevant and it will be verified infinitely. This way we can signal that the information was validated and holds true even after a certain period of time. So let's click on for seven days. As you can see, it now gets the blue hook and it indicates that this page is verified. We can also remove the verification. If the verification is removed, it's again empty, or we can pick a date, for example, tomorrow or whatever it is. On the other hand, we are getting the indication when the page was last time edited apart from all the pages, I can also only show the pages that I own. This will make it easier for me to navigate through it. Now I'm owning all the pages, so it doesn't really make a difference. But in case they are like hundreds of pages, I can just drill them down as a default filter to the pages that I truly own. Now, if I want to change the owner, I either go in here and select a different owner that I want it to be the owner of, or I go in the page. On the page, I open it up and on the page I can select a different owner. And again, I can verify or reinstate the verification part. Everything else is simply a page. And this hasn't changed anything. It just added this kind of governance structure to make sure the information is accurate and up to date. Of course, you can also undo the Wiki if you don't want to use the wiki anymore or you created the wiki by accident, then you click on the three dots and you simply click on under Wiki. Above that you can lock the wiki. So we can prevent your wiki from either being intentionally or unintentionally be edited. Now if we look at our wiki, we have currently only databases, but of course you can also add other normal pages to it if I click on you and just create a test page. Let's open it up then you can use this page as like a Word document. You can note down information, create processes, policies, whatever it is. A true superpower of notion is also to communicate within the sites. That means you can add, for example, comments. If you're reviewing this page with the multiple other persons, you can simply click on Add Comment. They can, for example, tell you please date page. Once they press Enter, the comment is visible for every comment. You can also attach a file. You can also take and mention a person. We will talk about this in a second. If you're the owner of this page, you can simply revisit the comments and work on these comments. Either you can react with emymogi, for example, an emoji that indicates that you're currently working on it or that you accept the comments. Or you can simply resolve the comment indicating that you have worked on the topic apart from the communications part notion is truly designed to collaborate with others and you can do that super simple, Instead of commenting on a page, you can simply tag someone. For example, if I want fred to change something on this page, then I would simply go at and then select fred and mention. Please update the page. Thanks. If I want to add a timer to it, I can go and select again the ad symbol and add a reminder to it, either today or I can say, please remind me tomorrow. I can also create more than one reminder, whatever is required. Also, with the ad symbol, I can not only tag people and add reminders, I can also add a different page. For example, if I want to refer to a specific tracker, then I simply click on the tracker, and now we have the link to the page. If you click on the link, you will be redirected to the. In this lecture, we talked about how to create a wiki, how to create a central data repository, a real source of truth, so that you can accurately manage all the information. We also explored how you can comment on pages, how you can tag other people in order to foster a collaborative approach when using notion. 37. Create Custom Notion Progress Bars and stand out!: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about a little styling element giving you a bit of extra customization to your notion database. Specifically, I'm talking about notion progress bars, but not the kind of progress bar that we already have explored in terms of adding a number field and adding the progress bar. I'm talking about truly customizable progress bars that you even can design on your own if you want to. So let's check them out on Notion. We're back to our notion workspace and I've opened up a template that I created specifically for you. And you can find the template in the course description, so you can open it up and duplicate it. Attach it to your notion workspace as a repository or as a resource to use them later on. The way this thing works is we have 18 different progress bars, which are all called variant variant 15161718. And we start off with variant one to five. Now this works all the same means a progress bar is calculated in a formula field. It is an extensive formula. I don't expect you to remember this formula or being able to recreate it. I just want to show you how you can copy them over and adjust it to your needs. A progress bar that is based on a formula always needs two things. Number one, a current value and number two, a goal value. Why? Because we're calculating percentages here. This is essentially what's been done. It is taking the current value divided by the goal value and translates it into kind of symbols, right? So we always need one number field that provides you the current values. Just imagine we have a book tracker, and I actually have an example of a book tracker where you are showcasing at which page you are right now. Where is the number field that is representing the goal means how many pages there are. And what the formula then does is you simply click into the formula to open it up. As I said, it's quite a complicated formula. I don't expect you to remember it, I just want you to show how you can adjust it to your needs. It's taking the current value divided by the goal value, and as I said, it's translating it into the symbols. As you can see here, we have here two versions. We have one for number fields and one for date fears for date ranges. This, however, only works if you have a separate date field for the start date and a separate date field for the end date. It doesn't work if you're combining this, for example, if we go in here and say, okay, we also have an end date, this won't work. So we need those two separate fields. Now of course, you can go through the views and select the progress sad that you find most appealing to your needs. Now if you say you want to use variant number six, then you simply click inside. You need to copy the entire formula. Copy and paste. It won't work if you'd simply copy this one to your clipboard, because this is just the result, it's not the actual formula. Then you go to your test page. I created one which is a book tracker. So let's say book number one. We are currently on page 78 and it's a large book, so it has 1058 pages. And now we go into our formula field. I paste the formula in here, and now I need to adjust. Of course, the fields of reference, current state isn't a field that we have available here, but it's the current page. Now we need to go through it. Goal is also nothing we have, we have instead the total pages. We have the current state again here which is actually the current page. The goal again, which is the total page, We also need to change this one into current page and we also need to change this one into clear and page and this one into total page. It's a bit of yes customization. And I missed one. Which is this one here. This one is the total pages. Now as you can see in the preview, it's ready to calculate our results. Let's click on Done. As you can see, it just works. We are at 7% I am changing the value now. The progress power will update dynamically. So let's say we are at 150 pages. Once we're adding also here different values. I'm not that creative. Let's put it this way, 200 pages, maybe this one has 51 pages. As you can see, it's updating the progress bar dynamically. And the very same applies also to date field. Let's say we want to have a date progress bar. Let's add a date number one. We want to also add a date number two. Let's use this one. Date number two, we have a date range from the fourth until the end of the month. And I'm using now this field, I will use a different formula for that. This is the template here, you'll find all the different formulas. As I said, it's attached to the resources. Let's say I want to use this one. As you can see, the formula is a bit more extensive than just the number field, but that's fine. I go in here, delete the entire formula, and add the new formula. As you can see, we have a lot of different fields to change. I'm speeding things up a bit. The way back, I changed now all the dates. Yes, it's a painful task, but you just need to do it once. Then we click on Done. As you can see, we have our date progress bar here. The good thing is it's always put into relation of the current date. So that means it's updating itself on a daily basis. We don't need to do anything. And once we move the due date to the start date and sooner to today's date, you see that the progress bar is filling up until we reach 100% If you want to give more space to the right hand side so you don't have the line break, just push it a bit over. And that's, that's it. In this lecture, you have learned about custom progress bars, how to create them, how to implement them for numbers, for dates. And you also have the template available down on the cost materials. Be free to duplicate it and make your database stand out. Have fun with it. Cheers. 38. Unlock the next level with Notion App connections: Hello and welcome back to this course. Okay, I get it, I'm advertising notion here a lot. Why? Because I'm a true fan of notion. But maybe there's still data outside notion that you want to keep outside notion. And you still need to find a way to integrate data into your notion workspace. Or to two way sync data with external applications. For this use case, we are dedicating right now, an entire lecture to which is called Notion Connections. Let's jump into notion and figure out how we are back on notion. And as I mentioned, there is a way to sync data that comes outside from notion with notion. So that means you can keep your data in your current system, but still can make use of Notion as a productivity system or a central hub for all the information. So how does that work? Essentially, we need to go on the Settings menu. On the Settings menu, you will find something that's called connections. A connection is, as the name suggests, a connection to a different other tool. In the past, we have already set up a connection to slag. That means we are triggering a notification toward slag. If there's a change on our notion database that's free, you can use that and it's incredibly handy to keep your team updated. If Notion isn't the primary tool on which you're communicating, then we can also integrate Google Drive. That means we are accessing files from Google Drive in notion and we need to connect them if we're adding a connections property to our database. But what other connections are there? Let's click on Browse Connections at Gallery, which will open up a new page on Notion. As you can see here, we have tons of different integrations that are categorized on the left hand side by different properties. For example, you have stuff for security, compliance, productivity, identity. Even have forms. We have designers in own categories such as Figma and Canva. And you can also use category. All should just get an idea of what's all included. Of course, you can also search them. Right now we have 82 different integrations. So it's an ever increasing database of integrations. Let's imagine you're using Asana as your productivity central. And because the set up of the integration always works in a similar way, we are going to use one example which is Asana. So imagine you're using Asana for your productivity workflow where you manage all your projects and you want to bring this information into notion. So let's click on Asana to select this integration. The first thing that you will find is you will get an overview. You will see how to use Asana. You will find the category, you'll also see the previews. And you will also see the features. So you can link previews, you can sync database, and you can import information. If you say, this is what I want to do, then you click on Add to Notion. This Add to Notion button will redirect you to your very own connections because it's a personal setting. Hence you need to set it up under my connections. And then you will scroll down to Asana. In this case, click on Connect. It will open up a new pop up menu where you need to give permission to Notion accessing Asana and vice versa. So as you can see, it popped up as a linked account and that's it already super easy to set up. Let's go on Energy page and look at how this works out on our Asana page that we just newly created. We can now add the command and simply type Asana. This will give you all the different options that you have out of the box. With Asana, you can use Mbts. However, this is a default feature that you don't need to connect your accounts with. What we're really looking at is the sync database. Click on it and it will open up an Asana interface similar to creating a notion native database. On the right hand side is asking me which projects I want to sing. Let's use Test for a purpose. And now you see how Nan has pulled in all the Asana information from the Asana workspace. We have here our task. We have assigned updated projects which are assigned to the sections, completed dates, the sections, the created, ad, and the description. We can even open up the different tasks, see all the properties, all the information. If we want to access the row level information in Asana directly, then we click on this link button, which will guide us to our Asana application and directly to the task. That's an incredibly handy feature to sync data from external sources into notion. The setup process is always the same. Of course, the functions and the integration itself differs a little bit. Just have a look at the Notion Connections gallery and check out the different use cases of the external connection. Something else I want to show you is how to make use of datasets outside notion that do not offer a native connection. As you can see from our Settings menu and the Not Connection gallery, there are currently 83 different connections possible. But of course there are more than 83 different tools. So what are we doing if we are not using a tool that is mentioned here? Then we have different options, we can head to automations. This offers us a broad range of sync services that are connecting to Notion and on the other hand, connecting to thousands of different applications that are not mentioned inside notion. My go to tools, if this then that z here and make. But of course there are also others which makes sense. Let's try out. If this then that we click on this one and it gives us the information on how to use it. So we cannot start from this gallery. Let's set back to our notion workspace. We simply go on the three dots on the right hand side. Go to connections, connect two there. We'll find if this then that now we need to confirm that we are directed outside notion on the integration side. We simply click on Learn More to figure out what we can do with this application. As you can see, we are now on the If this, then that side. And here we got a bunch of different ideas on which tools we can connect to Notion and the use cases. For example, we can use it with Alexa or with Siri. You can use it with a email provider such as me. Typically, these automation providers connect to thousands of different applications. I click now on Connect because I want to create this connection. Of course, I have to sign up also with these automation providers. Click on Continue with Google, You need to confirm the connection, then you need to give permissions to the respective pages where you want to use the automation. Two, if you want to use the automation on your entire workspace, then click on the entire workspace. Click on Allow Access. Now it's authorizing the access. Then then that menu, we click on Create on the top right. Now I start off with which is similar to the automation directly inside notion. We need to create a trigger and then an action event. Let's click on if this and I will look up Notion no NSO, for example, a new page in a database is created. I need to select the user in the database that I want to connect the automation to. Then I need to tell if this and that what kind of data is located in this database. In this case, roles I click on Create the Trigger. These are all the tools that I can use for, let's say I use Google mail. I want to send an external mail. I need to connect now my e mail account and allow the usage. And now I have to select the parameters I need to address the e mail, of course, to someone. So I can either use a freestyle e mail address or I can use the so called ingredient. Ingredient is a property inside notion. So imagine I've collected the e mail address here. Then I could simply select the e mail address to get a dynamic aspect to the automation. In this case, I will simply select my very own e mail address. I can create a subject if I want to. I can create a dynamic body with content from notion and I can attach something. But now I'm done with it and click Concrete Action. I can add more than one steps. However, then you need to use, if this is in that Pro account, I click on Continue and click on Finish. Now let's check if this is working. As I connected my Asana page indeed towards it, I actually go to Asana and add a new task. Let's add a new task. Call it test four. Press Enter. This test number four should then appear in Not. Our test task was updated in our sync database with Asana and I received the E mail as created. This was an example of an external automation. As I mentioned, Zepia Make. If this and that are my personal favorites, you can reach with those three providers, more than 10,000 different applications. Some of them are more complicated set up and manage than others. If this, then that is a great beginner tool. Apart from that, we also talked about how to create a connection inside notion. How to sync it with, for example, Asana. If you're going on the connections gallery, you will find more than 80 different connections to get data from external sources into notion. Maybe this is the remaining argument that's missing to convince also the biggest notion critics. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 39. Add Notion Widgets to your site and build beautiful dashboards: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to explore Widgets, which is a great way to upgrade your dashboard to real command room. You might know Widgets already from your smartphone, which are kind of summarized views. We can generate a preview, for example, of the weather, a clock Spotify, or upcoming calendar events. Notion allows you to create such Widgets also in your dashboard. So let's head over to Notion and explore them. We're back on Notion and I've created a couple of widgets already. So this is how it looks like. You can arrange them as blocks, push them next to each other, and creating such kind of dashboard or enriching your dashboard with live information. So they're like numerous examples or which is that you can create beginning from a clock over, whether any kind of countdowns and of course also buttons that you can link with a page that is really great to upgrade your wiki and give your team this little bit of add on information to create stunning dashboards. So how do we create them when you Google Notion plus widget? There are multiple providers for that. I will show you here three different examples of widget providers. Most of them require you to create an account to be able to manage your widgets, but the majority of them is free Provider number one is Infi. You can explore different range of widgets. For example, quotes, live progress bar, weather, app, calendar, app counters. You can also upgrade with buttons. So let's create, for example, weather application. We click on Create widget. We need to give it a name. Let's call it Simply Weather. We click on Create, and it's opening up our Design wizard where we can create our widget. First of all, we can define our location that we want to display. We can also change the preferred units and the number of days we want to get the forecast in advance. There are of course, features that you can make use of when you upgrade to pro account for the beginning. I guess it's completely fine if we go with a free account. And we can also change the style. We can go to gray scale style, we can change the form type, also adjusted to the light or dark more depending on what we have chosen to use in Notion. And once we are ready, we simply copy this link down here. Go back to Notion, go to an empty spot. Simply copy and paste it over. And then instead of dismissing or creating a bookmark, we click on Create, Embed. This will create the view of our weather forecast. We can adjust it in size and the width in the height, whatever we want to. And we can, of course, pull it as a normal block and adjust the position of our widget. The other provider I want to show you is widget box. Widget box gives you also a range of different widgets that you can create. For example, simple calendar. We can define the background calendar. We can decide on whether we are using the notion dark mode or not. We can define the font, the color, the background, the header, color, the border, the width of the widget, whether we want to use rounded corners or not. Once we are ready, we simply click again on copy. Go back to our notion workspace. Go to an empty spot. Paste the link into it, and click Create, embed. It's as simple as this. Some widget providers such as Indifi also give you live feed of other accounts, for example, of Google Calendar. So with this widget, you can get a live view into your Google Calendar. In notion that requires, however, again, a pro membership. Something else I want to show you is the option to create charts. We have databases in our Notion workspace and we can visualize them not only as a database but also as a chart inside notion. For that, we need to go on a tool that's called Chart based. So we click on Connect to Notion. Hence we need to connect to accounts. As always, we need to give read access to our, for example, the progress bar. Click on Allow Access, and next up we can create a chart. Let's click on Create New Chart. We can define if we want to have a pie chart, a line chart, bar chart, horizontal bar chart, doughnut, a radar chart, or any other KPI. So let's decide on a KPI. We want to just display a number. We need to refresh our database. We want to select, in this case, our progress part numbers go further. Now I need to decide on the column to display. I want to display the current state, whatever. And now we are creating the database here, This is just a number. We can of course also switch the type of the chart to a bar chart or to a line chart, Whatever it is we want to. We have right now just one number in there. There's not much to display, but you get the idea of how that works. We can adjust the colors, the styling, we can change the data labels, the time zone, We can define the appearance, and we can use also filters. Once we are ready with our chart, we simply click on Embed Link. Copy that link, and we go over to our workspace. Go to an empty spot. Paste the link in here, and click on Create, Embed. After a few seconds, our bar chart is visible in our Notion database. In this lecture, we learned about notion widgets, how to create them. We looked at three different providers. We also learned on how we can create charts. I will provide you the links to all those providers in the course resources. If you have any questions in regards to that, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 40. Use Surveys with Notion!: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we want to talk about surveys. Surveys are a great way to collect information from different personas, such as employees, customers, or business partners. On the other hand side, we now learn about a tool called notion that offers great functionality to work with data. In terms of databases, for example, with properties and filters, we really can design different analytics and work with the results. It sounds like a perfect match. If we are connecting surveys and notion, in this lecture we will figure out how. So let's jump into notion. All right, we are here on our survey site. So I just created a new site that's called survey and I will implement a database, this case a database in line. And we want to just collect some numeric information potentially. So we add a number field and we might want to also collect a phone number. I select the phone property, that's it. We are going to start with that and now we are using a survey provider. That's called Tally. Again, there are also different survey providers, just Google Survey and Notion, and we'll come up with different solutions. In this case, we are using tally dots and I will put, as always, the link into the resource of the calls. We can create surveys with tally. For that, we want to create a free form. We start on the foreign builder. You will recognize this layout. Why? Because it was inspired by notion and Tally was explicitly built for notion. This is why those two go well together. We call the survey the contact form and we want to collect the phone number of someone similar to notion, we work here with blocks. And we call up the blocks with a command. I want the short answer, the answer shall be accompanied by a heading. I will add a heading one, call it name. Put an example in here, for example, fred. Then I want a, another heading one with the phone number, and I want to have a phone number here. Below that, potentially I want to have a third question. For example, random number. I'm adding a number here. So this is our form. We can change the appearance of our form by simply dragging and dropping around the blocks. This is absolutely similar to notion. We have also Submit Button, which we can change the language here. Instead of Submit, we can also say Confirm, for example. That's totally up to you. This is our survey, super simple. We click on Publish. Now we need to, of course, to create an account. As always, I will add my details sign up. You will need to confirm your e mail address with the verification code. We continue. It's asking us how we want to use it. This is just like another survey for the survey tool. So we continue to our dashboard. Ready, set, go. We click on Publish, and there is our survey. The front end is ready. Let's test it out. This is how our survey looks like. Now we need to get the back end working means that the information shall be pushed into our database. We go back to our tally dashboard, we go on integrations And we want to connect to Notion. We click on Connected Notion. We of course need to log into notion, give permission to add information to our H. In this case, I want to push the information into survey. If you want to give access to all the different pages, means you give general access to the pages, then just go to the top level entry here, and then we click on Allow Access. Next up, we need to define how we want to make use of the information. So we need to select the database and we need to the teleform fields with the notion properties. I will call a test. And now we need to select the right database. You might need to reload this page after you have connected and make sure you give your database a title. Otherwise, Tally won't be able to find the database. Even though the database is existing, it always needs to have a title. So let's go back to tally and survey as a database is already pre populated, so we're going to select it. Now we need to map the teleform fields with our database property. So we are connecting the first field which is called fred, because I have added the example of fred as a name towards this property. So we'll select Fred and I want it to go into name. Next up I want to connect the phone number into phone. And finally, I want to give the untitled number, the random number into the number field called text. In this field, I can add some page content to the survey results. But in this case I don't need it. So I simply click Connect to Notion and we have connected it now. And let's try out whether this works. I am adding in your record, I call it simply new telephone number is 01. And then some random numbers and another random number. It's just an example. And we click and submit. This is our confirmation page. And now we need to look up whether the information was added to our database, and as you can see, it just pushed into our database. So we got the name, we got the number, and we got the phone number. So in this lecture, we learned about connecting surveys to notions, So having the front end of teleSOhere. You can design different forms for different use cases. We used it here for a contact form, but you can also use it as a feedback form And order form or indeed as a survey means sending out questions to hundreds of thousands of people and collecting, managing and analyzing those responses directly. Notion as our back end. As always, I will put the link to the survey tool into the course description. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 41. Find and sell Notion templates with Notion Marketplaces: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we want to talk about notion marketplaces as a source for templates. The past we already discussed that a template is a great way to save yourself time If you're short on time and don't want to spend the time into building your very own dashboard from scratch or database from scratch, then a template might be the way to go for you. And of course there are free templates as in the notion template gallery, but there are also paid templates with complete operating systems for a specific use case. For example, for agencies if you're an e mail marketer, if you're into social media or writing newsletters, there is literally a template for each and everyone. And there are numbers of marketplace where you can get free but also paid versions of it. And we are now going to explore five different marketplaces where you can get templates from. The first one is the Notion Template Gallery, we already looked at it. You get like more than 10,000 different templates, both free and paid versions. You can simply scroll through them and, for example, check out personal trackers. And there are filters that you can apply. For example, you can select just notion created templates or templates coming from creators. You can also filter down by paid or free options. For example, just have a look at the paid options. As you can see, the prices really range. The notion template gallery will usually for the paid templates, redirect you to individual shops of the creators. But the Notion Tamblate Gallery is a great information hub on which Tamblates are actually out there. I would say this is the greatest research tool to find templates for your use case. Next up tool that I want to show you and which I think is the second largest template marketplace out there is Gum Road. It's like the official official marketplace where you sell hate and free templates for not, not every template gets featured in Notion. So it might be that you even get more templates on the Gum road side. If you simply look up in the search for Nan and press Enter, you will find all the different templates that are in here for Nan. They're also like texts that you can apply here, for example, notion templates. And you can also set a minimum and maximum price. If you want to see all the pre templates, just set the maximum price to zero. So this is where you find all the zero priced templates. Some of them have a zero plus means. Gumroad has like a donation feature. Means you can set the price of the product yourself. You can take it for free. But if you think there is some value in the product, then you can set it to $1 or $10 or whatever amount you want to spend on this respective template. But yeah, they are like thousands of different templates on this template gallery or on this marketplace. Another one is Gridfiti. On Gridfiti you also have different notion templates that you can buy or that you can look through. There are also different articles around notion templates. Sometimes they do tests of notion templates. If you want to buy a template, you simply go to the shop and there you will find a lot of different templates, again, for various use cases. Another one is Notion Plaza. Notion Plaza is also a very large template gallery. By the way, on all these marketplaces, you can also become yourself a creator. There are like no real requirements to become a creator. Of course, you will require like a following or some kind of community market and advertise your narration templates too. But if you feel well, you want to step up the game by becoming yourself a notion creator, because you have great ideas or you have a great way to visualize information. Then you can upload your templates to those marketplace and make money out of them. So on Notion Plaza, you can browse the different templates and you have also here different texts and use cases for which use case. The respective template is for both paid and free templates. And the last marketplace I want to show you is Notion Everything, which is also one of the larger notion template galleries here. In order to find the notion template gallery, you simply go on templates. You directly can decide on whether you want to have a premium template or a free template, or want to browse, or templates. I got a real big bunch of different templates from here. Sometimes it's also really great to start off with a free template and just get an idea of different template compositions on how to visualize data, on how to arrange dashboards. Sometimes you really need this bit of extra creativity to go further. So that's a short lecture about notion marketplaces, Template marketplaces. I will link you all the different marketplaces in the course description. So feel free to check them out if you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 42. Notion AI (Paid Feature) - Leverage the power of ChatGPT in Notion: And welcome back to this course. In the past weeks and months, you might have heard about GBT and how it started to revolutionize the way people work from starting to write blog post, e mails, and translating documents into even writing code. Everything is possible with the power of AI. The good news here is that you can use AI directly into notion because notion has integrated an AI feature directly into the interface. In this lecture, we will figure out how that works. And for that we will now jump over to notion we are back on our notion workspace. First thing, first notion, AI is a value added product, so that means you need to pay for it to use it. There is a very limited amount of credits that you can use if you have the free version of notion to test out the AI capabilities. So you can experiment around in what you can or cannot do, but if you want to use it professionally or on a regular basis, then you need to upgrade. But the good thing here is you can upgrade also just to the AI feature without upgrading notion itself. So that means you have two different subscription or subscription packages. You can stay on the free tier for notion and upgrade simply to the notion I feature. How do you manage the subscription? You simply go to the settings in members and then head over to plans. On the plans, you will see how many credits you have left on your notion AI plan. For this demonstration, I've upgraded to the nation AI premium package and you can also cancel your subscription here. Now if we go back to our page, we want to start using AI. How do we do that? We scroll down all the way to AI and click on More. As you can see, we can ask the AI to write something. We can ask it to create brainstorming ideas or blog post, an outline social media post and lot, lot more. Let's kick things off with a very general prompt on ask AI to write. Now it's opening up the prompt interface. And the prompt interface is the input that you give to the AI. I need to tell the AI exactly what I want to see as an output. It's similar to when you talk to a friend and ask them to do a task for you. The more information you give, the more precise will be the outcome and the less the friend needs to guess about what Fred wants him to do. Try to create a prompt that contains all the information about the outputs that you're expecting. You can even be as creative and say, I want you to think like a lawyer. I want you to think like a marketing manager, giving the AI as much context as possible. The prompt I've chosen is I want you to think like a corporate communications manager drafting an e mail to all employees, inviting them to the summer party in July. Now I press Enter and let the AI write. This is the first draft of the AI. I can now either tell the AI what to do next. For example, to refine, I could also click on Done. I can also ask the II to continue writing or to make it longer respectively. Or I can go back and say, please try again. For that respect, I am now done with the e mail. That's it, but maybe this sounds now a bit too formal and I want to change the tone so I'm going to highlight the entire e mail. This also works with any kind of other text. Wait until the context menu opens up and then I click on Sky. Next thing I can either add the prompt, what it should do with the text, or I simply go down and select Change Tone. And I want it to become very casual. Let's try it out. As you can see, it has redrafted the e mail in a more casual style. And if I want to, I can now replace the selection boom, that's it. Our e mail is now in a casual tone and directly replaced in the text field. For the next example, I'm simply deleting what we have written before. I want to start afresh. My new prompt is I want you to think like an online creator and come up with a list of steps to take in order to create an E learning course with the topic cooking. I press Enter and see what it comes up with. All right, the AI is ready with the entire lists. And it summarized me the steps that I can take. Now of course I can become more granular. And again mark it and instruct to become more granular. My new prompt is become more granular. I press Answer and see what it becomes. Now it is ready. Now I want to replace the selection, and boom, there is the new list. Else I can also mark the entire thing again. Go on SKI. And I can translate it, for example, into Spanish. So the AI is now translating everything into Spanish. And there we go, it translated into Spanish. Next up, I'm going to ask the AI to give me an entire comparison of cameras that are good for recording an online course. The prompt is, create a comparison list of cameras to use for an online course. Let's see what's coming up with. Okay. It has now given me a list, but I want to turn it into table, turn it into a table. It has now converted all the information into a table, which is a better format for comparison, to consume the information out of something else. I can do is I can ask the I also to code for me so it can generate code and specific code languages under the condition that you exactly know what the results should look like. I will simply ask the I to create myself a simple website. The problemt is create a simple website code. I press Mer and let's look at the output. And it has created me a very simple HTML code to make use of. It can also write Python or any other code that you might be aware of like SQL. So you can use the AI to solve simple coding issues. Last but not least, every notion site also comes with a little Q and A button down here, which is like your virtual assistant. And you can ask certain questions that the II will answer. For example, what is a database? And it will generate you a reply inside the chat window, It's looking up the replies. It can also search through your entire notion workspace. If you have a question about the data that you have in your workspace, it can crawl it and search for the answer. It gives you here the full information inside the chat window, which is a great way to save on time finding the right solutions instead of googling for example. Another use case for the notion AI is to auto enrich database. Let's imagine we have a simple database, let's call it database. In line I have a entry that's called Notion Story. I simply open up the page, we add the entire Notion Wikipedia article with everything that we need to know about Notion. Now we are adding a simple text feature here and we want to use AI autofill. We want to select the auto fill as a summary of our notion story page contents. So let's click on Try on this view. Now it has created us a summary of the notion page behind. It can also try again or save the changes. Now that we have turned on auto updates on page edits, we need to confirm this. Actually, this means that as soon as the page itself, the page content significantly change, also the summary of the I will change. It will constantly monitoring the page contents and figure out if it needs to change the summary as well. Let's click on Turn on Auto Update and exit this page. We can of course, also use AI as an individual property. For example, to translate what we have here, let's translate the name. And we want to translate it in German. Let's save the changes and see what's going on. As you can see, it has translated the entire page into German. Something else we can do is when we click on the plus, we use the AI custom order fill. Here we can actually give a prompt that it's going to execute when reading through the database entry. Let's say give me a one page sentence summary of the page content. Let's try it out. Click on Safe pages, Click Safe, and we're exiting it. And it has given us, indeed, in one sentence, summary of the entire document. And this works, of course, with different languages, different document types. You can extract action items, you can extract also risks that are mentioned in a document. So a very versatile tool to use notion AI inside your notion database. In this lecture we learned about NotionaI. We explore different use cases from creating e mails, changing tone, translating, creating lists, and creating comparison tables or ultimately code. You see that NotionaI is a very useful tool to integrate it into your daily routine. You need to decide on whether you want to pay for it or you want to use Che GBT as an external alternative. That is of course, up to you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 43. Ditch your Planning and switch to Notion Calendar: And welcome back to this course. If at the end of this course you decide, well notion is the go to platform your central operating system. Then you might start out building a lot of different databases where you collect individual dates here and there. And of course, you can build yourself multiple views to have a central dashboard where you see all the dates. But still you would need to manage all of your dates in the different views. But you're lacking a central view of all the dates in your entire workspace. Wouldn't it be great to have the central view? And the good news is Notion has its own calendar, and this is free also for the free tier. So let's check it out in Notion. This will be an extensive guide on the Notion Calendar, on our notion workspace. You might have already spotted the Notion calendar feature on the left hand side. Once you sign up for the first time, you will need to connect your Notion account to your Google account so that you can sync it with dates. Let's open up the calendar. This is a central overview of your calendar. It looks like actually any other calendar that you might be used to, but we have some added values here. So let's drill down bit by bit. On the left hand side, you have a mint view of your calendar, so it makes it easy to navigate through the individual dates. And then you have on the left hand side, the connected calendars from your Google account. So in my case, I have a personal account. I have also some birthdays, some Celebration day, some holiday, so to speak. And you can enable viewing them by simply clicking on the eye on the right hand side. Of course, you can also add other calendar accounts, so you can add multiple Google accounts. For example, you can add conferencing tools such as Zoom or Google Meet. This will help you to embed directly into a new invite, the link, to meet up online, so that's great. In order to connect them, you simply select the tool that you would like to use. You connect your register with your login, and then you will have it as a plugin directly installed into your Notion calendar. So I will do it for the Google meet and below that, you're also able to connect notion workspace. So that means your notion calendar is completely independent of your notion workspace only. If you connect those two, you will be able to see all the meetings, all the events, all the due dates from your notion workspace. In the notion calendar, let's connect it. And it pops up a new message window where I need to allow access to my workspace. I need to connect those two again. Now they're authorizing, and as you can see, my workspace connector, you can also connect more than one workspace. So that's pretty handy if you have multiple accounts. I'm closing the settings menu for a bit. We will revisit it at a later stage. And then you can see on the left hand side all the different databases that it has detected where it contains dates. Let's enable those in here. As you can see, we have our dates in our notion calendar. If you ask yourself, why are these just like random blocks on the top here? This is because we have scheduled them for the entire day. We have not included any times. If I want to check out a specific task or specific entry in my Notion database, then I simply select the date and I click on Opening Notion. This will direct me to the exact same page where I manage the due date. And I can go in here and include, for example, a time. This will create a time frame. If I also include a time window, so an end date, I can actually block myself a whole 2 hours. For example, if I'm using 02:00 P.M. Just going to check this out and go back to my calendar and it will update the entry to have an hourly view. That's incredibly handy to move back and forth. Of course, I can also change this internally in the notion calendar. I can move the day around. I can also move the entire meeting around. This will have an impact. Let's see if Friday the eighth has been updated in here, and yes, it did. I can also change the duration of the meeting in here. I can of course, also switch the meeting from one calendar to the other calendar, or from one database to the other database if I want to. Another feature of the notion calendar is of course to create your very own invites. If I want to create a new event, I simply click onto an empty spot. I will give it a title. For example, private work time. I can select the date and the timing. Here I can invite participants. I can use a conferencing tools such as Google Meat for example. I can define the location and I can also add any kind of links or documents that we want to read through. In this call, I can set myself to busy or free, depending on how I would like to appear in the calendar for others. If I set myself to free, then I'm not blocking time. It's just a reminder for myself. And I can also select the default visibility. So whether I want my meetings to be public or private, that's up to you. And you can set up yourself a reminder before the meeting to make sure you're not missing out on the meeting. Another handy feature that you can use is sharing availability if you want to tell some. When you have time. Instead of writing down, hey, here I have a slot. You can easily share your availability by clicking on Sharing Availability. You mark those spots that you want to share or where you could imagine to have the meeting. You can also include a schedule link link, and then you simply create the availability note. Once created, the snippet was copied to your clipboard and then you can share this link, which gives the other part the opportunity to book the meeting directly into the available slots. Nowhere else isn't this handy. I find this feature. Awesome. Next up what we can do is we can add time zones. Particularly interesting if you're working across different geographies across different countries. You can add up to three different time zones and you can choose from the time zone on the right hand side. So let's add just two more time zones. And this will give you the view on the left hand side where you can schedule the meeting to the appropriate time. And you always know what time it is for your counterpart, if they can make it to the meeting or if they can't. Navigating through your calendar is just as easy as you know it from the timeline view or the calendar view. You can skip four or back by the day, the week, the month, or by the number of days. You also can select the viewing settings so you can decide whether you want to show the weekends, if you want to show declined events, the weak numbers. And it can switch over to the general setting, which I'm going to show you in. Second, if you want to go back to the today's date, then you simply click on Today and it will guide you back to the current day. The side node, There's also a Notion app available and Notion Desktop app for the calendar. But there's also Notion app for the application itself. If you want to, you can download it on the right hand side. Which gives you an application downloaded to your desktop PC and you do not need to open up the calendar view in your browser. Something else I want to show you is how you can switch between Notion as an application and the calendar. If you have a due date planned out in Notion and you want to switch from the calendar to Notion, you can click on the respective task or the respective entry and click on Open Notion, vice versa, you can do the very same if we go, for example, to our work tracker on the timeline view, you can click on Open in Calendar, which will guide you to the calendar. And the same is possible on the calendar view. Back to the notion calendar. Something else that's super handy is shortcuts in notion calendar, you have a bunch of different shortcuts. If you want to review all of the shortcuts, then simply press question mark. Question mark will open up all the commands on the right hand side. One of the most useful ones is the shortcut. So imagine you're somewhere else in your calendar and you press it will always bring you back to the current day. If you press it will show you the very next meeting that's scheduled. So you don't have to manually go and find your next meeting. If you press J, it will bring you to the next week. So whenever you press J, it will jump and scroll to the next week in your calendar. So it's an easy way to navigate through it. And the opposite of the J command is the K command which brings you a week before. These are my four go to shortcuts that I will use frequently to navigate more easily in ocean calendar. Last but not least, we want to have a look at the settings of our calendar. For that, I click on my profile on top, and I want to go to the Settings On the Settings, I can again decide on whether I want to show weekends declared, the ends week numbers. I can also decide when my week should start on which day. I can also define my calendar navigation shortcut, so I can either go to today or align today in the view. I can also decide on my upcoming meetings to be shown in the control panel. Can decide on the language, the time format, the time zones, and the appearance of the tool. Of course, we also have the dark mode as well as the light mode. We can also go onto the notifications and enable notification so that we get a pop up notification once the next meeting is around the corner. Below that, we have our integration. So where we manage our calendar accounts, where we manage our conferencing tools and our Notion workspace. And below that we have our profile settings where we can give us a different name. If you have a different name and notion and you do not want to use the very same name also in the notion calendar, then feel free to change it. And here you can also delete your calendar account. In this lecture, we talked about the notion calendar feature, which is a great way to consolidate all the different days and due dates from inside Notion Plus, in addition, all the other scheduled meetings on, for example, your Google calendar. This holistic view brings back the command over your time. You can easily schedule meetings, you can share your availability with others. So it's one of the best features that notion offers in terms of productivity and work management. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next lecture. 44. Use Notion as a Website with Pro Tools (Not only sharing a page): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture we are going to talk about using Notion as a website. In previous lectures, we have already talked about using Notion as a central data repository for our internal use case means when we work, for example, in a company we have a central place where all the information goes into in terms of wiki or in terms of databases. However, we can also use Notion for external facing information. With the click of a button, we can turn an entire Notion page into a website. And with the right third party tools, we can even use it as a no code website using cutting edge technology and design elements. Let's jump over Intonation. All right, we are on our Notion page and we have here just a random page that we want to create a website for. We click on the Share Share button, is already common knowledge. We talked about it previously, so you can invite people, but we can also turn a page into a website. Let's go on the Publish button, and then we again publish the site. Now you get the indicator that this is live on the web. You also get this banner on top of here to see which page is currently online. With online I, anyone with this link can access your site right now, which doesn't mean that any random person will find it. However, it is findable and accessible from the external. So let's copy this link and we'll enter the URL into our browser. As you can see, we have now here our website with some clickable links. We can access the template site below that, and we can go back to the main page. Now important to know is that once we publish a site, all sub pages of this page are also public. So that means anything that is incorporated into the site is accessible. We cannot go one level up. So that means we are not able to get the top level domain, the database domain of this page. But you need to be aware of that all sub pages are now live. If you want to see which pages are currently online, you can click on all published pages, which will give you an overview of all the currently published sites. We can allow commenting for people who do not have an account. We can also decide on whether we want to allow the duplication feature. So that means if we go on our page, this is the duplication feature with which we can replicate the site in our personal work space. Any random person can do that if this function is turned on. So let's undo it and reload the site. As you can see, the duplication feature is gone. It's just the site right now. If we go back, we can turn on the search engine indexing. That means if we turn this on, then our page is truly accessible by Google. Anyone who is googling this page might be able to find it. If we want to unpublish a site, then we simply click on unpublished. So far so good. We have created a website in notion, however, with a very uncomfortable link. This isn't of course, the link that you would want to use for an external site. So we can go into our settings and set a public domain for our website. We can do that here. In order to do that, you need to register for a domain and you can enter it here and connect those two records with each other. So far so good. This works for simple websites where you just want to showcase information. Maybe opening hours of your restaurant, maybe using it as a digital business card. But the more complex we want to have Pro Tools to manage our website and this is where third party software comes into the game. One software that we can use is Supersite. Supersite is like a plug in that we can install in front of our page, which gives us certain benefits such as accelerated loading times, optimized page layouts for mobile tablet and desktop users, and some other style elements. So let's head to super site. There are of course more providers. I'm taking Super just as an example. So as you can see, you can create websites with Notion and turn them from the notion look and feel onto a super site look and fear means a professional website. If we click on the showcase there, you can see different examples of sites that were professionally created with the help of Super. And we can also check out the features. I mean, the features are also available with other providers, but essentially it gives you higher performance custom designs, SEO different domains, and SSL encryption analytics, further integration, password protection, and custom code that you can embed onto your site. So let's start creating a site with Super just to get an idea of the workflow. First of all, we need to sign in. And by the way, Super is a free service. However, there are of course, premium features. As always, if you go all in, you will need to pay for the features we are signing in. And we need to, of course, give permission to su, as always, if we are connecting to third party software. So we are logging in. Now we want to create a site. First of all, the site will be called test site. I am going to take the link of our public site, I will copy it, put it into the Super site, paste it in here, and select Create Site. Super has assigned a new URL to the site. In this case it's menus, Snail dot, super dot site. If you want to have a custom URL, you need to go for the pro feature in Super. It connects it to a public facing domain. You see it's looking differently, it doesn't have all the notion generic features on the top here. It's also indicating that this was made with super on below here. Going back to the site administration, we can just for example custom code here. We can change settings set of Favicon, select a site language if we need to. We can connect different domains. We can also change the domain that was attached here. We can change the sites, we can add a new page to it. So for example, if we are turning on the publishing feature inside notion, as I said, all the subpages are going to be visible here. We can make a decision on which sub pages we actually want to publish externally. We can also work on SEOs. We mean search engine optimization, so that we get more traffic from Google. We can also change the design. We can add different colors, typography layout, we can add different blocks. We can change the block design, change the database design, the navigation design. We can also turn it into a theme that we can apply to multiple sites. We can add a navigational bar on top here. We can add a footer if we want to. As I said, we can also add custom code for that we need to upgrade. However, we can set some options, some properties, and we have a Page Analytics. We can see in the pro version how much traffic we get from different sites. Complete analytics tool to summarize with notion, we get already very, very good tools to publish our site or to turn a site into a website. However, it comes at certain limitations. For example, with the general notion look and fear. Sometimes we don't want to show or indicate that we build a site with notion. For some use cases, it might make sense to switch to a third party provider giving you third party professional website building tools such as adjusting code or adjusting the domain, or adjusting the user experience with the site by turning on certain sites or using a certain theme to apply on the entire website. I'm going to attach the link to the third party provider that we used here into the course resources so that you can make use of it. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. 45. Introduction into OKR (Objective and Key Results) System: Low. And welcome back to this course. In the coming lectures, we are going to practice a little bit what we've learned before at end of a new topic. This new topic is OKR as a productivity system for your personal, but also for your professional work life. And we are in part one of the lectures exploring the theoretical foundations of OKR. And part number two, we are going to become very practical and apply what we've learned before by building our very own dashboard that incorporates the methodologies of the OKR system. Let's jump into the topic and find out why OKR is such a popular tool. Okr is an acronym, Objectives and key results in this lecture. As mentioned, we're going to build out the theoretical basis so we can apply what we've learned into practice. For that, we of course need to understand what OKR is, what the pros and cons are for and against it, and how it's actually working in practice. The OKR system was initially founded in 1970s and it's actually a very powerful framework to reach your corporate goals and missions and vision. So it's kind of a way to connect the broader vision of your company or your personal life. And breaking it down into actionable items that you can distribute out to different individuals. And they in turn, feel connected to the overall mission and vision. So it's kind of a good way to measure the progress of your corporate vision. But also to make everyone feel connected to it, increasing the chances of completion. How could that look in practice in a company? Every company should have a mission in vision, like the broader vision of where we want to be, what we want to represent, what kind of problems we want to solve. This mission typically is broken down into objective kind of clear milestones that they want to reach. In turn, you can break down these milestones into actionable key results, so measurable results that help you to reach and track your objective completion. And these results, however, can be broken down into individual initiatives which you can assign to, for example, employees or departments to reach and contribute their part for reaching the upper levels means the key results, the objectives, and the mission in the division. So let's put it onto an example to understand how this could look like. Imagine the overall mission is to become a market leader, to be the best in a certain category. Different objectives could apply here. And one objective could be, we want to be the company that has the most customer recommendations or the best customer recommendations on the market. So that is the objective and the way we can measure it in a key result. Like one key result, there can be multiple key results attached to it. But one key result could be, in order to have customer recommendations, we need, first of all, satisfied customers. So we want to reach a customer satisfaction ratio of 90% In order to achieve this, which is a very smart means, a very specific, measurable, actionable, and realistic and time bound result. We need to create initiatives that support this, because this is usually a key result that composes of different influence factors. Such as, do we want to automate things so that we get rid of manual mistakes or we want to decrease the response time for customer requests. So this is a typical KR layout for one specific mission, one objective, one key result, and two initiatives. If you want to transfer this to a private example out of your private life, the overall mission could be, I want to learn how to sail a sailing boat, right? This could be the overall vision, which seems to be very far off because there's a lot of steps that you need to take in between. So one objective could be, I need to get a specific certificate for that, like a sea going certificate or navigation certificate. These could all be different objectives. And one key result for that could be to attend the respective theory hours, to get the practical experience, to master the exams, the practical and theoretical exams. And in order to do that, you need to build a habit of learning. You need to attend those classes and stuff like this. So as you can see, you can break down the overall goal that you want to learn how to sail a boat or maybe even broader, you want to do a vacation on a boat where you're the captain. You can break it down into different objectives, different key results, and different initiatives. Making the overall goal far more tangible for you so that you can measure the progress towards this goal in half your time. If someone is asking, hey, you wanted to become a Captain, how far are you? You could say like, okay, I'm at 50% because this and that initiative I have ticked already off. So try to make all the key results smart by making them specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time. That's a great aid to make it happen at the end of the day. What is an argument for an OKR system? Number one, we have complete transparencies and goals and progress. That means everyone feels connected to the goals and it's clearly measurable for everyone where we are. We see where we get the input, we see where we get the output, and we see if what we are doing right now is right for achieving those goals. We also focus on measurable results. So instead of having very fluffy designed objectives where you ask yourself, why are we doing it, We have a clear measurable result where we can decide on whether this is successful or not successful. Hence, we can streamline our investments in terms of money or time. Agility and adaptability to changes is also a clear pro, factor here. Because as we visualize all of these interconnections between objectives, missions, key results, we see if we're changing any kind of factor in between. Or if an external factor changes how we need to adapt this entire strategy to the new situation. And finally, it fosters employee engagement and motivation. Because if I, as an individual, understand how my role plays out or supports the overall mission vision, I feel much more motivated to achieve my goals. Also because you have objective, clear, and measurable results for your performance evaluation. So it's a better indicator for my performance as an employee, but also a better indicator for the company to measure the performance of an employee. The contra argument against it is that you have a high administrative effort to create those calls. Of course, you need to map out all the missions you need to break them down. Meets, you have a lot of working sessions, not only with your managers, but also with your teams and your colleagues. So that's high effort task. Then you might be at risk of pursuing too many things at a time. So for example, if an individual is responsible for more than one initiative, it might just be too much to handle at a time. And also it can put excessive pressure on your employees. Because if everything is transparent, if everything is measurable, employees might be super fast overloaded with peer pressure or with the pressure of performing in order to avoid, in particular this pressure thing, it requires a very, very clear communication and training to everyone participating This Ok R strategy needs to be trained for it. So the next question after hearing the pros and cons is of course, who should use the OKR system? For which kind of situations is OKR a great measure? So it is great in a corporate environment. If you need to work, Agile means you need to quickly respond to market changes. It is a high dynamic environment or you want to increase the collaboration of your employees. So if you, for example, do an employee survey and your employees tell you, I don't feel really connected through the overall mission vision, then OKR might be something you want to look into. Also, if you want to have a way to clearly track goals and the progress against the goal achievement, then OKR might be something you would want to look into for your private life. You can use it, of course, in a less administrative way, but if you have a lot of goals or a lot of dreams that you find not really the time for to work on these goals and dreams. And you want to make it more tangible, means you want to break it down, or you work better. If you have smaller smarter goals, then okay, R can be a measure to alter your motivation and also the probability to reach your overall goals in lie. And finally, how do you implement the strategy? So step number one is to find clarity of what I want to achieve, whether me personally or me as a company, or us as a company. We need to understand why we are doing what we do or what should we do to achieve what we're dreaming about. Next up, we need to define objectives. We need to break this overall vision down into objectives and then into measurable, key results. We need to think of, how can I measure for myself or from my company? How can I measure clearly whether or not I'm doing the right things? What are milestones? Or how can I measure the achievement of milestones? And step number four, we need to be agile, so we need to regularly verify our progress, measure our progress. And if we see, for example, that a objective is too far off or too far to reach, then we of course, need to adjust and maybe break it down even further into smaller bits and pieces. After having talked about KR in a theoretical manner, let's jump into our productivity system and build our dashboard for our own. For that, I will see you in the next L. 46. Lets build together: an OKR/Project Tracker System in Notion: Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are going to have another practice exercise where we build ourselves an OK R tracker, objectives and key results tracker. If you wonder what this is about and want to learn more about it, just go back one lecture, because there we will examine the theoretical foundation behind the methodology. But in a nutshell, it's actually just a tracker to capture objectives, means goals, and to break it down into actionable initiative. It could also be used for project management and task management to have a central view on everything, what's going on. As always, this is voluntary exercise, so you can skip it if you want to. But I highly recommend you to stay until the very end and to practice as much as you can. That being said, let's jump into notion and explore our today's exercise. All right, we are on our work space notion workspace and this is our OKR system. We have on top here our objectives that we want to reach grouped by the quarters. No worries. I will show you how this works. This is a new element that we haven't touched before, It's just a small one. Down here we have our results and initiatives. Our key results means what we try to measure at the end. And below that, in the sub level we have our initiatives. But you could also use it, of course, to capture projects, the top lane projects, and then the tasks below that to measure the overall progress on it. The way this thing works is we have two databases. These are database use, but we have two database, objective database and a results database. If I want to create a new objective for my database, then I simply click on you and create myself a new objective. Let's call it objective number four, and I can add some details to it. So let's give some details. I have an automatic alert here which is referring to the due date. If we are at risk of exceeding our due date, then we will get an alert here. We, of course, need to enter our due date. So let's say by end of the month we want to get it done and here we got our quarter calculation. As I said, this is pretty simple. So we're taking the due date and format the date into the quarter and breaking it down into the years and put the que in front of it so that we have a way to group our quarters in the view here. Next up, we also want to have a way to connect our objectives with our results and initiatives, which we are going to do in the very next step. If you have a look at the grouping, here we are, grouping everything by the quarter. And this is the formula that I just explained before that works out for the quarter. Below that, we have our results and initiatives where we can add a new entry. As I mentioned, you can fully customize this if you, by the end of the day say, I don't want to capture any objectives, I just want to capture my projects and the task below that or attached to it. Then just rename Objectives to projects and results in two tasks that's also workable, or you say the key results are the projects and the sub level are the tasks. That's completely up to you, but let's create a key result for the example. Here we open up our key result and I will call it simply key result. Number one, I need to assign a tech define whether it's a key result or initiative. The way this thing works is that everything in the top level is a key result and everything below it is an initiative. We call it a key result. We give it a due date, which should of course be before the 31st. Otherwise, we are having a problem. Let's select the 29th and we're connecting it to an objective. The objective in this case should be objective number four. We can start our progress measurement with 0% because right now we are at 0% We can add some details here about the project, the task, or whatever we want to attach here, we can put it directly into our key result. Now a last word about the alert that we have in our objective view. Let's say we move our due date sooner or even exceeding it. Then we just get here an alert that's saying alert, we have our due date at risk. That's all. It's nothing to fancy something we have done before. Be creative and define your alert with a simple formula. That being said, this is a task of today. You can pause the video right now. In a few seconds, we will go over the solution step by step. All right, we are back on our OKR tracker. As mentioned, OKR is just a suggestion. We can of course interchange the levels of measurement. Means objectives could also be projects and results initiatives could be tasks and subtasks. That really depends on your preferences and how you manage your daily workload. But let's kick things off. Okay, we have here our headline, this is the default headline of the Notion page. We are then progressing with a divider and a callout box, a simple call out box here, where we are getting rid of our imog followed by the divider. The divider, we have a headline that's in a grayish box which isn't really a call out. It is simply or matted headline. Let's put objectives here. Mark this entire thing as a headline number three. Then we want to turn the entire block into a gray background block like this. As you can see, we have now created a alternate format of the headline. Below that we have our objectives. The objectives is very own database in the gallery view if by opening up we are not having too many different formulas, just the alert formula. And this says if the due date of the objective is smaller than the last due date of the result, then we get an alert. So that we get a hint, if the due dates are not adding up, we are pulling in with a roll up formula, the last date of the key result and also the progress so that we can, number one, make use of our alert function. And number two, so that we get an aggregated overview of our progress. The progress is being calculated by a number field of all progresses that are attached to the objective. So all key initiatives have a progress and we want to take the average. So to avoid that, we are summing up or using any other way to calculate it. We want to have the average in here. That's for the objective. If we are opening up the key results and initiatives, then we see we do not have any formula attached to it. It's really just a single select field where we can define whether it's an initiative or a key result. We have a due date where we capture both the start and the end date. And in order to indicate or make everyone aware of that, we also need an end date. I added the respective hint towards the description of the property. Next up we have the connection towards our goal and we have potentially a sub and apparent item attached to it. So I have enabled for this database, the sub item feature as you can see here. This is why we have apparent child relation inside our key results because this is already the top level key result. We do not have any level above it, we just have sub items attached to it. We have also a checkbox, and we have a progress bar that is formatted with a circle in percentage. If we look at the property itself, we have the ring progress bar attached to it and the number format is percentage. We have a look at the sub items in turn. They are formatted the very same way, just that. They have now a parent item, which is the complete research here and no sub item attached to it. For the results, I have two more views. One is the tab where we have all the different tasks and initiatives and results. We also have to do filter attached to it. This filter, if I'm opening up, is just verifying if the result is achieved or not. It's all unchecked here. Right now for the done, we have the vice versa or results achieved, just the check marks. So if I go to do and say, okay, this one is ready, then it moves over into this view just to give us a clear view of all the results in initiatives that was the exercise for Okay. Art tracker. I hope it was achievable for you and please don't worry if you were not able to completely recreate it as there's multiple ways to achieve the very same thing. You can build it in a different way or you can build it in the exact same way. It's completely up to you. As always, I will attach a link of this template into the course description so that you can duplicate it. Either use it out of the box or change it, for example, to this project and task narrative that I was just talking about. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 47. Introduction into Second Brain Concept by Tiago Forte: Hello and welcome back to this course. In the next two lectures, we are going to talk about the second brain methodology by Tiago Ford. Second brain, as the name suggests, should be the one and only place to capture everything that you have in your mind means notes, thoughts, projects, resources, actionable items. Simply an all in one place to store and manage information. And it should be so intuitive that you don't even have to think about how to stay organized. Because the system will do it for you, of course, with your input. But you can trust the process, so you're not missing out on any deadline on any information or forgetting about something. If that sounds interesting to you, then stay on, because in lecture number one, we are going to discuss the theoretical foundation behind it. And in lecture number two, we have another exercise. So we will have a look at how to build a second brain. Of course, I will provide you with the template so you can start off right from scratch or build your own second. Brad, as you want to, let's jump into the topic and explore the second. In this lecture, we want to understand how to transfer our mental load into a system so that we're not missing out on any deadline or missing or forgetting about any kind of resources. How do we do that? First of all, we need to understand what the second brain is about, how it works. And finally, we will understand how you can build your very own. The second brain is a productivity book by Tiago Forte, and it's designed as a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. The problem this book tries to solve is that in a world as we live in today, we are flooded with constant information. And we need to have a method to remember things like using post. Its. If you're like me, I was using posts and note taking here pen and paper over there. I was literally cluttering my entire workspace with all these nodes. And this isn't efficient either because you forget about nodes. If they are buried under other posts, we need another productivity system. Second, brain is a methodology for having one central space where we can capture and remind ourselves on ideas, inspirations, insights and connections that we have gained through our experience. This is the one place where we want to store everything and why should we care? By creating this all in one place where we can store and unload all our mental load, We create a process that we can trust. And hence, we do not need to remember all these things. And we do not need to worry about not forgetting about it, because we just put it there. And this relieves us from so much stress that we can unblock a lot of our mental load to be more creative. So as an example, there was a time where I had trouble finding sleep in the evening. This was because my brain was constantly thinking about stuff that I need to take care of that I would like to remember myself on. And since I'm using the second brain and unloading everything there, I have a place where all this information goes. I don't think as much over these problems anymore. My thoughts are more of a creative nature. So instead of being reactive in my thoughts, like I need to react on an approaching deadline, my thoughts are more proactive and creative, if that makes sense. And that, of course, leads ultimately to also more calmness. At least that was the case for me. So how do we build our own second brain? It's like a funnel on the top, we put everything that comes into our mind and through the process, only those ideas and resources that are relevant will be actioned at the very end. So it's like a filter mechanism if you want to, which cuts out all the noise that we are maybe hyped about, but which actually doesn't really add value to our personal life. In order to make sure we're capturing the information we need, one place that is super simple to reach, best place would be online, because this is usually reachable from every location. It's not like a posted that I write on the go and then need to remember to stick it on my computer. No, it should be in the best case, an application that's online where we simply can add everything we want to remember. Next thing, we need to have a robust methodology to organize our thoughts. This organization should go directly into distill process. That means we are only actioning at really relevant things. And not like capturing everything, organizing everything, and everything needs to be action. No, there is like a clear list of priorities that we need to take care of and stuff that is simply not relevant for right now, but we store it just for the future. And the last step is express. This means we want to action on the points that we find relevant, which is the net outcome of our funnel. The way this thing works is we have a central place where we capture information. As mentioned, this should be something where we can access this spot all the time. It should be online, and then we're organizing and distilling it into the so called Perra method. Perra is an acronym for project areas, resources, and archives. A project is something we are actively working on, stuff that we are actioning more or less right now. An area instead is something that is timed out to the future. So that means something that we are generally interested in generally working on. But it's not like a really tangible project because a project would go under project. Of course, resources is everything we are generally interested in, which, however, neither fits directly into an area. So something that's like a mid term goal or a project, it's just like, hey, I found a really good recipe for something. I would like to cook sometime somewhere. But I don't really know when, how, what, and stuff like this. So this would go under Resources And Archives is a spot where we are putting all the information from our projects areas. Resource that we don't need anymore, but we don't want to also delete it simply we just want to put it into place, but it's kind of like the inactive part of our second brain, really something that we want to dump there. We are not intending to look at it, only if we have a similar project or a similar problem to solve. We would consult the archives folder to see if we had a similar problem before and to see how we tackled it. And that's it, that's the theoretical foundation of the second brain. In the next lecture, we're going to look at how to operationalize this methodology so we don't have to think about how to capture information, how to process the information. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out, Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 48. Lets build together: your own Second Brain in Notion (Exercise): Hello and welcome back to this course. In this lecture, we are having another exercise. We are going to have a look at how to build a second brain. If you wonder what a second brain is, just go back one lecture where we are discussing the theoretical foundations of a second brain in detail. In a nutshell, it's a central place where we organize our thoughts, ideas, resources, our nodes, our projects, so everything that's actionable. And that otherwise we would manage somewhere across our entire desk with posted nodes, different apps. So we are creating one central spot where we can really transfer our mental load into so we don't have to be stressed out and have more time to be creative. As always, this is a voluntary exercise, so you can skip it. But of course, I highly recommend you to stay until the very end so you can practice as much as possible. That being said, let's jump into the second brain. All right, we are back to notion our workspace. And this is the second brain dashboard that we tried to recreate in a bit. How does that work? Don't be intimidated by all the different views. Essentially, we have here just two different databases that are quite simple. First of all, we have a project and areas database here. We are capturing everything that we are actioning right now and areas that might be relevant in the future. It's a very simple thing. We collect the relevant projects or areas. We select the type, whether it's a project or an area. We give a due, and we can assign a task and note a resource or whatever it is to it. Then we have a roll up function that in turn relates to the tasks that we create for it. On the other hand side, we have a task data repository, a database where we are collecting, first of all, everything. This is a place where we're capturing our task resources and nodes. Then we assign the respective category and decide on whether it is already done or we have it archive. We want to have it archive. The next we decide on the status, whether we are actioning it right now, it is a progress or done. We manage the due dates and the progress and also the priority of it. Last but not least, of course, we need to attach it to a project or an area which we are doing right here. If we go back to our dashboard, we have just different arrangements of the views where we can quickly capture something new. We talked about these buttons before, try to remember how this works. We, of course, go through it step by step. In a few minutes, we have a quick access bar to our databases. We have a quick overview of our projects and areas, our tasks and our calendar with upcoming dates. Down here we have a view on our nodes which was already hint on how to build it. If you want to recreate this entire template, then you can pause the video now and in a few seconds I will go with you through it step by step. All right, we are back on our second brain. I hope you enjoyed this exercise and don't you worry if there's anything that you were not able to immediately build up. As always, this is just one solution to the problem. Of course, there much more. So how this thing works is we said initially we want to have a central place where we capture everything. So we want to have a place where we can centrally capture all the task nodes and resources which is here. How do we do these? We have created a button. Button is essentially the button automation that we can add as a block, where with the press of a button, we create a new page to our task database and directly classify it as a task. We are repeating this step for nodes we are classifying as a node in the text and as a resource in the text. Simple as it is, the entire thing lives in a callout box. And we have assigned a respective icon, a minimal icon from the notion can gallery. The next one is our quick access to the databases. This is like a little trick because if you remember, every page that lives on a page needs to be mentioned at least once. We cannot get rid of this. Instead of placing it somewhere and trying to hide it, I simply use it as a quick access guide and place it simply in this callout box. Below the callout box, we have another callout box for our projects and areas, which is simply a gallery view of our database. As a total, we have two columns where I reduce the space of the left columns to minimum giving more space to the central view. On the right hand side, the scale review is grouped by the tech project in areas as you can see here, we are grouping it by the type which is essentially the two single select fields. Next up, we simply have a new view of our task database that is filtered to tasks. We have the task and tech unchecked because we just want to see the active stuff. Every task should come, of course, with the due date. We are visualizing our due dates in a central calendar view filtered by archive unchecked because we just want to visualize active task. Of course. Below that we have our Quick nodes repository, where we are filtering our task database by the tech nodes. If you look at this one, we have assigned tech node and archive unchecked. Of course, I could also create a quick link to, for example, the Archive. However, this is a dashboard and I just want to consume everything that is burning right now or has a higher priority right now in my dashboard. I don't want to have a look at my archived stuff. In order to do that, I simply go on my task database and there I have a dedicated view just for task and for the archive itself. Done, you have managed the exercise of creating a second brain. As always, you will find the link to the template in the video description. You can either duplicate it and use it out of the box, or you can create it on your own, or you can alter it in order to make it work for your very personal situation. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next lecture. Cheers. 49. Thanks: Hello and welcome back to this course. Congratulations, you made it through the entire course. You have watched all the lectures, participated in all the exercises. I couldn't be more proud of you in this very moment. So thank you very much for joining this course and you're truly now a notion master. I've told you everything I know about notion, all the details, everything about databases, styling, communication, external stuff that you can connect to notion. We have also gone through a bunch of exercises helping you to practice more and build out notion as a true skill for your civ, for your personal life. And I truly hope you enjoyed this course. If you found value in this course, I would be super glad if you could give me a review. This would help me a lot to get more eyes on this course and to educate people on the benefits of notion. So we all can jointly create more efficient work lives environments and create great things. As you have dedicated so much time and initiative to this course, I won't let you go with a little bonus which you will find in the bonus section down here. It's a free gift that I want to give you as an added value for your participation in this course. For now, nothing else remains to be said from my end other than thanks again for joining on this exciting path. I wish you lots of fun exploring notion, lots of creativity, lots of success with the project that you try to achieve. And if you ever have a question around notion, I'll be here and available to all your questions. So feel free to reach out and I hope to meet you again. Thanks and good.