Notion: Project Management, Notion AI, & Time Management

1. How Notion Can Change Your Work: What even is Noon? Well, it's just a No app, right? Try again. Noon is a full blown productivity OS used by teams, solepreneurs, and creators. And you can use it for anything from organizing projects in teams to managing client relationships, to creating databases or even full sites. My name is Adam Taylor. And after running multiple businesses, building hundreds of systems and teaching thousands of students, Notion has become the tool that I use every single day to think, plan, and execute. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to make notion work for you without any headaches. We'll start from scratch, creating your account, choosing the right plan, and customizing your preferences so you get familiar with the interface. Then we'll master the fundamentals, how notions blocks work, how to structure pages, how to link ideas together, and how to turn messy thoughts into clean workflows. After that, we'll go deep into databases. Filters, sorting, roll ups, relations, layouts, all explained step by step with practical examples like a project tracker dashboard. Also learn how to build reusable templates, connect systems, and even turn Notion into a public website. We'll also dive deep into Notion AI, so you can master the newest tools out there. Finally, we'll explore productivity hacks, keyboard shortcuts, and integrations to automate your life and business. Whether you're managing clients, tracking goals, building content systems, or just trying to stay organized, this course will give you everything you need to master this incredible tool. No fluff, high quality video lessons, walk throughs and real world examples from someone who uses Notion to run their entire business. It's time for you to master the most powerful productivity software out. Take action and join the course right now. 2. What Notion Actually Is: Whether this is your first time opening notion or you've already dabbled with templates and pages, you're in the right place. Because before we get into the buttons, databases, formulas, and fancy stuff, we're going to start with a super simple question. What is notion and who is it for? This lesson is essentially going to ground you in the big picture. So you'll walk away knowing what notion can do, what it shouldn't do, and how you can start using it based on your needs, not someone else's. If you've Googled Notion before, you've probably seen phrases like these. All in one workspace. Second brain or productivity tool for everything. While those are technically true, they don't really help you understand what you're actually working with. So here's the simplest way to think about notion. Notion is a blank canvas for digital organization. It's part time note taking app, part time task manager, part time database builder, part Wiki, and part visual dashboard. But the key is that you decide what it becomes. There are no rigid folders or pre built workflows. You build your own. You're not just using a tool, you're designing the tool as you go. It's essentially like digital lego for your brain, your business, or your team. Now, if all this sounds a bit overwhelming right now, don't worry. That's exactly why this course exists. 'cause I'll be taking you through everything step by step at a pace that's going to be easily understandable. So what can we do with notion? Well, let me give you a few real examples to help ground this. A student might use Notion to take notes for each class to track assignments and to organize reading lists with checkboxes and tags. A freelancer might create a CRM to track client communication, content calendar, or even an invoice tracker. All of this in the same workspace. Lastly, a YouTuber might use it to script videos, to plan thumbnails, manage collaborations, and track performance metrics. A startup team might build a knowledge base, an SOP library product roadmap, maybe bug tracker, and daily stand up. You might just be a personal user using it to create a daily journal, a habit tracker or a budget planner. Now, all of that is really just scratching the surface. B with notion, you can build systems as simple or as complex as you want. You can create to do lists that update automatically project boards like Trello or Asana, interactive spreadsheets that filter and calculate and pages that feel like websites. Notion lets you do all of this in one place. And more importantly, it lets you connect all those things together. So now let's break down who notion is really for. I'm going to list a few categories, and if you fall into any of these, then notion is 100% for. The first one is going to be the second brain builders. So these are students. They're researchers, content creators, anyone who is trying to keep track of ideas, notes, references and resources all in one place. So you might use notion as a personal Wiki to tag your notes by topic or to create different knowledge systems. So, if you've ever had 15 open Google Docs and couldn't remember where you wrote that one thing, then notion is the answer. Next, we have the workflow hackers. So these ones are freelancers, solopreneurs, and small teams who want to build their own business systems without needing to hire a Dev or use ten different apps. With notion, we're able to create CRMs, SOP libraries, content calendars, sales pipelines, internal dashboards, whatever you can think of. And everything that we create can be customized, themed, filtered, and shared with your team or clients. Now, for number three, we have the creative organizers. So creators love notion because it gives structure to chaotic creative workflows. So you can plan your entire YouTube channel, organize a podcast series, store ideas for a book, or outline your newsletter pipeline. So templates, checklists, progress trackers, it's all modular and all up. Next, we have the teams and collaborators. So if you work with the team, Notion lets you centralize everything. Meetings, tasks, resources, SOPs and feedback. So you don't have to dig through all those slack messages or emails or random docs folders. Instead, everyone's on the same page, literally. Now, lastly, we have the life planners. You don't need to run a business or be a productivity nerd to use Notion. If you simply just want to track your habits, set monthly goals, plan a trip, keep a journal, manage your finances, then you can do all of that within notion beautifully and efficiently. Okay. So now we should ask the question who shouldn't use notion? Because it is worth saying that notion isn't for everyone. Because if you want something dead simple, like a basic to do list that you open once a week, then notion might feel like overkill. Or if you need lightning fast note capture, like you might get in the Notes app of your iPad with an Apple Pencil, then Notion's typing can feel a bit slower. And if you absolutely hate building systems, then you might prefer tools that are more out of the box. But for most people, and especially if you're watching this course, then notion is more than worth learning. Okay. Now let's do a quick recap of everything that we've covered. First, Notion is a flexible digital workspace. You decide what it becomes. It can handle notes, tasks, databases, calendars, wikis, and more. Perfect for students, creatives, freelancers, businesses, and teams. And it works best if you want a custom setup that fits your needs. And lastly, it's not for everyone. But if you learn it, it'll unlock serious productivity and clarity. Okay, so in the next lesson, we are going to walk through how to set up your notion account the right way. And from there, we'll build your foundation block by block, page by page until you've got a beautiful, functional notion workspace that you actually want to use. Let's go ahead and get started. 3. Set Up Notion Correctly: Alright. Now it's time to get started within Notion, and the very first step of that is going to be creating our account. So once we're here onnsan.com, we can come over here and we can click Get notion for free. Now, I'll talk about all of the pricing plans in just a moment. But for now, we're going to start off from the ground zero and just creating our account. Now in choosing your email for the account, this one here is going to be pretty straightforward. But I do recommend if you do have a work email and that work email is going to be connected to other calendars and maybe other softwares, then it would be best to be using that here because as you'll see, as we progress throughout the course, Noon has a lot of opportunities for integrations. And not only that, but also inviting people with your same domain is going to be a little bit easier in terms of getting them onboarded onto Noi. Now I'm going to go ahead and put in my own email. And now we just have to put in a quick verification code, and then we'll move on to the next step. So now it's time to just create a profile notion. So this is how everyone within our workspace is going to see us. You can go ahead and put in a name or maybe a nickname, and then you can add a photo, and then we can move on to the next step. Now we're asked how we want to use Notion. Now, this choice really is only going to impact the next steps that we encounter. So it's nothing that is going to be too important. So I'm going to just go ahead and select for work. Again, it's a similar thing right here. So I'm going to go ahead and select with my team because we will learn how to add in people within our workspace a little bit later and how to collaborate with them. Next, it's asking us what we are planning to use Notion for. Now, each thing that we select right here is going to be its own tab that is going to appear under our team spaces. So one thing that you should know about any one of these is that all of these are essentially comprised of pages. We're going to go deeper into this because pages are essentially one of the foundational pieces to what makes notion notion. But for now, just so we can kind of preview everything, we can have all of these selected just to view them. They're not going to impact our experience on notion. In the long run, they really just will be these single tabs that appear right here within our team spaces. So now let's go ahead and continue, and it is now bringing us to the point of us being able to invite our team members in. Now, if you have anyone that you want to go ahead and invite off the jump, then you could go ahead and do so right here. You can even get an invite link right here. But for now, let us go straight into Notion. Now, we are about to the point where it's asking us about our plan. Now, this is going to be important, and this is where I want to take us into the pricing plan page on Notion. So we can talk a little bit more about this because we are afforded more than just a free option and a business option. Okay, so now we are here within the notion pricing plan page. So as you can see, there are four different plans that we can have right here within Notion. There is starts at a free plan, and then it goes all the way up to an enterprise plan. Now, before we go into actual features of each of these plans, I do want to know that plan, this pricing plan is going to be not just a monthly charge or yearly if you choose to do so. It's going to be a per member per month charge. So that means, as you invite people into your notion workspace, that is going to essentially add in whatever amount you're choosing here to what your monthly charge will be. So if I add in one team member, then that means I'm going to be paying for myself and that other team member. So with a plus plan, that's going to be $20 per month, and with a business plan, that is going to be $40 per month. So I just want to note that before we actually go any further. Now, as you can see, if we switch to a monthly paid plan, then we get to see that we are $2 more here with our plus plan and $4 more per member per month with the business plan. So now let's actually talk about who is going to be using each one of these plans, and what are the kind of benefits and what are the things that you should be looking out for? Because as you can see, there are a lot of different things that we can go ahead and approach and tackle here and a lot of things that each one of these plans can afford us. Now, starting with the free plan, Notion is a great software, in my opinion, because essentially, anyone can use it for a wide array of tasks and things that either they have to do for their business, for their school life, or personal life. And with this wide array of functionality comes a software that you are afforded a lot of things to do for $0 per month for completely free. So I'd say for most of you out there, this free plan is going to be sufficient for using notion to do everything that you would hope to do with this productivity software that we have right here. With that being said, there are definitely few key differences between the plus and business plan and the free plan. Now, I don't want to get bogged down in the details because that's not what this is all about. As we go out through this course, you'll see what you need to access each different part of the course because some things are going to require plus, some things are going to require business now, with that being said, when it comes to the difference between, let's say, free or plus, because most of us are going to start right here at this free plan, what would be the thing that would draw us to upgrade to a plus plan? And for that answer, the thing that was going to draw us to upgrade would likely be that with the free plan, we are going to encounter a cap of how many blocks we can use. Now, many of you might not understand what a block is yet with Iotion. Blocks are content, and with a free plan, we're limited to the amount of content we are able to add per workspace. With the plus plan, that limit is alleviated. We get unlimited collaborative blocks here, so we can essentially have unlimited content within our notion workspaces. Now, as we progress throughout this course, and let's say you're balling on a budget, maybe you want to stick to this free plan. Maybe you don't want to pay $10 per member because you might have a lot of members and you just don't want to be spending that much money. I'll say how we can go ahead and kind of circumvent these limits, and we can avoid paying this $10 per month. But maybe this $10 ask is something that's not going to be a problem for you, right? It's going to give you convenience because you won't have to jump through the hoops that will require you staying paying for free while also getting this unlimited content. But now, let's go ahead and move on to the business plan because again, this is a $10 jump per member, but in my opinion, I'd say this affords you a little bit more value than what you do get in the free to plus range. Because with FreedoPlus, you essentially get, as I said, unlimited content, but also something to note here is that we get basic integrations here. We can integrate with our Google Drive, we can integrate with Gmail and tools like Slack. But in upgrading to business, the main thing that we get is this notion AI. And depending on who you are, this notion AI can be something that's huge for you, your personal productivity, or maybe your business. So the first thing that notion AI grants us is going to be an agent. So an agent is essentially like another teammate within our workspace where we can go to and consult to about all the things that are within our notion workspace and also things that we want to give it that are brand new, like for say, meeting notes. With those, it can create summaries. I can draft out emails. And it's really just, as I said before, another teammate, another person, another helpful hand within your notion workspace that already knows everything about your business. So at least what you've put into Notion itself. Speaking of meeting notes, there also is its own built in feature of AI meeting notes in that you're able to just go ahead and open notion, whether that be on your computer or on the mobile app, and you can click Record. And with that, it'll transcribe everything that it hears. And it will generate AI meeting notes for you without you having to do a thing. You don't have to go ahead and record this yourself and then go to a transcribing software to then pull the transcript, to then move it into let's say, chat GPT, to then create this AI. Within notion with this business plan, it does it all in itself. So we just hit transcribe and it creates these meeting. So the AI itself, along with these premium integrations, where we get more than just slack, Gmail and drive, we get things like Jira and Github. And if these are all things that you are using within your business, then maybe this business plan is going to be something that's going to be a little bit more attractive to you because of these integrations. And again, we will be going over later in this course, how these integrations can help us and what they actually do with a notion. The last thing that I want to mention before we go ahead and move on is going to be file upload limits. Now, as you can see here, with our free plan, we are limited to 5 megabytes of upload limit per file. But as we move up to plus in business and, of course, with enterprise, we are now given an unlimited limit per file upload. Was just the last thing that I wanted to mention while we were here because this can be one of those things that if you are on the free plan, it can be a roadblock that you do run into, and it could be that one last thing that kind of pushes you over the edge to go to plus or maybe even Business. Okay, so now we've really gone over these pricing plans about what they give us and why we would choose each one. So we can now come back here into our onboarding section of notion. And for now, let's go ahead and click Continue with our free plan. And we can finally go ahead and get into Notion itself. We're not solely limited to using notion on a web browser, because it does also have its own desktop app. But along with that desktop app, there's also a mobile app as well. So if you're someone that is going to be using Notion a lot on the go and maybe even offline, say that you're traveling often, then getting the desktop app is going to be something that is super helpful because you can make a lot of changes while you're offline, and when you finally sync up and connect back to Internet, all the changes that you make are going to sync up and your team will be able to see all of them. So, right, that is it. Now in clicking Skip. We have now been brought into our notion Hub. This is essentially going to be the place where you're going to see everything that you do on Notion. Everything on Notion is going to live within this sidebar right here. So we are finally here ready to get started and actually going through this software. 4. Configure Notion for Daily Use: This lesson, what I want to do before we get into notion and the functionalities of the software itself, I want to bring us into what is going to shape our experience within the app, and that's going to be our software settings. So as you can see, to access the settings of our workspace, we're going to come up here and we are going to click. This is usually going to be the name that you set when you created your account. And from here, we are able to access these settings. Now, we're here because a lot of these settings is going to really inform how you use the app and how the app reacts to. For example, right as we open up these settings, we're brought to our preferences. And we can see right here that language and time is one of the first things that we see. Now, this is important here because we want to make sure that our time zone is going to be set correctly to the place that we are. So whenever we set due dates for people in our team, whether they be in the same time zone as us or maybe halfway across the world, if you're hiring contractors or freelancers, whatever it may be, we want to make sure that these time zones are correct. You want to make sure that your time zone is, in fact, where you are currently station, B if we're going to be using notion to say set due dates for people in our team and our time zone is incorrect, it's not the time zone that we intend, then that means you are going to be setting the wrong due dates for your team, and this is just going to lead to confusion. So this here is an important thing. Now, as we look above this, we have appearance. So notion can be viewed in two different ways. It can be in a light mode as we are right here, or it can be in a dark mode. This is all to personal preference, but I have seen some studies that do say that using dark mode actually increases your focus. So keep that in mind when you're doing this. So moving on, we next have notifications. So notifications are, of course, going to be important because if you have your notifications set up where you're going to be getting notified about every single thing that happens in your workspace where some may be relevant to you and others may not be, then it can lead you to kind of get conditioned to just ignore them. So you want to make sure that that isn't the case. You want to make sure that you're only getting notifications that are going to be pertaining for you, and they're not going to kind of condition you to ignore them. So as you go through these, make sure you are selecting the ones that are going to be best for you. A note on this is for me, personally, I have notion on my phone. So whenever any important updates are mentioned, if I'm mentioned by one of my team members, then I get to see that instantly on my phone, and I don't have to go through my emails to see. So, that's just a little preliminary tip for you. Now, as you can see up here, we also have Slack and discord notifications. So these are essentially integrations that you can run where you can go into specific channels within Slack or discord and have notifications from notion get sent over there. Now, we're going to be going over how to connect and set this up later in the course, but I want to mention this as we are here right now. Now, that's going to lead us into our connections. These ones are going to be integrations that we can run. Again, these are going to be something that we're going to go deeper in later in this course. But now, as we move down here, we're moving into workspace specific settings because as you can see, we have this workspace title here and we have an account title. Now, the difference between the two is that our workspace is one piece of our notion puzzle. You're going to be operating within workspaces on notion. You might have one, you might have multiple. But this workspace setting, as long as you are an admin of the workspace, is where you're going to be able to control the minute parts of your workspace. We here in general, where you're able to change the workspace settings icon, this is essentially the same thing as if we come to our account up here, where we're also able to upload a photo and name for ourselves within Notion. And now I'll go ahead and add in an icon. Now, with the icon, we can set it to be an Emoji. We can set it to be an icon from their preset list right here, or we can upload an image. So I'm going to go ahead and upload. Okay, so now having this uploaded, I can go ahead and hit Save. But if we want to add it to the Emoji library as well, so everyone within our workspace can use this as an emoji, you can check this box, but for now, I'll hit Save. Now working down the list, we can allow in some trusted domains. But here, if you sign in with a work email, then your work email is immediately going to be allowed email domain. So meaning anyone with these allowed email domains are going to be able to automatically join this notion workspace. As we scroll down more through general, we're going to see some more specific settings that you guys can all go through on your own terms, but these ones aren't going to be of most importance to most of you. But as we continue down in our workspace settings, here we are able to invite people into our workspace. We have specific team spaces that we're going to be able to add. Again, we'll go through all of this more in depth later in the course, but I want to show you right now. So we also have some security settings. And we have some identity settings. These ones are going to be mostly used under the enterprise plan, but it's still good to know if this is going to be something that is going to pertain to you specifically in your own experience of notion. And then, lastly, what I want to show you before we go ahead and move on to Notion itself is going to be our Emoji tab. So here we're able to add in specific custom emojis that our entire workspace can use. So this is just like adding in our icon right here as an emoji, except we're able to add in essentially as many as we want. Okay, so there you have it. These are all more of the high level and some more specific settings that we can tweak that are going to affect how we interact with notion and vice versa, how notion interacts with us. So now let's actually get in to using Notion. 5. Navigate the Notion Interface: Now, the first step of mastering notion is understanding all the pieces that come together to create notion. So that's exactly how we're going to start this tour of the interface. We're first going to look at the biggest piece of notion, and that is going to be our workspace. Now, we start here because our workspace is what comprises every other thing that we create from this point on. Think of our workspace as essentially like a library because it contains all of the content that we're going to create. Now, of course, what we can also do is create new workspaces. So, for example, you could have one workspace that is for your work, and then you could have another workspace that's for your personal life. But that's essentially what workspaces are. They are collections. Now, if we want to strip this to the most basic it can be, then next step down from a workspace are going to be pages like this one that we got when we first created our account. We can then say our workspaces are comprised of a bunch of different pages. Now, of course, a page doesn't have to be just this simple, because what we see right here is essentially like a Google Doc. We're able to type in anything that we want right here. For example, we can write in tour the interface. And we get to see that the text pops up here, again, just like a Google Doc. But as you probably know in purchasing this course, Notion isn't just a bunch of different Google Docs all comprised together. No, we can do so much more within these pages. For example, again, a basic example, we have our GolsTracker here, which is one of the basic ones that were created when we created our account. Now, in terms of finding all of our databases and pages, we can approach this a few different ways. First off, we have our homepage, and our homepage is going to show us a lot of things, one of which is going to be our most recently viewed pages and databases. Everything that we see in this tour, we're not going to understand completely how to best leverage them to Notion's best uses. But we can go ahead and see that they do exist. And you can know that we are going to go more in depth into all of these pieces as we progress throughout the course. So again, in this home view, we're also given a few things to learn about Notion. No worries because you got this course, so I'm going to cover everything else in way more detail in this. We have some upcoming events that you can see if you do set up your notion calendar, and we have specific home views and some featured templates down here. Now, we also have this search bar up here. Now, this search bar can allow us to get to specific pages or databases quickly by searching, let's say, specific keywords that arise in any one of these given pages or databases. Now, moving on, we have our notion AI buddy here. We have our inbox, that's going to be giving us all of our notifications, and then you can see that we have two different sets right here, two different tabs. We have a private tab, and we have a team spaces tab. Now, our private tab is going to be showing us all of the pages or databases that are only going to be able to be viewed by us. But if we want to go ahead and change this, then we can have these pages and databases that are going to be accessible by our entire team that is within our workspace. Now, as we progress down, we have things like our settings, which we already covered for the most part. We have our marketplace. So here we're able to do quite a few things. We can access some featured consultants. So people that are going to be helping us build our specific workflows within Nsen. We have some more featured templates here. So these are templates that are made by other people on Notion, some of which are free, and some of which have a little bit of a price tag to them. Now moving on, we have our trash tab here. So if we move any page within our trash, we can come over here and we can recover it and have it come back into either our private or Teamspace tab. Additionally, what we're able to do within layout is right here we have our side tab. Again, this is going to be the house of essentially everything that we're doing within Notion, at least in terms of navigating between our pages and databases. What we can do is we can drag this up and we can close it. And if we want it to disappear entirely, what we can do is come over here and simply just click it. And then it disappears until we want it to come back up with that button right there. Now let's move into pages themselves because that doesn't just stop at workspace being the top of it and then pages and database being on that same level because pages and databases are made up of what we call blocks. So blocks are these individual elements that we have within notion. Now, this doesn't mean individual characters like letters in a sentence. But no, as I click here, you can see this, for example, is a block, and you can see it says, This is a toggle block. So in clicking this, we get to see that this toggle block also contains two separate bullet points. So with each block, we're able to do quite a few things with them. So I can go ahead and select this that I wrote to the interface, and then I can turn it into any one of these given blocks. So let's go ahead and make this a to do list, right here. So now this is changed to a checkbox. So I can check it off or not. For now, it's not going to be checked off because we haven't finished the lesson. So additionally, another way that we can kind of explore these blocks is by using a forward slash right here. So with this forward slash, we get to see these basic blocks that I just showed you right here, but we also get other blocks. And as we scroll down, we get to see media blocks. So we have images, videos, audio files. We could even put code or just simple files in here. And then as we scroll down, we have more database blocks. So there is a lot of these building blocks that we have within Notion, which is what makes it such a strong software because our creative freedom is essentially limitless in what we can create. So now the next question is, how do we share what we create in Notion with other people? Well, there's a few ways that we can do this. The first of which is going to be coming up to our share function up here. So here, we can input people's emails and we can invite them. Now, given this is a private tab, so it's a little bit different. This general access, we can change it to everyone at digital skills Academy, and we can have this be at full access. So now if we wanted to have, let's say, anyone or everyone from digital skills Academy to be able to access this, then they would be able to do so, but we'd be keeping it in this private tab, just say for organization purposes. But again, if we want to do this right here, letting everyone within digital skills Academy be able to access it, then it would be as simple as grabbing it from here, and then just moving it somewhere within our workspace. So now these privacy settings are going to be changed. But each one of these databases and pages don't only have to live on their own, because what we're also able to do is we can drag any one of these given pages or databases, and we can put it inside another one. So here we have our goals tracker, and if you can see, we have a new piece right here. This is our welcome to notion page that is within this Goltracker. So now we're able to have everything that we had in that page now kind of be in this little side bar right here within our GolsTracker. And if we want to expand this to essentially look just like it did before, we can expand this. And now we have this. We also are given a common section because this is a part of the database where we are going to be able to collaborate with others. So we have this common section as well. Now, coming back into our goals tracker to kind of just view this a little bit and how databases work, with each database, we tend to have a name of something here. Here, these ones are goals trackers. So here, these are going to be goals names, and we have different properties that we are able to change the values for. So, for example, we have status here, I can click change the status to done here, I can change it to in progress. We have due dates, we have priorities in teams. Again, we're going to go in all of this deeper, but I just want to let you know that these exist here. Now, another thing that we're able to do with our pages here and databases is instead of just sharing it, what we can also do is favorite it. So if we favorite something, then it appears here under its very own tab, where before we just had a private tab and we had a team space tab, now we also have our favorites. Now, next, before we go ahead and wrap this lesson up, I want to show you how we are able to create new team spaces and new pages within them. Now, to do so, we can just come over here to our side, and we have our private tab right here. And what we can do within these is we can go ahead and drag these to move them. So we can organize them in a little different way here. And if we want to add in a new page or database, we can do so right here. And here under team spaces, what we're able to do is come under our team space and we can add and do the exact same thing. But if we want to create a new team space, so let's say we want to have a team space for different teams within our business, like our marketing team and our sales team, then we can come over here and just as we would add a page, we could add in a new team space that can be dedicated solely to that team. Okay, now to finish this off, we always are going to have one little buddy here on our interface, essentially, no matter where we are. And that little buddy is going to be down here in our corner. And that is our notion AI. So just as we access our notion AI right here, we also have a quick access right here when we are within any given page or database or team space. Okay, so there you have it. This was our very fast and quick overview. Of the interface of notion. Now, don't be worried if you got bogged down in all the little details because every single thing that we went over in this course, we are going to go in more depth throughout the course, and we're also going to cover things that you didn't necessarily see here. Alright, let's go ahead and get to it. 6. How Notion Blocks Really Work: Notion, everything is a block. An image here, a block, a header, a block, a checklist, a block, a toggle list, a bullet point, these are all blocks. So the way that notion itself describes blocks are lego pieces where some are simple, like a simple text block right here. Others are a little bit more complex, like, for example, having an entire calendar view. But just like Lego, we're essentially able to rearrange them, nest them within each other, and essentially create whatever we want within notion. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how blocks work, how to use the slash Command to find any type of block, and how to move and organize your content with ease. So now let's go ahead and just click and drag and delete all of this so we can start from scratch from a fresh page, essentially. So let's start this lesson by looking at some basic blocks. Well, right here, just as if we hit Enter and we're typing in a new line, this is going to be a simple text block. So let's go ahead and ask this question. What are blocks? Well, we've covered this. Blocks are the basic building units of these notion pages. So every new line or element is a block, and even databases, embedded files and columns are blocks. So right here, we have our question. This right here is a block, and we get to see that it is just a text block. So, right here, we have a list of all of our basic blocks. But let's go ahead and turn this question into something that is going to be a little bit more eye catching. So what I can do is come over here, click these six dots, and I can turn this into a heading number two. So right here, we see that it's larger and it's bolded. So here, this is just marking essentially its own part of our page. Now, if we go ahead and hit Enter, we are now taken back to our normal text block. But let's go ahead and put in some bullet points here of answering this question. What are blocks? Well, to do this, these bullet points, I can do one of two things. The first of which I just showed you. I can click these six dots right here and I can turn this into from a text into a bulleted list. If I don't want to do that, what I can also do is click forwardslash. And from forwardslash, I can then come right here and select Bulited List. Now let me go ahead and type in some notes here. Now let's go ahead and ask another question. Because I want this to be its own section with the page, I'm going to go ahead and again, hit the slash here. And I'm going to do again, another heading here as I asked the question, what kind of blocks exists? Well, to look at all the blocks that exist, we can again use our forward slash, and we get to see that we have a few different blocks that are going to be broken up into different sections here. So first, we have our basic blocks. So these are going to be just basic texts, basic headers right here, the bulleted list, as we just saw right here, but we also have some different variations like a numbered list. We have toggle lists. We have to do lists, and we have specific things like tables, quotes, dividers, things of this essence. So let me go ahead and put some of these on the page so we can actually see them. So I'm going to go ahead and start out with a toggle list because just like we have different categories within our blocks, we can use our toggle list to represent that. So the name of this toggle list can be basic blocks. So now what we can do is expand this, and now we have this space within this toggle list, where we can add in some specific kinds of blocks. Okay, right now, I have illustrated here a few of our basic blocks. You can see right here we have our to do list. Now, if I hit Enter here, kind of with this group of kinds of blocks, we also have our numbered list right here, and we also have our bulleted list that we have up here. So, then as we go down, we have a call out block. And as I listed right here, this is used to make specific items stand out on a page because as you can see, it's going to have its own background, and oftentimes you're gonna have your own little emoji right here that you can change out for any given emoji, as well. Then below it, we have a quote block. So as you can see, this one differentiates itself from normal text by having this line right here. So when you have this among text, it's going to be clear that this is something that's different. And of course, you can go ahead and add in your little quote marks right here to make it look even better. And then, lastly, what I added down here is a table block. Now, I gave us some guidance as to how we can use these table blocks right here, because I said, by dragging the side, you can add in more columns. So I can drag out like this. And then by scrolling, we are able to see these added in columns. But also, I can drag my mouse backwards, and then we can take those columns away. The same thing applies to the bottom right here. If I drag downwards, we can add in as many columns as we want or as many rows as we want, and I can do the same thing backwards and remove all of them. Now, one thing that I didn't list with any text is our divider blocks. Now, our divider blocks are these very faint lines that we see between each one of these blocks that I've added. Now, what we can do with our divider blocks, and what I did in creating these is I just clicked right here, the same six dots, and I click Duplicate. So now what I was able to do is organize this a little bit more quickly, as opposed to clicking this button right here, clicking our forward slash, and then dragging down until we got to the divider, which I was able to create one here. The divider for how simple it is is actually one of my favorite blocks because it's super subtle, but it can add a great deal of organization to our page, and it just makes everything look that much nicer. As I said earlier, I have all of these comprised within a toggle list. So what does that mean? Well, what I'm able to do now is if I want to collapse this list and get rid of this, all I have to do is click right there. And now the only thing that remains are these two dividers that I created outside of this tog list. So we can go ahead and get rid of these and we can move on to the next set of blocks, of which being our media blocks right here. So just as I did before with our basic blocks, I'm going to go ahead and put a few media blocks in here and then we can talk about. Now, for our media blocks, I'm showing us a few here. The first we have are image blocks. So image blocks are essentially just images or gifts that we can upload within our pages. So right now I have GIF here. If I wanted to replace this, I could come over here to the three dots, and then I can click Replace. And we're given a few options here for the images that we can use. We can either upload a file, and right now on a free plan, your file upload limit is going to be 5 megabytes. Anything past the free plan is going to be essentially an unlimited file limit. So this is going to be something that's going to be a problem for you, then you might want to consider upgrading right now. Now, past this, we also have an embed link, so we can embed an image link here. We have Unsplash, which is essentially going to be a bunch of stock photos for us to use, and we have GIFI, which is going to be a software collection of a bunch of gifts that we can search through and upload in here. Next, we have our video blocks. So our video blocks are going to be similar to our image blocks in that we are either able to upload videos or we can embed in links. So here for this video, what I did is I embedded in a link. If I want to come here and replace it, I do the same thing. I can either upload a video with a five megabyte limit because I'm on the free plan. Or I can embed in a link. And that's what I did for this video. And if you want to watch this video, once you embed in a YouTube video, you can simply hit Play, and then you're able to watch the video right here within Notion without going into YouTube. Now, next, we have our audio blocks. So our audio blocks are going to be just places where we can upload in audio files and be able to listen to them within Notion. And lastly, here we have our file blocks. So our file blocks, just as everything else, we can access simply by clicking. And by clicking, it's going to take us to the file itself. Now if you want to go ahead and replace it, again, just as you guess, it's the same process. We're going to right click and we can replace right here, and we are given these two same familiar options in uploading or embedding a link. Okay, so right now, we've gone through our media blocks and our basic blocks. Well, is that it? No, we still have a few more kinds of blocks to cover. So let's go ahead and continue going on. Now for these last two sets of blocks, I haven't listed most of them within here, because these ones are going to be a little bit more complicated and they're going to be something that we're going to focus a lot more time to later in this course. But because we are talking about blocks, it was worth mentioning here because these are some of the foundational sets of blocks that exist within notion that make it this productivity and really behemoth of a software that it is. Now, starting with our advanced blocks, some of them that I mentioned here that I listed is we have an equation block. So here, you're able to type in specific kind of sets, specific kind of characters that are then going to be reflected in a way where we'll actually have proper equations here. Now, next, we have buttons. Now, buttons, again, these ones are going to be complicated. These orgs are going to be more things that we're going to focus on later in the course. But with a button, we're essentially able to name a button, whatever we may want this button to do. We can add in a specific icon here. And then what this button is going to allow us to do is essentially whatever we program it to do. So we have these conditional statements. So when do. So when the button is clicked, then the action right here is going to be whatever we delineate it to be. So these ones are going to get into the kind of automation realm, but these buttons can be super helpful as we kind of get to know and get to use notion. Next, we have column blocks. So column blocks are essentially ways that we can organize our pages in the manner of having multiple kinds of blocks next to each other. Because here, we have these column blocks where this one on top is a four column block. The one below is three column block. And within these columns, we just have simple text blocks. Now, I can change any one of these text blocks into something else, like, let's say, to do list. And I can do that for each one of these. So columns are essentially allowing us to move within space in notion, but we're also able to add in specific blocks within those columns. Now, lastly, here within our advanced blocks are table of content blocks. So table of content blocks are things are blocks that you can have in the beginning of a page that can then redirect you to specific parts within that page. So for example, I have two right here, what kind of blocks exist and what are blocks. These ones were Auto created because these were two headers that I had within this page. Now, if I click What are blocks, it's now going to redirect me, and it's going to highlight this heading right here, which is what are blocks. Now if I selected the other one, what kind of blocks exist, it's going to take me to this header. So there you go. Those ones are a quick overview of advanced blocks. Now moving on to database blocks, which are going to be a whole another behemoth in themselves. So here I listed just three of the over ten database blocks that we have. So this first one here is going to be a list view. So as you can see, we have different lists here that are based on our status of a project, which was not started in progress and done. Below this, we have a table view. So as you can see, these ones are all tables. This is going to be a view that's akin to our Gholstracker. As you can see, it's essentially the same setup that we see. And then, lastly, here we have a line graph. So with these database blocks, they essentially allow us to visualize and organize our data in a multitude of different ways that are going to be super powerful. But also, there is a little bit of a learning curve to them, which is why I'm not going to go over them in too much depth right now as we're learning the foundations of not Okay, so now that we know what kinds of blocks exist within Notion, another thing to mention here is how can we use them to interact with each other? Well, there's a few things to note here. The first of which is going to be moving blocks, navigating blocks around a different page. So what I mean by this is by coming to any one of our given blocks here, we're able to do a little bit more with these six dots than what I've just been showing you and using to click and turn them into different kinds of blocks. Because what we're able to do is instead of just clicking it, we can click and hold, and we're able to navigate these blocks to different parts of the page. So right now, you get to see that this block that I have right here is a toggle list. And when I collapse this list, we get to see that everything goes away. But if I grab this right here, I can drag it to live outside of this toggle list. So now, if I just drag it down here, it's now outside of this toggle list. So when I collapse this, we get to see that this lives by itself. Now if I want to put it back, I can always come and drag. And as you can see, there's these lines that appear that tell us where this is going to be placed. Now, as you can see, if I come beside this, we get to see that there is a different line right here. There is a vertical line instead of our normal horizontal line where we would place right here. And that's because by being able to drag these blocks beside other blocks, we're able to create column blocks. So right here, as you can see, this is now a two column blocked setup. So just like we have our Advanced blocks down here and the columns, we're actually able to do this without having to come here and click, let's say, forward slash and then drag all the way down to then come to our Advanced blocks and then select the columns. We don't have to do all of that. Because all we have to do in this scenario is just grab and drag and then place them beside each other. So now we have three columns right here. Now, if I want to take this out, I can do so just as easy by pulling them and placing them wherever I want. Lastly, we also are able to grab multiple blocks at once by simply clicking and dragging. And by doing so, I'm able to select here all of the blocks within this toggle list, and I could drag them out to live outside of this toggle list, just like this. So right now, we see that the only thing within this toggle list is that little divider. But I can again come here because they're all selected and just click one of these, and I can put it back in this toggle list. And also, if I want to select everything including the toggle, then I can simply just come right here to the six dots beside this toggle block, and I can just click it, and you get to see that the entire thing is selected. And just as I was able to do before, I can move this wherever I want. If I want to put it within another toggle list, then I'm able to do so. You see, within this media block right here lives our basic block toggle list. Again, we can pull it out simply by dragging. Okay, so there you have it. These are our blocks within Notion. There's so many blocks, we can use them in so many different ways. And again, just to recap, the way that we can access this, the best way that you can see all of your blocks within Notion is simply by using this forward slash function right here and scrolling through. Here we have all of our basic blocks. As we scroll down, we have our media blocks. Down here, we have our database blocks. And as you can see, there are a lot of them. And then finally, we have our advanced blocks as well down here. Okay, though, there was a lot of content, a lot of things that we discussed within this lesson right here. So I hope at least visualizing this data right here in front of us, all the blocks that we can use was at least a little bit helpful. Remember, if you have any questions at any point throughout this course, go ahead and drop those questions in the Q&A section, and I'll be there to answer your questions in no time. 7. Pages as Living Containers: So in this lesson, we're going to be looking at another one of notions basic foundational building blocks, and that is going to be Notion's pages. So everything in notion, everything that we interact with, anything that we create, is going to be a combination of pages and or databases. So this is to say that understanding pages is going to be a pivotal part of learning notion and becoming a master of notion. So now let's go ahead and create our very own brand new blank page. So I'm going to go ahead and do that by coming here under our workspace and then hitting this plus button. And now I can add in a brand new empty page. This is our blank slate that we are going to be able to work with. So what are the components of a page? What makes up a page, and what can we add to our pages? Well, when we create a new page, we get to see that it appears right here in our side bar, and we have this little blank icon that's going to sit right next to it. First thing that we're able to do in terms of text on this page is going to be able to create a heading an H one. So let's go ahead and name this blank slate. Now, before and prior lessons, what we did is we came below here, and we went ahead and experimented with different kinds of blocks. And yes, blocks are a huge part of pages because by using these different blocks here, we're able to create these amazing creations with inntion but the functionality of pages themselves are more than just being a kind of blank canvas for these blocks. So let's go ahead and take a peek on how we can format this. Well, first off, we don't kind of have this blank canvas that we are only ever going to be working with because what we can do is have some customization added to this. For example, the first of which is going to be adding a cover here. So just by clicking that button, we have this cover that was just auto generated, but if we come over here and click Change Cover, then we get a whole lot of other options. We have some colors and gradients that are just going to be basic. We have some images from the James Webb Telescope. This one here being one of them, you get to see there's all these different options. We also have some NASA archives, some stuff from the MT, and really just so many different options that we can use to kind of customize. Once we click and select a banner, what we're also able to do is be able to reposition this here. So, right here, we came to change cover, but we can also come here and repositioning. And now with just a simple click and drag, we're able to reposition how the artwork or the banner, the image, whatever it may be appears here on our page. Now, we're also given another option here in customizing the appearance of our page, and that's going to be with an icon. So with our icon here, we can select from emojis, icons or even an uploaded image here to dictate how this is going to appear here within our sidebar. So let's go ahead and choose an image, choose an emoji, and I'll come back to you. Now, another option as well is also this randomized option. So you get to see all of these appearing here. So this is more of a little fun gimmick. So let's go ahead and just stick with this one right here. We got partly cloudy with some sun. Now, in clicking out, we get to see that this icon is going to appear here, but it's also going to appear next to our page name in our sidebar. Because before, where it was just kind of a document icon, now we have it to be a little bit more personalized. Now, the next thing that I want to know in regards to pages is that I don't want all of you to think of a page as just that a page, because that name is a little bit misleading because pages can act more than just one off document. Instead, what pages can be are folders. So I went ahead and rename this from blank slate to a folder to kind of illustrate this because let's go ahead and come back here and let's add in a new page. So I'm going to click the ad button, and I'm going to add in another empty page. So let's say that we're going to use this page to hold some documentation on a client of ours, and the client name is going to be Horizon. So what we can do is take our Horizon client and put Horizon inside our folder. So now we get to see that in this folder, which, of course, doesn't have to be named folder, it now comprises this document, this page. So let's go ahead and rename this to make this be, let's say, a little bit more realistic here. And the name of this page is going to be clients. And now I have one of our clients here Horizon. Now, what's another way that we can do this? Well, if we want to create a new page within this page, this folder, for lack of a better word, let's go ahead and come back to our forward slash. Now, instead of using this forward slash to come to our basic blocks as we were doing before, instead, what we can do is use this to create an entirely new page. So right here, I have a new page, and we can say this client is going to be Acme. So now, right here, we have multiple clients, multiple pages within this one page. Now, if we want to access these without coming into this page itself, what we can do is come to this drop down, and now we have all of these different pages that are comprised in this one individual page. So far, what we've done in order to nest pages within another page to have that page act like a folder, we've dragged them in here through the sidebar, and we've used our forwardslash command. But also, there is another way that we can approach this, and that is going to be just using this plus right here. So instead of coming to our team space and adding in a new page and dragging it in, we can just do so right here and we can title this whatever we want to. So let's say our third client is going to be Amazon. So just like that, I can now click out and we have this right here. If I want to reorganize them, I can have it look as such, and now we are using this page as a folder. So now just by simply clicking on any of these pages, we are brought directly into these new ones. Another basic functionality of pages is going to be that when we open any given page, whether that be this main one or any sub pages, what we're able to do is add in comments. So right here, we can add in a comment, and then that comment is going to be listed next to our name so everyone in our workspace know who set that comment. Let me go ahead and write in something here. So right here, I have a message that I put here a comment. I said, list the most up to date info you have on our clients within their respective pages right here. So what we're also able to do here is instead of just leaving this comment, if we have any people within our team within our workspace that we have in mind, that can be, particularly helpful for any given task. For example, this note that I have right here, this comment, then what I'm able to do is I can use the at function right here, and I can mention specific people within our organization. So long, of course, as they're in our notion workspace. So once we do that, once we're good with our comment, we can just hit the Send button right there. So now, this comment is going to appear right here for anyone within my workspace that is looking at this page. Now, once this is resolved, then you can come over here and you can hit this plus button right there. Now, if I undo this, we also have a reaction button. And right here, I can also edit it, and I can copy link, Mark as unredO again, just delete it. Now, lastly, within pages, in terms of commands, what I've been showing us has been this forward slash, where we're able to do a lot of things here. But another thing that we're also able to do is instead of that forward slash, we could hit space. And hitting space allows us to use notions AI. Now, we're going to be going into AI much deeper later in this course, but you should just know that this is right here, and we're given all this functionality. If we have texts here, we can highlight it and we could have it summarize it for us. If we want to have it add any text for us, we can do so just by typing it in, or if we have any other commands that we want this AI to do within the notion functionality, then we can tell AI to do that simply by typing in right here. After just hitting space on our page. Alright, so there you have it. This was our intro in looking at pages that are beyond more than just a blank canvas for us, but the pages itself have a lot of functionality. 8. Move Through Notion Effortlessly: In this lesson, I want to talk about navigating notion. Now, this is important because notion is frankly quite compact software. Meaning, there's just potential for a lot to be going on throughout notion. Throughout all of your pages, all of your database, there is a lot of information that we can have pushed in and stacked and crammed into our notion where it might be difficult to find something. Not only that, but as we continue to create nested sequences, as we have pages in side of pages, sometimes it's going to be hard to actually get to where we want to be. Let's say we want to go back a few steps, but we don't want to go all the way back to the beginning of any one of our pages, and we don't want to keep collapsing all of these lists right here. Well, whatever position you may be in, learning how to navigate notion efficiently is going to be something that will really pay dividends as you continue to use the software. You can't talk about navigation without discussing the search function. Now, this is a function that notion really prides itself in, and that's because there's a lot that we are able to do with this search function. So this search function at its most basic form, is going to be notion searching for titles and block content. Now, when you think about it, titles and block content are essentially everything in notion. This search function, especially as you build up your workspace, can come in quite handy as you have so much content out there, and you're trying to find maybe one little idea that you jotted down a while ago that you can't quite remember where exactly you put it. So let's go ahead and see this in action. Right now in the search bar, I'm going to type in deliverables. And now we get to see our best matches right here is that this word appears in our ACM document. So if I click on it, we are now brought here where I wrote deliverables due on November 26, 2025. Our search function does go a step further than just recognizing text within notion because the content that appears in notion is more than just text itself. So that's why here within our search function, we are given a lot of filters. Now, sometimes depending on which version of notion that you're running, these may be hidden. So if you want to unhide them, you should look for an icon that looks just like this, and by clicking it, you can open it. Now, here we have all of these different filters. We have the sorting filters, so we can sort by best matches, buy a last Edited or created. Have filters of searching for title only. So if, for example, I just wanted to find a specific page, then I could do so by enabling this title only filter. So if there was any point in which my search appears in some kind of text content on some random other pages, then that's not going to show in this search. We also have some created by filter, and right now because I'm the only person in the workspace, that is the only filter that appears right here. We have our team space. Again, we just have this one team space. So that's not going to give us any more options there. We have in. So if we want to search for within specific pages, then we can do so. Let's say one of your pages has a lot of content and you want to bring yourself right to that exact content block, then you could do so by selecting the specific page and then putting in your search. And then, lastly, we also have filtering by date here. Now, we have a few options in filtering with this date because we can filter it by last edited, and we can filter it by created. So those are two things that you just want to keep in mind. But now let's move on because there's more to navigation within notion than this simple search bar. So, for example, let's say that we have multiple nested sequences, right? We have pages within pages. Now, that's exactly what we did with our clients page right here where I created this clients page, and then I put some pages within it like ACM. Now, here we're able to see the exact sequence in which I got here by looking at the top of our screen right here. So we get to see that I am within Adam Taylor's workspace, and from that, we went into clients, and then from clients, we came into ACM. So this is another thing that you should keep in mind. If you want to go back, let's say, just one step, but we're within a document within a document, and you want to go to a specific sequence without coming to your sidebar here, you could come and just click up here, and then you're back to your desired page. Now, next, I want to mention something that is only going to be available within the desktop app, which I am in right now. And that's going to be tabs with Intion. So you can see right now that I'm in the client's tab. And if I switch to any other thing in my workspace right here, then you get to see that it changes. Now, I have the option to open multiple tabs to have multiple projects, multiple pages open at once here. So if I hit this plus button, then I can open in a new tab. Now, what I can do here is I can create a new page or I can open something that I've already previously worked with. So let's go ahead and just use clients here. So now I have my clients page and my GLsTracker right here just like I was on Google Chrome. So, with this tab function, we're essentially able to open as many pages as we want that exist within our notion. And to get rid of them, it's just like you would on Google Chrome or any other web browser. You can just hit this X, and you'll be taken out. Now, another thing to mention about searching within pages or databases. And that is going to be the first of our key strokes that I want to introduce you to, which is going to be Command plus F. If you didn't know, Command F is a keystroke that is going to work essentially no matter where you are on the Internet, to be able to find specific text that appears on whatever page that you initiated that keystroke on. Now, within Notion, within the desktop app or on the website, this works the exact same way, where in hitting Command F, this opens right here, and we can search for specific text within our page or database. So here, I don't really have that much content. So let's go ahead and come back to our welcome to Notion. And we can open up all of these blocks, and now I can search for something. Let's say that I want to find a specific example of one of the blocks here. I want to go down to, let's say, our video blocks. So I hit Command F, and then I can just type in video. And we get to see that this is now highlighted on our page. And if we have multiple examples, like for example, if I type in blocks here, we get to see there are nine examples. I could go ahead and click through, and then it will just bring me and highlight the specific example that it is on. While we're here, I also do want to note that there is a replace function that exists within our Command F search function. So that means if we want to replace everything that we type in here. So instead of saying blocks, if I wanted to replace this with just the word block, then I could do so. And let's say I want to change the capitalization here, then I can replace all or just replace any individual one. So that's kind of just a little note for you guys. Now, the same thing exists on databases because this right here is a page similar to a Google Doc. But here, within a database, we're going to have a little bit more information that isn't going to be necessarily as clearly available. So with our search function within a database, we're able to search for everything that we see right here, but this isn't everything that exists within a database, because, for example, what I can do is type in the number 20, and we get to see that there are two examples of where 20 appears because it's highlighted. Or I can type in some fields like the field done, and we get to see that two of them appear right here. If I type in the field high, then we get to see this priority high field appears here. But within all of these goals exist their own kind of pages. So if we want to search for something, let's say, success metrics, then we have to know that if I come here to search and I just go ahead and paste this in, we're not going to see that here. So know that this search function is a little bit limited because you're not going to be able to search within the goals in this case about those words that you're searching for. But if we want to come to our full search function right here, and I go ahead and put that one in, then we get to see that this is going to take us to our success metrics within this goals tracker. Now, we get to see that we're in our goals tracker because of this function right here that I showed you earlier. We are within a goal within our goals tracker. Okay, so there you have it. This was a kind of introduction to navigation with a notion, kind of all the basic ways that we want to keep in mind and going through notion, especially as we're learning more, as we're opening new pages and databases. These are going to be things that are going to help us get around a little bit more efficiently. 9. Link Pages Like a Knowledge Graph: By now, we know that pages can be great on their own. But notion becomes really powerful when you learn how to connect them. So in this lesson, I'll show you how to link between pages and how notion automatically creates back links that help you stay organized and never lose context. So the first thing that I want to note here is that linking pages isn't the same thing as nesting pages. I'm mentioning this because right here in our clients page, we created nested pages. So these are pages that if we come down here to the page, we could expand, and we see that these pages live solely inside of this page right here, this mother page. And by clicking on them, we get to open and we get to see what each of these pages have in store. But now that's different than what we have here in linking pages. So, first off, this means that these pages that I'm linking don't necessarily have to live within the side bar right here because we get to see action items exist here and it does here as well. But we don't see our Team roster or project Alpha, which we can clearly see are different pages that exist on this page. Well, first, let's see how these react. Let's go ahead and click in to Team roster. Well, within team roster, we get to see that this is essentially just another page that has some team members listed here. It's a roster. Now, if we go ahead and return to this, we can also hover over this, and we can see that this team roster does have a preview. Now, how is I able to do this? How do we create any one of these given page links? Because you can kind of see their utility is apparent. And in showing how easily this can be done, this is going to prove my point even further. So let's go ahead and get rid of this project Alpha. Now, if I want to go ahead and link to this project Alpha, how can I do so? Well, the first and kind of most straightforward method of doing so is going to be just using our at function here. So we can at, and then we can go ahead and type in the name of this page, the title of the page. So I'm going to type in Project, and then we get to see this link to page right here, and we get to see Project Alpha. So all I have to do is select that, and now it appears right here. In creating this meeting summary, it really is as simple as this. So this app function is great because instead of what we covered before as nesting pages here in which we actually had to create these new pages, here, we can just link to pages that already exist. But now, this isn't the only way that we can link to pages, right? This app function isn't our only option. So let's go ahead and get rid of this. So right here, I said, updated. And what I want to do here is insert my team roster. Now we did before is we use this app function. But instead of the app function, what we can do is use our forward slash, something that we should be quite familiar with at this point. But instead of using this to do a command or insert some block here, we're instead just going to type in Link. And with Link, we have the option of link to page, and now we get to search for the page that we want to link. Here, I'm going to do Team roster. So you see now that this is now a linked page. But we can see that it acted a little bit differently than we have our project Alpha here because it came onto its very own new line. And besides just that, if I come over here, into our page in our panel and I expand it. We get to see that it now appears right here within the drop down. So there are two ways of linking pages here. Let's go ahead and put both of them here, linking pages. One of them being with our at command in which we can just embed that within any sentence or text that we are writing or we have our forward slash Link Command. So we see here that our link command can link pages in their own block and they appear in our page dropdown. So you get to see that here, this team roster is its very own block that could go ahead and move to be wherever it is, whereas this at function here is embedding this within our sentence. Last thing that I want to cover is something that we went over quickly earlier in navigating notion, but that is the function of backlinks. So backlinks and Notion are automatic links that show you where a page is mentioned elsewhere. So in seeing these, you can easily trace connections and jump between related content without ever losing context. So where does this back link exist in our project Alpha? Well, this only exists if you know where to look for it. Where prior, they existed below the page at the bottom. Now they exist in this little sneaky area right up here. So the same place that you would add a cover to your page or customize the layout is where you are also able to see the back links. So you get to see that this is mentioned right here in our weekly team sink. Now, this is separate from the links that we have above here because this is telling you where does this project Alpha exist? Well, it exists most largely under Adam Taylor's workspace right here. But if you take that one step further, it exists within projects. And then within projects is the smallest kind of piece, the smallest folder in which this project Alpha lives. You can see that it is not, in fact, connected to our weekly team sync document. The same thing is going to be the case on if we come to this page right here, action items. We get to see that there is one back link, which is our weekly team sync. But up here, we get to see where this item actually lives. It lives within, again, my workspace, document Hub, action items. Is different than pages that are nested. Because if we come here within clients and I come to Acme right here, we get to see that this does, in fact, just live within our clients page. Okay, so there you have it. This was our lesson on backlinks and linking pages and how they differ from nesting pages. 10. Share Pages Without Breaking Things: So as most of you who've bought this course know, notion isn't just for you. It's for your team, for your client or even the entire Internet. So in this lesson, I'll show you how to share your pages with others, whether you want someone to just view a doc, leave comments, collaborate live or duplicate your template. So here we have a page that we created last lesson. Now, to share this, whether it be within people that already exist within your workspace or people you want to invite in your workspace or even anyone that's outside of this, all we're going to have to do is first come to our share function right here. So click it and we are open, and we get to see a few things. First, we get two tabs here. We have our Share tab and we have our published tab that I'll speak about a little bit later. So now focusing on our share tab, we get to see everyone that has access. Beside that, we get to see the permissions here. You get to see that there's full access, there can edit, can comment, can view, or simply remove. Now, below this, we have something that mostly acts like a folder, which is People in Adam Taylor's Workspace HQ, which is this team space right here. So this is telling us that everyone within this team space is going to be able to see this because we get to see that this page right here is living under our workspace. Now, separate from our team space, we have everyone within our digital skills Academy. So this is different because we can create multiple different team spaces. And some people might be in one team space and not in another. But regardless, we have our permissions right here that we can change. And when it comes to people within our workspace HQ here, we can also expand this and then be able to see all of the individual people and their access level. Now let's look at how we can invite someone who doesn't exist within our workspace into this page. So let's start out by typing the email of our new friend Nick Noon. So here we now have our new friend Nick Noon added in right here into this invite box. Now, one thing to note here is that we don't just go ahead and invite them. We can also control their permission level. So we have full access. We have C comment, C view, and if you have a plus membership, you can give them simply Cit permission, which is the same thing as full access except they're not able to share it with others. So let's go ahead and start off by giving our friend Nick notion a simple permission of only being able to view the page. So now, as I go ahead and click Invite here, it's going to bring us into the next thing that I want to mention. It is going to ask us if we want to upgrade this guest to a member. So, this might be a question that many of you might have. If you go ahead and share a page by putting in an email and inviting someone into that page itself, does that mean they are immediately a member that you have to pay for? And the answer to that is no, because whenever we invite people into pages with a notion, they are only ever going to be invited in as guests, meaning that they're not going to have certain privileges, but also that means we don't have to pay for them because remember that notion operates on a per member per cycle pricing plan basis. This means that if you're paying for Notion, if you're on any plan besides the free plan, then any member that you add into your workspace is going to be someone you have to pay for. So now let's go ahead and move over into Nick Notion's view to see how him being a guest can differ from a member within our workspace. So now I can go ahead and move over to his email to see this invite. So, right here, we see there's a new email, Adam Taylor via Notion. We see that Adam Taylor is inviting him into the page weekly Team sink. So let's go ahead and click this, and we are then going to be brought into the page itself. Now, I also want to know if you are going to be inviting someone that doesn't have a notion account is first, they're going to have to do a verification code, and then second, they are going to have to create a profile, which is simply just putting in their name and adding in a profile picture if they so choose. It is very simple and straightforward. There's not much friction to the process at all. Now that we are in the page, we can see how being a guest kind of operates a little bit differently than a member, B first and foremost, we don't see anything in our sidebar here. We are only able to see our weekly team sink, which is this page that we were invited to. Now, as an extension of that, we can also see that all of the linked pages that we had before, we see project Alpha, action items and Team roster are now just showing as no access. This is because they don't have access to the entirety of our workspace. They only have access to what we invite them into as a guest. Now, if we made him a member, if we made Nick Notion a member, then he'd be able to see everything here that members within digital skills Academy would be able to see, and therefore, he'd also be able to see these linked pages. Now, a way that you can kind of circumvent this is you can invite guests into these pages that we see are no access. And in inviting them into these pages individually, they're then going to be able to use these links. Now, another thing to know is if we are going to invite a guest into, let's say, this clients page, then they are going to have access to all of these pages because these are nested pages, while in weekly team sync, these ones are linked pages. So again, remember, there is a difference between those two. Now, let's go ahead and change Nick Notion's permission to have full access. So instead of just being able to view, he'll be able to edit, as well. So now, in refreshing the page as Nick Notion, I have full edit permissions, and I can do essentially whatever I want within this page. If I go ahead and take this one out right here, we can go ahead and look here, and we get to see that is now Okay, so now that we've covered how we can invite people in and what they're able to do with their permissions, the last thing that I want to know, at least on this panel is going to be our copylink function, which is essentially going to operate the same way as inviting someone here with their email. So you can use this copied link if, let's say that you're in a slack chat or you're in Discord, and you want to invite a lot of people to be able to see your page, you can go ahead and use this copy link function to do that, instead of having to ask all the people what their emails are and then putting it in here, it's just going to be a little bit easier. But now I want to talk about the other way that we can share pages with a notion, one way that might even be more common than sharing with this function, and that's going to be exporting our pages as PDFs. So for whatever the reason may be that you want to go ahead and export this as a PDF, to print it, to share it with others, to either save it on your computer, it is going to be a simple process. We can just come up here and instead of clicking Share, we're going to come to icons over. We're going to come to these three dots. We can select them. And then ignore all of these until we come down right here to our export function. Now, in clicking that, we get to see a few different settings that we can change. First is going to be our export format, and we have three of those. We have our PDF, our HTML, and our Markdown and CSF. So these latter two right here are going to be more useful if you're going to be exporting a database. Now, speaking of databases, this next setting right here says, include databases. Have a current view and default view. This one's only going to be relevant when we go over databases, which we will a little bit later on in this course. Next, we have our content, so that's going to be everything, or do we want to exclude files or images? Keep that as everything, doesn't matter in our case, because we don't have files or images. We have our page format. We can change it to A four, A three, keep it to be whatever we want, and we have our scale. So now let's go ahead and export this page just so we can see how it looks. Okay, so here is the exported PDF. So note here that all of our links are actually still intact. And if we do want to click them, then it actually will link us to these pages or projects that we have listed. So this could be helpful if you're going to be sharing these files with other people within your workspace or maybe even just keeping it on your computer to access later. So we essentially see everything as we see it in Notion, except down here, we have a little bit of extra information where we have the title of the page, and we have the page number. Okay, so there you have it. This was the basics of sharing your pages on Notion. 11. Publish Pages as Simple Websites: The last lesson, we discussed one of the fundamental aspects to notion, and that was sharing our pages, sharing the pages that we create. But besides the share function, we have publish, and publish is essentially turning the page that we create into its very own website. So yes, you heard me correctly. We are able to create websites within notion. And not only are we able to, but that is exactly what we are going to do in this lesson. Now, personally, I think this is a great project for us to go ahead and work on because it's going to be able to put a lot of the things that we've learned thus far in this course into action. So let's go ahead and actually take a look at what we're going to build because I've already went ahead and built this website. Now, let's go ahead and view this in a proper website view. And then I can go over, talk about a few things, and then we can get into actually building the entire website from scratch. Okay, so here we are on the site that we created fully in Notion. Now, one thing that I want to add at this point is that this here is a basic site, right? Because so far we've only learned so much, and there's still a lot of the course to go. So, what we're going to be doing throughout this course is as we learn more things, we're going to come back to this website lesson, and we're going to be adding into this website that we've created. Because as you can see, right now, we have some tabs up here. But if we come here to our courses, you get to see that this here is going to be blank or About me section is going to be blink. So that's just to say that this website, what we're going to be doing in this lesson, isn't going to necessarily be the finished product by the end of this course. But still, as you can see, this isn't just any Rinky dink page here. This actually does look like a pretty decent website. Alright, so let's go ahead and come here into our workspace and add in an empty page. So although we're creating a full website, the start here is going to be the same as it is with any other thing that we worked in notion with so far. So the first step of this is going to be having our page title here. Now, one thing that is a little bit unfortunate for notion is that we can't just ignore this new page title because blocks add a little bit more, you know, flexibility, and we're able to edit things with a little bit more control as compared to having a page title. But it is the case that when we do publish a site with notion that if we have this blank right here, this new page, then on that site, it's going to appear just as it is right now where it says New Page. So instead of being bummed out about this, let's go ahead and use it to our advantage, and we can go ahead and put a little bit of a tagline right here. In our case, what I decided to do was just put in this. Hey, I'm Adam Taylor with a little bit of a waving emoji. Now, typically, we're not able to go ahead and put our forward slash command and then type in emoji to be able to do an emoji. So what I did here is I just came down to a free block where I am able to do the forward slash. And then I typed in Emoji, and then I just went for the waving hand, and then I copied it as such and then pasted it right in here. So we now have this waving hand emoji. Okay, so now we have the tagline for our website done. But before we go any further in actually creating this website, I want to bring our attention to a few things right here under these three dots. So under these dots, we are given a few different options. Some of them are going to be relevant for us in actually creating a website. The first of which is going to be our font type. So we have the default font that we've been using throughout this course. We have this monofont which isn't very good, at least for the kind of website that I'm going for, and we have this Serafont. Now, this serapont is personally what I want to go ahead and use for this website just because I like the way it looks. The next thing that I want to do while we're here is come over here to the customized page settings. Now, this is because what I want to do is I want to turn off a few of these things. Like, for example, for our backlinks, instead of being show on hover, I want to turn this off. And our page discussions off table of contents isn't going to be relevant here, but I'll still turn it off. And our inline comments, I also want to put down to minimal. This is also all of these options here are going to be least intrusive in our actual final website because we don't want our website to feel like it's a document. We want it to feel like it's an actual website, and all of these little settings here aren't things that are going to help us get to that website feel. That's why I recommend just turning them all off, and that's why I'm going to do that in this build in this project. Okay, so now that we got those two settings out of the way, let's go ahead and get back into actually creating this. And to do so, I'm going to go ahead and hide over our side panel, just so we're going to be able to see this from a view of a person that's actually going to be visiting this website or at least a more similar view. Okay, so now looking at our reference here, what we have next is a two column layout. So let's come ahead and come back in here, let's go ahead and create those two columns. Now, as we've covered before, we could go over here and we can turn this into a two column setup. But personally, the way that I usually approach this faster way is just going ahead and putting in the slash here and then typing in two C. And then that will give us our two column setup. So as you can see, we have this one column right here. We have the center line, and we have a second column right here. So in this right most column, what I have here is an image. So let's go ahead and input an image. Again, it's the same thing. We could come to these six dots, but instead, the faster way is using our slash here and then just typing in image. So now that I typed in image, I have a few different options. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to upload in a file of my image, and then I'll come right back to you. Okay, so we now have our image right here. But as you can see, doesn't look exactly the same as it does right here. That's because we are able to crop this one to be, in fact, a circle. So what I can do is I can come to this image, and we have all of these different options here. You see, as you hover over them, you get to see what they are. You have comment, caption, crop, expand and download, and we have a few more options as well. But what I want to do is, I want to crop this photo. So here, in the cropping function, if we come to the top left, then we have a few options as to how we can crop this, right? They have a few presets right here. But what I want to do is simply click the circle one. Click the circle. Click Save. And now we have out circle image just like this one. Okay, now, next, what we have is going to be our headline. Now, since I already created this website and I did all the copy, I'm not going to bore you out with me actually typing all this out, and I can just paste it in. But one thing that I do want to know is that as you just saw, when I paste it in in a very new block, this is going to be just simple text. But instead, if I just want to go ahead and have this pasted in as a heading, then what I'm going to do is have this double hash tag right here and I'm going to hit space, and that gives us a heading two, which is, in fact, the exact kind of heading that I want to be right here. So now, let's go ahead and continue under here. And where this here is going to be the main headline right here saying what I am, I want the text below to be a subheading. So instead of being that heading two, we can have this be a heading three. So to do that, I can just do three hashtags. Then you get to see that there you go. You have a heading three, ready to go, and I can go ahead and just paste in what I had before. I built online courses that simplify complex topics, and I help creators turn their skills into scalable digital business. Now what I want to do before moving on is I want to reorient everything because as you can see, this here doesn't look as good as it could, right? All of this looks quite crammed right here. So what I'm able to do is actually grab this sidebar and I can extend it out essentially however far I want it to be. So if I want it to be all the way here to be essentially a full page length, then I can click drag and then release, and you get to see that I do, in fact, now have a full page text making this picture here massive. Let's go ahead and pull this in, though, so I can release right about there. And having it like this looks a little bit better. But looking at this text here, I actually want to change this one from being a heading three, back into being a heading two. I just think it looks a little bit better like that. And with that, what I want to do is I want to drag it out just a little bit more like that. And I don't want the picture of me right here to be so big. And I have a few options of being able to fix that. But I think the best option would be coming here, pulling this tab, which is separate from the big one because if I pull this one in, that's going to be pulling everything in. I just want to pull in the size of this image to shrink it just a bit. And I think about that size is going to be good. Okay, so now let's go ahead and compare the two. I think it's looking pretty decent right now. So next what we have are going to be these two little buttons down here. No, we haven't actually fully discussed buttons yet. So I want to take this time to kind of give a quick run through of what buttons are. And we'll go a little bit deeper into it later in the course. But for now, what I want these buttons to do is actually redirect to different pages within this website. So first, what I want to do is create these buttons. So I can do this slash and then type in but and then hit Enter right here, and we have a new button right here. And I can do the same again, right here. I'll do another butt and hit Enter. And we have these two buttons that are going to be ready to be programmed. But first, to be able to link to certain pages within our website, those pages have to already exist somewhere within the site. So what I'm going to do is actually create a new block here, and I'm going to be linking to all of the pages within the footer of our website. So let's go ahead and move over to the finished website so I can show you exactly what I mean. So right down here, we have our site navigation, which is just a toggle block has all these three different pages that I am going to link to or that I at least want to have appear on my website at some point. And again, to be able to do that, they have to appear somewhere. So I'm putting them right here into this footer. So let's go ahead and actually create that footer now. So right above that footer, I had a divider. Now, to do the divider, we could go ahead and do our slash Command and type in divider and hit Enter. Or instead, the way that I like to go about it is just put three dashes, and as you can see, the divider has now appeared. Okay, so now for this footer, we want to have two things, right? We want to have our site navigation, and we want to have our copyright, our Adam Taylor 2026 copyright. So to do with copyright, what we have to do is hold Option and G on Mac. And on Windows, if I'm not mistaken, you are going to have to type in, like, a little code, but you can search that up or you could even just copy it online somewhere, which is probably the easier approach to go ahead and do that. So I put in this copyright symbol, and then I'm going to go ahead and type in Adam Taylor 2026. And now, as I said before, we need to have two columns here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to enter into a new block, and I'm going to do the same thing as we've done before. I'm going to do two C. Create these two columns. And I'm going to drag in this text block to be inside of our two column block right here. So right now, we have this column, and then we should have another one right here. And here, what I want to do is create a toggle list that is titled site navigation. Now, we can again come into here and click Turn into a Toggle list. But the better approach, the one I like to take is going ahead and just putting that symbol right here, hitting space, and I can title this site navigation. What I want to do is create three new pages that are going to live within this website that are going to appear within the website. It's going to be an About Me page, a contact page, and a courses page. Now, I could just go ahead and hit slash Page and create a page for each one of them individually, but a better kind of faster approach, a little hack here is instead to create a bullet list. So I just hit Dash there and hit space to create a bullet here, and I'm going to type in About Me. I'm going to type in courses and I am going to type in contact as well. Now that I have these three bullet points, what I can do is I can click and drag, select all three of these. I can come here, I can click turn into a page. So now we have three pages that live within this website all under this little toggle list that can kind of hide down under here. And in order to hide this even more, what I want to do is go ahead and come here, and I want to change the color here into gray text. So it's just a little bit more invisible right there. Okay, so now we can go ahead and actually create these buttons and giving them names and actually giving them pages for them to link to. So in my example, I had two buttons right here. I had to view my courses and I have who I work with. I don't actually plan to create anything here with who I work with, but that's more of just to kind of give you guys an idea of how you could format this. So let's go ahead and do this view my courses one. So we have the name of the button right here, and what I can also do is add in an icon. Now, just to make this more clickable, more like a website, we can go ahead and definitely add in an icon here. I'd like this arrow right here, this little blue arrow. I think it looks super clickable, and it just makes sense. So now we have the kind of visible aspect to this button done. Now we have to get into the conditional side of this because all buttons are essentially conditional statements, where the when is the button being clicked which is going to lead to some kind of action, right? There's all these different actions that we have right here. But instead of kind of going into all of this, I'm just going to go ahead and do this super simple one in opening a page form or URL. So in order to select the page form or URL that we want to go ahead and link to, we just click this again, and then we have the ability to search up our pages or paste in an external link that we want this button to then lead to. So I'm going to go ahead and put in courses. I should have two right here because this is the one from the actual finished one, and this top one should be the one that we're creating right now. But because I'm not actually publishing this, this doesn't matter that much. But one thing that I do also want to bring your attention to is going to be this function right here. So right now, the action that this button is going to take is when it's clicked, it's going to open our courses page in a center peak. So that means it's just going to kind of sit here in the center of our screen. But we don't want that to be the case because, you know, that's very notion, software, app like, but we're making a website. So we want to make it feel like a website. So instead of doing the center peak function, what we're going to do is do this full page. So it's going to open in its own full page. So we can now go ahead and hit Done. And now we have this second button right here, which I have titled who I W W. And we can go ahead and add in that same exact arrow icon right there. And we can have this one again, lead to a page. We can select the page. This page can be the About Me page that we're going to create, and we can again have it in a full page, and we can hit Done. Okay, so now we have our heading section of our website complete. So now let's go ahead and come back to our reference website to see what we have next. Now, the next part is our student reviews. But I also want you to notice that there is some spacing right here. Now, in other website builders, you could typically add padding, but we don't have that within notion. So the way that I create space between separate blocks is just adding blank blocks in between. So right now, what I just did is I added in a few blank box under my image right here. And now to kind of operate below this two column block to add in our next section to add in our next divider, what I'm going to do is I could come and drag this block to leave and sit right here. Alternatively, I also could have just duplicated this block, so I can just click that right there and then hit Command D. So now I have a second divider right here, but either way it works. So now what I want to do is I want to actually take this block that I just dragged out from under my image, and I want to put it in between these two dividers, so I could go ahead and get started on this next section, which we student reviews. So here, again, what I had was a heading two. So to do our heading two, I'm just going to do those two hash tags, and then I'm going to type in student reviews. Okay, so now let's go ahead and hit Enter twice. And now what I want to do is I want to insert a quote block because these are testimonials. These are reviews. These are quotes from other people, and the quote block just makes it look a little bit more nice. So I'll do my slash here, and I'll type in quote, and now we have our quote. Now, if we look back at this, what I did is I had these star emojis. So again, to insert an emoji, we can do our slash Emoji. And you can type in star, and we'll have our star right here. I hit Command C, and then I pasted it to match the review of the student. So right here, I have five stars. Now, to go ahead and enter into the next line to put their name instead of just hitting Enter here, which is going to give us a new block, what we want to do instead is hold Shift and Enter. So holding Shift and Enter allows us to create a new line within the same block without creating a new block. So again, and looking back, there are a few stylistic formatting choices that I made here that I do want to walk you through before I just go ahead and paste in the next two. So the first of which is going to be the style of putting in this course title. If I could just go ahead and copy this and I move over here, let me go ahead and put a space here with the dash. Once I paste it in, it's going to paste as it appeared on the other notion page. But you can see that this is clearly not how normal text actually appears within notion. And that's just because that text was italicized. So I typed it in just, like, so Google My Business, local SEO and Google Business profile, the name of this course. Then I just highlighted it all and hit Command plus I to make it italicized. Now moving on to this next line, we have the name of the student, and again, a stylistic choice that I made here was to bold the name. So I just hold command and B to bold. And as I type this in, we get to see that his name is now bolded, and if I go ahead and command Enter to the next line, I'm going to have to deactivate this bold. So again, Command plus B. And then I can just copy and go ahead and paste in this review. So now we have one full review right here, and you can see all the choices that I made here. So now let's just go ahead and paste in the other ones since you know how this goes. Now, one thing that I did, again, is I used an empty block here to create some space because if I just go ahead and paste in another review here, it's a little compact here, and I personally like having just a little bit of space between the two, just so people are able to go over and kind of see them as separate pieces of social proof. Again, we can do the same thing here, so I'll just put in two spaces there, and we can paste in the last review. Okay, so now before moving on, let's go ahead and do some subtle formatting here because right now people are going to land and they are going to see this page. And I don't want these student reviews to be necessarily that visible right here, when they land, I want there to be a little bit more space. So what I can do is I can come here to student reviews, and I can hit Enter right here. Another thing that I'd probably like to do is go ahead and put in another space. But instead of just leaving it like that, I can drag this empty block to live right under here to add in a little bit more separation between this divider and this two column layout, my picture, and all. So I think having this spacing like that looks a little bit better. So now let's go ahead and again, we can duplicate this divider and we can drag it in to live right over here. And we can go ahead and hit Enter to then put an empty block in between this next section to go ahead and create this next section, which is going to be our featured courses. So, as you can see, this is going to start off with our title right here, which is going to again be an H two. And it's going to be titled featured Courses. Now, for these featured courses that I am going to have highlighted here, there actually is a way to do this with databases that we will cover later on in this course as we continue to learn more about notion, and as we continue to come back to this website to kind of beef it up a little bit with the new things that we learn. But for now, what I'm going to do is only use the things that we have discussed so far to be able to create this. And that is going to go ahead and start off with our three column. So before we've been doing two columns now we are going to have three columns to show off three different courses. So what I did for showing these thumbnails of the course is I simply just uploaded in the thumbnails themselves. So that's just going to be a slash image. And we can go ahead and just upload in that thumbnail. Okay, so now we have this thumbnail, and I'm going to go ahead and do that same process for these next two. Okay, so now we have all three course thumbnails right here. Now, what I want to know is that these don't necessarily have to live on our website as solely images. Now, of course, as you can see here, I did is I put in some buttons to view the course, but we're also able to allow people on our page to redirect them to these courses and simply just clicking the images, the thumbnails themselves. And to do so, we just have to come into more, and then we can come into more options, and we can add a link to this image. So here, we can paste a link. I could paste a link into these respective courses that is then going to redirect any person, any potential student on my landing page into those courses. So this is exactly an approach that you can do. Let's say that you have something similar to mine where you're going to be showing off some kind of service or product that you're offering. You could go ahead and paste in this link. And in the case that you are, you could go ahead and even add in a little bit of an incentive right here in the title to make people click. So I could have a little funny line like this, like featured courses. And then in brackets, we have with promotional links with a little winking mochi. Now, this, of course, is kind of going to depend on, you know, your ICP, the people that you're targeting, and the kind of overall tone that you want to create with your website because, you know, this is an overly professional, obviously. But that kind of works in creating a website on a platform like notion because, you know, this isn't trying to be overly professional. Instead, we're going for a more personal approach, right? Because right here, we have our tagline here saying, Hey, I'm Adam Taylor. So you're immediately starting with a more personal one on one connection with your clients or whoever it is that is going to be visiting your site, right? Exactly shown with this little tag line. So doing kind of, you know, funny, goofy stuff like this can work if that is the style that you are kind of partaking. Now let's go ahead and move on to adding in more information here. So I'm going to click below this, and we have a new block that we're able to go ahead and edit that is living within this column right here. Now what I want to do is go ahead and put the title of this course here, but I want it to be in a Heading three. So again, I'll just put three hashtags right here. We have our heading three, and I can just paste in the title. So now I'm going to go ahead and do that for all three of these. Okay, so now that we have these, what I'm going to do is hit Enter, and we can go ahead and put in our subheadings right here. This is just going to be more information about the course. And instead of, again doing another heading three, here, I'm just going to stick to normal text. So let's go ahead and paste in what I have for each one of these. Okay, so now these three are all in here. But of course, we don't want to kind of leave these to be as they are right now because as if we look over, you see this looks much better than this. This is all just way too compact. There's way too much text just stacked on each other. So what we're going to do is do the trick that we learned in the beginning of this lesson. We're just going to go ahead and drag these out a bit to make them appear a little bit more prominent on the page. Alright, so I think immediately that already looks better. So another thing that I want to do is I want to add an empty block right there to create some more space. I'm going to turn this one into, say, a heading one. I think that looks a little bit better just because of how large all of these thumbnails are. That complements it just a bit better. So I can add in that complements it just a bit better. So now the next step is going to be adding in buttons right here for each one of these. Now, I said before, we can link our images right here, but that one isn't necessarily going to be as clear for people. We want to give them something that's going to be a clear call to action, which is going to be a button here that is going to say view Course. So let's go ahead and put in a button. So I can do that, and the button is going to be titled view Course. And we can go ahead and use this same icon that we have been using across this. It creates a little bit more consistency, and there's just nothing that comes to mind right now that would work much better than this. I think this arrow here is perfect. And with the button being clicked, the action is then going to be to open a URL, and then you can have a URL to your product right here. I can have the promotional link. It can be whatever you want. I can link to your YouTube, whatever it may be. So for now, I'm just going to have a placeholder link here because we're not going to be using. Once we create this, we can hit Done. And what I can do is I can just go ahead and duplicate these and we can drag them into each one, which is going to show a little bit of a problem. And that problem is we get to see that this doesn't really look very uniform right here, because one thing I don't like here is that we have all these buttons on different levels of our page. You know, it's not consistent as we can see right here. Nor does it have much spacing, right? I want to add a little bit more spacing because there is a lot going on, and the buttons themselves aren't that big. So a little hack, to be able to have things all on the same line is actually just creating a new column set. So let me go ahead and create a new block right here, and I'm going to drag this block to live below this three column. But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to make another three column here. So I'll do three C. Now we have three columns. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag in these buttons within this column right here. And now we have all three of these living in a new separate column because if I go ahead and highlight all of these, you get to see that those are in, you know, their own column. But one problem that we have right now is that they're not aligned with their respective courses. So in order to fix that, we can do is grab on the side here and we can extend to be the length of this. So we get to see that this line here is lined up essentially perfectly with this line. Maybe we can drag it out just a tiny bit. You can see that this line is aligned with this line. Now, you get to see that you do have full control. You can pull it way out here. But now, we just want to go ahead and have it to be lined up there, which looks roughly perfect in my eyes. Now, the last thing that I want to do here is I want to add in a little bit more space. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new block right here, and I'm just going to drag it to be above this divider. So now we have a little bit more separation from our featured courses and their buttons to our footer down here. If I want, I could even add in another one empty block there. So now what we have done in the span of this lesson is we've created our very own website with the things that we've learned, right? Everything that we've learned in notion has culminated so far at least into creating this little project here. And I think it's quite impressive that notion of productivity platform is able to do this for us. But we're not done just yet, because what we have to do is we have to come up here and to our share and instead of sharing, as we did in the Pier lesson, we're going to come into publish. And we can just go ahead and hit Publish. And now we have a live site. But there's still a few more things that we are able to do with this. So let's go ahead and come into our site settings, and let's customize the site styling, because right now, this is how this site is going to appear. You know, actually, let's go ahead and view this site as is. Okay, so right here, we have our website, and at least right here, you know, everything is essentially looking you know, as we were able to see it in notion. But if we look up here, we have some extra elements right here in our header. So if we come back into notion, we can come here into our site settings, and we can customize our site styling. Now, the first thing that we have right here is going to be a theme. So if we set the theme to system, that means anyone who views our website is going to view it in the theme of their computer. So if we go ahead and set this to dark, then that means people with dark settings are going to view this like this. So if you don't like how it looks in one or the other, and light or dark, if you kind of built it around one kind of theme, then you might want to go ahead and just have it set to that theme that you built it in. But looking below this, we have a favicon. So this is essentially going to be the little thing that appears right next to it. Right now, it's a notion favicon, but we can upload in our own image, let's say, the image or logo of our brand right here to kind of have it appear a little bit more professional and a little bit more kind of put together. Now we have our header. Our header is all of the things that we saw right here and it allows us to edit some things. First off, what I would do is personally just really take off almost everything that we see here. Now, I'm going to go ahead and keep duplicate as template because I want you guys to be able to come to this site. I'll have it in the resources for you, and you'd be able to duplicate this and use it as a template for your own use. But if you want to go ahead and get rid of it for yourself, come to the header settings, and you could turn it off. But here, I will keep it visible. Now, the next thing that we're going to do is change our navigation. So this is going to allow users to click onto different pages within our website. Now, this is exactly why I added in the site navigation at the bottom of our site. It was to do this exact thing. So we are able to have people be able to navigate through the different pages right here. We can reorder them if you want other ones to appear first, keep them as such, and we can go ahead and publish our changes. Now, there's one more thing that I want to mention here, and that's going to be the link itself. So, right here, I have digital skills academy dot non dot SIDE because Digital Skills Academy is the name of the workspace that we've created right here and Adam Taylor dot non dot SID was taken. So right here, what we're able to do is come here in our publish tab, and we are able to come and manage all domains because before changing this, this was just a bunch of random letters, right? It wasn't communicating anything. So if you want, you could come over here and you can update domain name right here. Now, alternatively, what you're able to do is create a new domain. Now, if you want to have a complete custom domain, then you can do so paying $10 a month. But this isn't something that I would do because you can definitely buy domains to be a little bit cheaper than this elsewhere and then connect them into notion. So if you do want a custom domain, I wouldn't do it with the Notion, but if you do want to create multiple sites with this dot notion dot site domain, then you could go ahead and do so, and it's completely for free. Now, one thing to note is that if you do have a free plan, you're only able to create one site. And if you have a plus plan, then you're able to create five. So just keep that in mind. But there you have it. This is essentially our finished website for now. Let's go ahead and refresh this to see all the heading changes right here. We get to see About me courses contact. Right here, you can duplicate this as a template. And this is so far what we've created a notion with this website with the things that we've learned in this course so far. As I've continued to say throughout this lesson, we will come back and beef up this website with new things that we learn. So we're able to put those things into practice into some practical application here. 12. Why Notion Databases?: You've made it this far in the course, you already know the basics of notion, pages, sub pages, blocks, and how everything is built from simple pieces. Now, we're stepping into the feature that truly makes notion powerful. It's the feature that turns notion from a nice note taking app into a system that can run your life, your business, your team, and your brain. That's databases. And the funny thing about databases and notion is at first, they sound intimidating, but once you understand what they actually are and why they matter, you'll realize that they're simply structured pages with superpowers. So this lesson is your warm up. Think of it as a big picture tour before we dive into the more hands on detailed walk throughs later. You'll walk away with a conceptual roadmap so that when you start building databases, it all clicks into Pace immediately. Let's get into it. So what actually is a database and notion? Well, you know how a regular notion page is basically like an open Canvas, where you type, you add headings, you drop images, and you create lists. It's flexible, unstructured and freeform. A database now is the opposite of that. It's structured, it's organized, and it follows rules. The easiest way to think about it is this. A database is a collection of pages that all share the same structure. So I want you to imagine a table of tasks. You have the task name, you have its due date, its status, its priority, and assigned person. Each row is one task, but that row is also a page that you can click into and fill in with more detail notes, checklists, files, em beds, whatever you want. So instead of having random pages scattered all over your workspace, databases let you organize information in a clean, consistent and structured way, all without losing notions, flexibility. Now, the structure is where the magic comes from. Now, why do databases even matter? Well, once you understand databases, something shifts within your notion experience. Because Notion stops being a prettier Google Docs and becomes your dashboard, your planner, your CRM, your Wiki, your project manager, whatever you want it to be. Now, why is this? Well, it's because databases give you four powerful abilities. The first of which is they simply keep things consistent. Every item follows the same layout, the same properties, the same fields, the same structure. So you don't have some pages with dates, some without, and some with tags, and some with nothing. Next, they make information searchable and sortable. So you can filter by a whole bunch of different variables. Things like All tasks do this week. Things like all content ideas tagged high potential or all clients with unpaid invoices. So it's like turning your notes into data that you can actually work with. Third, they let you build multiple views of the same information. Now, I'll get into this, but this is where notion becomes notion because one database can appear as a table, a board like trell, a calendar, a list, a timeline, a gallery, or even a custom view filtered down to exactly what you need. So it's the same data. It's just presented differently depending on your workflow. And the last superpower is that they connect things. Literally. Now, this is something that's a little bit more advanced, which we will get into, but we can essentially relate databases to one another using a relation property. So we can rely a task database to a project database, or a project database to goals or content pieces to platforms, or even clients to deliverables. So everything can talk to everything else. And this is how real systems are built. Pages can't do this, but databases. Now let's actually talk about the building blocks of every database because we actually have to understand what we're working with before we make it work for us. So, again, I want to reiterate that databases aren't complicated. They're just made of three things, really, when we break it down. The first of which are items. So these are all of the individual things inside a database. Now, depending on the kind of database you're building, each one of these items can be essentially a different thing. They can be named a different thing. If you're building a task manager, then each one of these items can be a task. If you're building a project manager, then each one of these rows can be a project. Now, you need to also know that each one of these rows, each one of these items is a page. So you can click into it. Now, this is one of Noon's biggest advantages over traditional tools because we're able to integrate everything that we just learned in pages into their databases. Now the next building block of databases are properties, which are our columns on the database. All of these properties or columns are what describe your items. So think of them as fields or attributes. So the most common property of all is going to be a text property. So this can be either short text, like your title, or it can be long text, like descriptions. Other common ones are select fields, multi select, date, number, checkbox, person, Neven files and media and URL. And for our more advanced users, we also have relations and roll ups. These are the two things that are going to be helping us connect databases, which we will cover in a later lesson. Now, properties are the structure of your databases. If items are rows, then properties are the columns that give them meaning. Now, the final building block of our databases are views, and views determine how you see the items or how you see the data within your database. So this is a fun part because you can really transform this same set of data instantly to look completely different, to communicate different things to you. So, for example, you can look at your tasks as a table when planning, and then you can switch to a board when tracking statuses or switch to a calendar when checking deadlines. It's the same database, but different view for different purposes. This flexibility is why notion can replace half of your productivity tools with. One thing that surprises people is that many notion templates you've seen are secretly just databases. If you've seen a content calendar, that's a database. If you've seen a habit tracker, it's a database, a CRM, database, a reading list, a Wiki, a task manager, definitely all databases. So it's not a question of if you'll use databases. It's a question of how many and how well you'll use them. And that's exactly what the next set of lessons will help you master. Alright. So now that you understand the big picture, here's how the rest of this section will flow. We'll first learn how to create your first database from scratch. Then we'll go into how to create, organize and customize properties. We'll also learn how to build and customize views using filters, sorts, groups, and when to use each one depending on your workflow. Well, of course, even dive into the more advanced things like how to build cross linked systems. Our case, we'll look at how we can relate the task database to our project manager database. And finally, we'll also learn how to create our very own dashboard using multiple databases and multiple views all within its own page. So everything you've learned thus far has been setting the foundation. This lesson right here is the turning point because once you understand databases, notion becomes a completely different software. It becomes your planner, your calendar, your business hub, your content system, and your very own personal knowledge base. Best part is that throughout this, you'll build it your own way. So now that you understand what databases are and why they matter, we're ready to get our hands dirty. And the next lesson, we'll create your first database step by step, and you'll see just how intuitive this really is. So let's get into it. 13. Creating Your First Database: Alright. Now that you know what databases are and why they're so powerful in notion, let's actually build one from scratch. So in this lesson, I'll walk you through creating your first real database. In this, we can create our very own project tracker. So we can be introduced to some custom properties like status, deadline, and tax. So let's go ahead and instead of clicking Empty Page, as we have been doing, we can click an empty database to again, start from scratch. So now we are here within our database. Now, you get to see visually here where it says New Page. That's because each row in our database is a page in itself. So let's go ahead and add in this new page. And because this is going to be a task tracker, we can name this a task. So I went ahead and titled this task client presentation slides. Go ahead and now add in a name for our database. This is essentially going to be the same thing as adding in the title of one of our pages. As you can see here, we have our icons, we have a cover, we have a description and a verify. Alright, so now we have the name for our project tracker. And right here, we have one of our projects here, one of our tasks, our client presentation slide. Now the next thing that I want to show you is that each one of these are, in fact, a page because if we go ahead and open this in, we get to see that it opens, and it looks just like a page. Here, we're able to type in anything we want. We can go ahead and edit this block. We can turn it into whatever other block that we want to do. So you get to see that this here is a page. And if we want to expand this, then we can go ahead and click that button right there, and now this is an entire page. This is span the entire page. So now I'll go ahead and click Command B Bracket to take us back into our database. So we can see the very next thing, which is going to be our properties. So if all this did was compile a bunch of different pages for us, then that would be no different than a simple folder. But no, databases take this a step further because we are able to add custom properties for each one of these pages that we create. In our case, they're projects. So each one of these projects that were. Now, as you can see, there are a few suggested properties that we can add. But along with that, we get to see so much more. There's all these different types. We have text, we have select, status person, checkbox, phone. We have a number field, multi select, date, files, media, URL, and email. And these here are really just our basic ones because as you can see down here, we have some more advanced. And as you look below, we also have some integrations right here with some extra kind of properties that we could add as well. So in this lesson, let's go ahead and look at some of these types of fields. We can start out with a text field, and that here is what we see in the description because the suggested field in description is just a text field that is renamed the title. So let me show you what I mean by that. Well, we have our text field right here. And if we go ahead and click in this box, then now we're able to do just that. We're able to put text in this field. But that necessarily doesn't really communicate anything. If you have anyone in your team coming to this database and they just see text here, that's not telling them anything about this kind of data field, right, anything within this. So instead of having this just as text, what we want to do is click it and we want to rename this. So instead of text, we can have this B description. Or instead of description, what we can do is name this project description. So we're making the title a little bit more descriptive. Pun intended. But you see, as I do click on this to change the name, there is all of these other options which we will cover in due time. But for now, let's go ahead and leave this as is. So right now, what we have is our projects right here, and we have our project description. But on the same note of making this field a little bit more descriptive, we can do the exact same right here with name. Instead of just having name here, let's actually rename this to projects. So just like that, when I hit Enter, you get to see that the name of this has now been changed to project just to make it a little more clear that everything that is going to be within this database is going to be project. That is what this first line is. Alright, so now let's go ahead and continue to expand this project tracker by looking at some more properties. So the next thing that I want to add in here is going to be a status field. So what do I mean by that? Well, if we go ahead and select this status field, then you get to see exactly what it is. You have not started, you have in progress, and you have done right here. So these are all things just to mark the status of the certain project. And if you want to say add more, then you could come over here and to edit property. And then from here, what we can do is we can add in more options under this to do category. We can add in more options under this in progress category, and we can add in more options under this complete category. Now, this is actually going to lead me into the next kind of basic property, which is going to be a select property. And I'm talking about this now because select and status are essentially the same thing in that status is a select property, but select is not a status property. Oh, what do I mean by that? Well, select property is a property where you are able to select from a set of options that you create here. You're essentially able to select a tag for this project, in this case. So what do I mean by saying that a status is a select property, but a select isn't a status? Well, if I go ahead and type in not started here, I could go ahead and hit Enter, and I just created that as a field. Now I could also put in progress and hit Enter. And now that is another select field. Now, lastly, what I can do is put in done. Now as I hit Enter, you get to see that this is another select that we are able to do. So we're essentially able to create this status field within this select. But of course, with the select field, we're given even more flexibility in being able to create essentially whatever we want here, whatever single select field that we care to do. So another way that we can actually use this select field is, let's say that you're running a business, and under this business, you have multiple teams. You have a marketing team, you have a sales team, and you have a customer success team. Well, in that, what we could do is actually come here and let me go ahead and change the names of these to those team names. So here we have marketing. I can change in progress here into sales, and then down here, we can change this to customer success. And with this and being able to edit these, I'm also able to edit the colors. So I can change these to be whatever color I want to be, and I don't have to stick to three. You can create essentially as many single select fields as you want. Okay, so now, what if you want to have more than just the single select? What if you have a project that you want to assign, let's say, to multiple teams? With a single select, you're not able to do that. But if we go ahead and come over here, add in a property and come to multi select, then here, we are able to put in everything that we did here. But instead of just being single select, we can select as many as we want. So let's go ahead and do that. I'll put in all of these from the select field into here. I can just type them in, and each one I hit Enter in between them, which then creates them as these fields. Okay, so now all three are here and just like before what I was able to do, I can come in here and edit them. I can change their colors. But instead of just being able to select one, I can select as many as I want. Now let's go ahead and get into other properties that we see here. So, what we can do as well, is we can set a date here. So this is a date property to where we're able to open it, and we can select any date that we so please. And what we can do here is we can name this to convey whatever information we want it to be. Let's make this a little bit more descriptive here. We can have this set at due date. Or we can have it set at start date or we can create multiple of these date fields, each one of them conveying some different information. Like, we could have Do date here and I can create another one simply by right clicking it and duplicating it. And instead of Do date here, I can have this set as completion date. Now, another thing to note here is that we are able to edit this property here. So with our date format, we can have full dates. So they'd be August 11, 2026. They can be a short date. So let's see that one in action right here, which is just going to be the day of the month without the year. And we can come in here. We can edit the property. We can change the time format if the time is going to be showing here. And we can also set notification. So if we want to be reminded one day before, two days before, one week before, this could be something that could be useful here, let's say in tandem with our due date function. Okay, so now let's go ahead and keep on going. Now, these next ones I don't necessarily need to spend as much time on because they are quite self explanatory. For example, person here, which can be perfect for a project tracker because you may want to assign specific individuals to specific tasks. So right here, if I click on this, then it shows us all the people that are within our workspace that could be assigned to this specific project. Here, there's only two people, me, Adam Taylor, and our friend Nick Noon. Next moving on, we also have checkbox fields. A checkbox field is actually quite simple, because as you can see, it really is just a little checkbox here. So here, maybe you want to rename this checkbox to convey something specific. So if it is to be checked, then you know it's going to be important or significant in some regard. Another thing that I want to know is that with any one of these given fields, we are able to change its icon. So if we want to change it for whatever reason, then we could go ahead and do that. For the most part, these icons are quite perfect for their respective function. Okay, so let's go ahead and keep on moving. And the next one that we have is going to be a number function. So this number property here is simply going to be exactly like we have our text property here and product description, except with number, it's just supposed to have numbers within it. So it's pretty simple there. This one I can go ahead and delete because it's not going to have any relevance to our project tracker. And I'll do the same thing with our checkbox just so we don't crowd this up too much right here. Let's go ahead and get rid of our completion date, as well. Now we can add in another property here. Here, with phone, this is just going to be a phone number. So if you just want to, let's say, import a list, import some other CSV into here, then this can be a field that you already have existing that can match up with one of your fields and let's say your CSV file. So the translation is going to be that much more seamless. Now, lastly, we have our files and media, our URL and email. All of which I will put out here right now. So in terms of the URL and email property, they are also essentially just text properties where we're able to put in anything here, except their titles here are just making them a little bit more descriptive. So you can initially just put this in without having to go to, let's say, a text property and then renaming it to email then changing the icon here, if you so please. But when it comes to a files in media property, this one actually allows us as we click it, that we can upload something or we can even embed a link into them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of this URL and email property. And what I want to do is I want to come over here to our beginning. And now let's go ahead and open this page here, open this project. Now, as you can see before, it was just a blank page where, you know, it still is right here, where we have a lot of space to add some things in. We also get to see all this information as well. These are all the properties that we have added into our database, which are now associated with these pages that have been created. Alright. Now, with that, you have officially created your very first notion database. So, you know how to set up a table to customize the properties, add entries, and even open each item as its own page. So this right here, as simple as it may look, is actually the foundation for so much that we can create within Notion. Alright, let's keep going. 14. Control Views with Filters: So in between the last lesson and now, what I did here to our project tracker is I expanded it and refined it a little bit. So as you can see, I've narrowed down our properties here to kind of make it a little bit more condensed, but I also added a very new one. And that is our priority property. And more specifically, this is going to be project priority. So you can see with this single select property, what I have is three separate selects a low, medium, and a high. So this one was just a simple addition of a property that makes sense for this database that we've created here in our project tracker. Additionally, what I did is I expanded our project tracker. I created new projects, and I gave each project its own icon where before all of these projects looked like these because all of them were blank pages. Now what I did is I just clicked that, and then I added in an Emoji icon for each one of these projects. As you can see, as you start to add data to your databases, as you start to add in new rows, add in new pages, add in new properties, there's going to be a lot of information. And a lot of it can kind of get fuzzy because it's hard to decipher what it is that's important, what it is that you have to do, and maybe what other things that you have to take action on. So that's why in this lesson, we are going to be talking about our filtering and sorting criteria, our filtering and sorting functions within our databases and notion. So both filtering and sorting are essentially ways that we get to organize our data in our databases. Let's go ahead and start with filtering right here. When it comes to filtering, filtering lets you narrow down your databases to show only the items that meet specific criteria. Like, for example, we can filter by department here. And you get to see as we select a filter, it pops up right here, and we actually get to decipher what this filter is going to do. So if department is and we select marketing, you get to see that it's now been filtered to only show the projects that belong to our marketing department. We can take this filter, and we can work the opposite way as well. So if I go ahead and come back to here and I expand it, you get to see that it says department is marketing, but I can do the opposite and select is right here, and I can say is not marketing. So now what it's doing is it's taking out every single project where the department is marketing. So it's leaving us with only our sales and customer success department projects. Those aren't the only two conditions that we can put with our filters because we have is is not, but we have is empty and is not empty. But in our case, all of our projects have a department. Each one has a project status and a project priority. So the is empty, is not empty really isn't going to help us. Another thing that we can do with these filters is that we can actually stack filters. So right now, we have this filter to take out all of our marketing department projects. But we can also filter this, and we can add in a status field here. And with this status, we can say in progress. So we get to see everything, all of the projects that are not marketing and are in progress. And in our case, there's only one project which belongs to our sales department that's in progress, and that's our CRM cleanup. So, as you can see, depending on the amount of pages, the amount of things that you have in your database here, stacking these filters can be quite useful in terms of organization and actually filtering down to the things that you need to see. And in a later lesson, we are going to be talking about database views, which is going to rely heavily on this feature here and being able to filter the things within our database. Okay, now taking this one step further, we also have one more thing that we can do with these filters, and that's going to be advanced filters. So as we click on Advanced Filters, we get to see a kind of expansion of where we saw here with our department filter, we saw these few options that we can do, right, kind of conditional statements here. But right here with our Advanced filter, we get to have a little bit more freedom in what we are able to constrain by. This really is only going to kind of be useful in very certain and specific scenarios. But let's go ahead and still kind of get this going here and giving an example of how we could use this. So right now, the property that I want to work with is going to be our project property. And as we move on here, we get to see that where project contains, then some certain value that I can put. In this case, this is just going to be text because all of our projects are going to be text based properties, right, because they're just titles. We can also come here into contains, and we can change this to is is not, does not contain, start with end with is empty and is not empty. So we have a lot of functionality here. But what I want to do is, I want to say where project contains the value Q, which is just the letter Q. Now, you get to see that in doing this, we see nothing pops up. And that's because we already have two other filters in progress. So what we have here is going to be a filter where it's only showing us projects that are in progress status where they're not marketing and they have the letter Q within their project name. So this one's super specific. Now what I want to do is I just want to get rid of all of these to then be able to see this one rule in action where project name contains Q, and that's right here, thir quarter Lee Jen campaign in quarter feedback survey analysis. Okay, so now you've seen all the ways that we can use filters, at least here within our simple project tracker. Now let's go ahead and get rid of all of these, so we can move on to the next thing that we're going to be working with, which is going to be sorting, another way that we can organize our data and databases. Where filter only pulls out the specific projects or the specific pages that meet the certain criteria that we set, what SRT does is it works in organizing everything within a certain property. So what do I mean by this? Well, if we select filter and we came to department here, that is going to be pulling specific projects from these departments. But you get to see that if I select all of them, and I want to have them separated, that's not what happens when I select these. But if we come into sorting and I go ahead and sort by department, you get to see that immediately all of our projects are now going to be separated and sorted by their departments. So now that we have these departments kind of categorized, right, they're all in their own little spots right here. What's a way that we can combine this with filtering to actually have some meaningful practical value well, what we can do is we can come here into our filters, and with these filters, I'm going to add in a filter, and I'm going to add in a status filter. And what I want to do is status is not done. So what does this do? Well, this is essentially showing us the performance of each department, meaning that we're able to see how many tasks each department has yet to complete. We see with our customer success department they only have one task that they have yet to complete. With sales, it's two, but with marketing, it's four different projects that they have yet to complete. Okay, so now let's go ahead and come back here into our sort. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of our filters right here, and we're just going to stay with our sorting right now. So here we have everything sorted by the department in ascending order. Now, in terms of ascending and descending with a property like this, it's not going to matter as much. But what it would matter is if we want to set this to sorting by due date. Because right now in descending order, this is showing us from the top the tasks that are most far out in the future. But if I set this to ascending, then we get to see all of the projects where the due dates are the soonest in the future. So these are going to be the tasks that maybe you want to have a higher level of priority set to just because their due date is so soon. Now, the last thing to know for sorting is that we're not only able to have sorting in isolation. As I showed you before, we can also mix it with filtering, but we are also able to sort multiple things at once. Now, in our case, when we're going to be sorting by due date, we add essentially any other sort, it's not going to change what we see right here because this dude is taking precedent as it stands on top. If we change it around right here, we get to see that the department now is sorted, and the due dates are now in chronological order for these. So again, if we have the dude on top, then it's just going to be putting all of the due dates in order, all of our projects ordered by due date. But if we go ahead and switch it up, it's first going to sort by department, and then within the department, it's going to sort by due date. So there you have it. This was our lesson looking at both filtering and sorting as a way that we can organize our data within databases. In the next lesson, we're going to be going over another way that we can also organize this data through grouping. It's going to be a similar lesson to this one, so let's get right into it. 15. Group Information That Matters: All right, so now it's time to get into the next aspect of notion in databases that allows us to visualize our data in a more organized manner. In this lesson, we are going to be covering grouping. So grouping is essentially quite similar to what we see in sorting and filtering, and it's almost as if it's a combination of the two that's a little bit more akin to sorting. So let's go ahead and actually check out what this grouping feature is. So we first have to come into view settings. So we have the settings right here. Which is going to be in the same kind of line here that we have our filter and sort. So if we come into settings, we get to see a lot of options, most of which we will be discussing. But what we want to focus on right now is going to be our grouping function. So let's go ahead and select this group, and we get to see that we have all of our properties that we are essentially able to group by. Some of them are going to give us some meaningful results, other ones, not so much. Example, if we come here into grouping by project, you can see that right here, this really isn't doing anything for us because what it's doing is it's taking the title, the name of each project here, and creating its own group. Or because each project has its own unique title here, it's essentially just creating this exact amount of groups, then there are projects, which isn't helpful for us. So let's go ahead and remove this grouping. And instead, we can group by something that's going to be maybe a little bit more meaningful, which can be project priority. So we get to see all of the projects that are going to be high priority right here. We get to see all the projects that are low priority and medium. Now, if we want to reorder this in a way that kind of makes more sense to where we have the highest priority items on the top and the lowest on the bottom, what we can do is come over here into our groups. We can grab these six dots and it allows us to reder all of the things in this property. Now we get to see all of our projects separated by priority in a very clear manner. Now, let's go ahead and remove this grouping and come here into sort. And I'm again going to sort by our project priority. Now, you get to see here that if we do this by a descending order, that we get to see essentially, it's the same kind of thing going on here, except when we do it by grouping, we get to see more separate kind of groups of these projects of this data within your database. So it makes it a little bit more discernible. It takes the sorting a step further in what we're able to do with it. And of course, just like we were able to do with sorting and filtering, we can combine our grouping with those two as well to create the most kind of filtered views of our data. And this term that I'm using in views is actually something that we are going to be going over later in this section because combining all of these, our filter, our sorts, and our grouping can give us separate kinds of views of the same data in ways that are going to be more meaningful and more manageable to deal with, as well. So now let's go ahead and group by due date because this one here is an especially unique one that we can see. So now I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this sorting function because it's not very important in this view, specifically. But you get to see as we go ahead and group by due date, we get to see all of these groupings in kind of meaningful representation because first we have our next 30 days. So these are going to be the projects that are going to be essentially of highest priority to us, at least in terms of their due date. So now, one thing to note here is that grouping is a little different from our filtering and sorting criteria because we're not able to stack groups on one another. And that makes sense because these ones here are quite separate here. If we're going to be making groups within groups, that just wouldn't make sense. I would make our data even more unorganized than it probably was in the beginning. Again, although that you're not able to do this group on group work, you are able to do a filtering and sorting within the groups that you create. So I'm going to go ahead and come back into our group. And first, I want to show you here that we are able to hide certain groups that we create. So this here is just to kind of show you that this exists, right here. But we can also change it by coming here to group by, and let's go ahead and group by department here. So we see all of our departments separated in their own neat and tidy category. A way that we can mix in our filtering and sorting in this to again, have some more meaningful view right here is we can keep it grouped by our department, the way that we have it right now. But we can first filter out all of the project statuses that are done. So let's say status is not done. So now it's getting rid of everything that is done, and then we can sort here by due date. Now we get to see all of the projects that have yet to be completed and they are ordered in their due dates per each category or per each department. In customer success, it doesn't really mean much because once we applied that status of not complete, that only left one project here. But with marketing, that did matter because you get to see here that there are quite a few projects here that are not completed, and we get to see that they are ordered by their due date right here. And the same goes for our sales, although there is a little bit less projects here. Okay, so now, with all of our organizational capabilities within databases, our filters sorting and our grouping, you now know essentially how you can best optimize and organize the views and presentations of the data within your database. Now, this is going to come very much in handy in a couple of lessons from now, where we're going to be turning this into a dashboard. But for now, before we go ahead and do that, I want to show you in the next lesson how our databases don't necessarily have to exist solely as databases and solely in their own place. We can actually integrate them with pages. So let's go ahead and get right into that. 16. Embed Databases Anywhere: Now, in this lesson, we have found ourselves back to pages. So here, I want to show you how we can have our pages interact with databases. So I'm going to title this new page action items. And we can go ahead and add an icon here to make it look a little nicer. So now that we are on our page, we can come back to the function that we always found ourselves using in our slash command. So with our slash command, if we type in database, we get to see that we have a bunch of different options here and database. And we're going to be going over all of these views in the next lesson. But now what I want to show you is just how these databases can interact with our pages because the first two things that we see right here, are two different ways that we can have databases within pages. The first of which is going to be an inline database. So that means that we get to see our database right here live within our page itself. Now, this is slightly different than if we come into this new block and type in database here. We get to see this other one being a database full page. This one simply is going to be a link to a new database. So let's come back into our action items, and we get to see this one right here, which is a full page, is living right here within its own block, but it's simply a link to this new database that was created here. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this one. And what we're going to do is we're going to focus here on these inline databases because this is where notion starts to become so powerful when we're able to integrate databases within our pages because this is going to enable us to create these amazing second brain dashboards that we'll cover later on. Oh, right here, what we did is we just created a new database. This is going to be a blank tabled database. I'm going to go ahead and add in here a title for this database where we're going to have it be tasks. So, right here, we have our tasks manager. Now, this one is going to live beside our project tracker under this action items page. So how do I actually pull in this project tracker within our action items page that we're now created? Well, it's going to be the same process. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use our slash function. I'm going to type in database, and I'm going to make sure we select our inline database. Now, as you can see, this is just created exactly what was created before. But instead, I don't want this to be a brand new database. What I want to do is I want to import our previous database that we already created. So the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to come here and link to existing data source. So I'm going to Link, and I'm going to now select our project tracker. So now, as you can see, our project tracker has been fully brought in. So let's come over here and look right here with our project tracker, we have it set up in groups. But right here, we get to see that all of the projects, everything that was there is still maintained here. Okay, so now that we have successfully imported this in, I do want to show you that these inline databases operate just as any other blocks do, at least in terms of navigation and functionality on the page, because what I'm able to do here is I'm able to grab this project tracker as the block that it is. And what I can do is I can grab and move it to live, let's say, above our tasks manager. So now we see that we're able to reorder them and, frankly, treat them exactly how we would treat other blocks, other simple text blocks, really. But of course, because it's a database, we have so much more flexibility in what we are actually able to do in that we are able to control what we see on our page from that database. So, for example, let's go ahead and come into the settings right here. We're going to come to the settings of our project tracker database, we get to see our view settings. Now, if we come down here into layout, I want to bring your attention to our load limit right here. So our load limit is going to be the amount of pages or projects in this case, that will be loaded in this inline database block. Right now it's set to 50. And because there's less than 50 projects within this database, we get to see everything. But if we want to go ahead and change this, then we could go ahead and do so and change it from 50 down to ten or from 50 up to even 100. Now, in our case, it's not going to make any difference because we actually have exactly amount of ten projects here. But if we had, let's say, 11, then it would cut off this bottom project right here. Now, besides just load limit, there are actually a few other settings that we can tweak here to alter the appearance of our database within our page. You can see a few right here where we can turn off show data source title. So it gets rid of the title of our database right here. We have vertical lines, and we're also given the ability to wrap all columns. You might be wondering what this wrap all columns does, and what it does is essentially takes off any text that isn't visible, and it puts that to the next column. So let's go ahead and actually change this right here. You get to see if I shorten this, we still get to see all of the text right here. But if I come back here into the settings and I come over here to layout and I turn off wrap all columns, then we're not able to see the text here and it keeps it in the condensed format that it remained. All of these layout options are actually things that we are also able to do within the databases themselves, not just in those in line blocks. Because if I come over here, we can come to layout. And we are also given these exact same options. Now, another thing that is going to be relevant here that also is present on both the databases themselves and the inline block versions of them is going to be our property visibility. So depending on the reason that you might have a database in lined in a page, you might want to have some properties that are going to be in the original database invisible here. And to do so, it's super simple. If we want to come over here into property visibility, we can come and we get to choose which properties that we want to hide or keep. So if I want to get rid of this project priority right here, I can get rid of that. If I want to get rid of the department, I can also get rid of that. And then we're just left here with our status and do. Okay, so there you have it. There was your overview of how we can work with databases within pages and slightly edit their appearance. Now, we're not going to stop just here, because in the next lesson, we are going to be taking this kind of altered appearance of our databases to the next level and looking at different layouts. 17. Design Views for Clarity: This lesson, it's time to take organizing and visualizing our data a step further and looking at layouts on notion. Layouts are all essentially different ways that we can organize and visualize our data to serve some purpose. As you can see, up here, we have our plus mark right here, and this is going to be adding in a new view to our database. You could essentially think of these views as different types of tabs all using that same data. Now, if we want to go ahead and change up this view because right now and what we have been operating in has been a table view. We want to change it, we can come over here into our settings of our database, and we can come to layout, and we can change it to one of these other eight layouts. But instead of doing this, I want to have all of these layouts kind of side by side in all these different tabs so we can click through and we can compare them a little bit more easy. So we have a lot to get through in this lesson. Let's go ahead and get going here in our first view, which is going to be a board view. So in a board view, we essentially get all of our data visualized in a Kanban style. Now, as you can see, in organizing this within a board, it has taken a very specific property and then put all of our projects within that. And this property that it is organizing between is our status property. So this board view is essentially what we get in Tre it's partly why notion is so powerful, because what you have entirely within one software trell is just one part of our software here with a notion. Now, what if we want to go ahead and change this and we don't want to have this organized by status. And let's say we want to have it organized by department. Well, to be able to edit this, we're then going to go over to our settings. So we're going to come here into our settings, and we're going to come to our layout settings. And here within our layout settings, we can go ahead and change our group by function right here. Now, additionally to this, we can come here to our group. But within our layout settings, we have just more things that are condensed all into how our board is going to be visualized. So let's go ahead and change this. Instead of being grouped by status, we can group by department. Now, in our case, the status is already grouped appropriately, right? We have not started and progress needs review and done. So this is in the order that we would want it to be in. Now, I also want to know that no matter what view we're going to be looking at, whether it's a table view, whether it's a board view, or any other view that we'll be going over in this lesson, we are going to be allowed to apply our filtering and sorting organizational commands here. So just keep that in mind, if we go over some view that you could see as particularly valuable for you in your own notion that you're going to be creating so one main benefit about this board style is that we're able to kind of take our projects or tasks or whatever things that you're going to be creating here, and we can have them flow from one group to the next super easily. So as we finish one thing right here, we can then put it here as into in progress, into Ns review into done, right? The flow in between these different groups is just super seamless and easy. All it is is a drag of our mouse. You can use this board layout in exactly this kind of style where you're going to be using this board to delineate between the status of certain projects. But you could also do this with assigning tasks to people because you can have an unassigned group of tasks right here, and then with these other ones, they can all be specific people that you are going to be assigning the task to or even departments. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on to our next view, which is going to be the gallery. Now, the gallery view is mainly going to be useful when we already have some kind of attachment or image that is going to be visible on the pieces of data within our database. Because, as you can see, none of these right here have anything going on in them because there's no images attached. You don't necessarily even need to have images here because what this is actually showing us is not just whether or not each one of these pages has an image. What they're showing us instead are an actual preview of this. So let's go ahead and just type in anything right here, we can put in test, and you get to see that we're actually able to see a preview of what this contains. So now if I go ahead and put in, let's say, a quote block right here, Then you get to see as we click out here that we do, in fact, see a preview of this. But in terms of actual utility and whether or not you'd be using this, it really is best to be using this gallery view if you want to showcase your database in terms of images. Now, this is actually going to be a view that we use in actually upgrading our website that we created in the notion pages section of this course. But other tweaks that we can do is we can come here into the layout settings, and we can change the card size here. We can make them small. We can make them large. And in terms of fitting image, this is only going to matter if we actually have an image as the preview right here. Now the way that we just were able to change the card size is actually something that we're also able to do with our board over here as well. So if we come into our board, we can come here to our card size, and we can make these large. We can make them small. It really just depends on how much you want to have visible on your screen because ideally, you're not going to be scrolling left and right to be able to see all of the groups of boards that you have here. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on to our next view, which is going to be a list. Now, our lists here are essentially the most simple kind of form of views that we have within notion. So as you can see, it really is just taking all of our pages here and just orienting them in a list and giving us only the things that we choose to see here, only the properties that we choose to see. Because right here, if we come into our settings and we come to our property visibility here, you get to see that only two things are visible. Our project, which we can't hide, that is always going to be there and our department property. So our department property, if I go ahead and get rid of it, you get to see that here, it's just a list. And what we're able to do here is we can click into these, and we're able to see the page itself, right here. Now, if we come over here into our property visibility, we can essentially show everything or anything that we want. So if I show all, then you get to see that it just lists all of the properties side by side in the same order for each one of them. So we see our due date first here. We see our priority level, our status, and the department category. If I want to come in here, I can change the order of these. So I can put, let's say, the Dude at the end, so the Dude is going to be here. But you get to see that this isn't going to be a kind of view that you're going to use if you want to have a lot of information on your screen because you get to see this is really just a worse view in terms of seeing all the information than compared to a table view. Right? This is really just where you want to see everything super condensed and maybe just one or two properties associated with that database. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on to our chart view. Now, our chart view is actually something that maybe sounds a little bit complicated, but they really are quite simple, because what we're able to do in our chart view is we're able to take the data within our database and turn it into any kind of chart that we really wish to create. So what do I mean by this? Well, if we see right now, we get to see that this is now a bar graph of the amount of projects to each given department right now. So if we come here into our settings, we're able to tweak a lot. We're able to choose between a vertical bar graph. We can choose a horizontal bar graph. We can choose a line bar graph, which is mainly going to be helpful and seeing change over time here. If you're going to be looking at individual tasks, you're really never going to want to use the line graph because it's not going to be conveying any meaningful information. And lastly, we have our doughnut graph. So this is we get to see the percentage split here. Again, this is one of those views that is going to serve for the most part, at least, a super specific purpose because we're never just going to kind of come over here into our project tracker and use this chart to work with all of our data, right? This is only going to show us quick visualizations of the data in our database. So this kind of view and visualization can be quite helpful in actually creating dashboards where we're going to be able to on a page, be able to see a bunch of information on one or a couple of our databases. So really, this one just works best in tandem with everything else. Now, in looking at the settings of this, we're able to change what we are visualizing here because right now we have our department. But we can change this by our status. So we can choose group right here, or what we can do is choose our status by option because this needs review and in progress are both in the same group in this single select field. There's really a lot of ways that we are able to tweak this to show very specific things that we want to do. In terms of our project tracker, though, this one is all quite straightforward because we get to create these bar graphs that show the amount of projects and essentially whatever properties that we deem to be meaningful for us. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on into our next view. So we've covered now half of these views. Next is going to be our timeline view. So our timeline view is, as you guessed it, going to be most useful in visualizing due dates. So you get to see that as you come here on the timeline view, all of the pages in your database are going to be visualized by their due dates. And we get to see only one dude appears in this range right here, this initial range without having to scroll. And you get to see all these little arrows right here on the right side of our screen are going to be other pages within our database. They're going to be due dates in the future. We get to see that there are none on this left side here because none are in the past. So what we can do is we can grab this little scrolly bar right here and we can scroll and we get to see all of the tasks that are going to be due for us in a way that's just way more visualized and kind of easy to see everything on a time base. Now, just as with any of the other views, we're able to come to any one of these, and we can select them to see more information to see them opening the page. Now, another thing that we have here, which is similar to our board view is that we can actually adjust do dates within this view. So if we're, let's say, going through, and we see right here, these kind of tasks are all very close to each other. If maybe we want to spread them out to give our team more time to work on them, then we could go ahead and just drag and drop. We can drag and drop. And you get to see right here that this is in December and this one is on the 13th. And as we move from side to side, the new due date is now highlighted here. So right here, I'm on December 19, here I'm on December 5, and just release, and now that due date is updated. So we see new client onboarding workflow. If we come back into our table, then we get to see that same page right here, that same task, but we also get to see this new due date as December 5, 2025. Now let's go ahead and come here into our timeline, and again, let's change it. Let's make it December 23. If we wanted to be evil and make something do right before Christmas Eve, we could come over here into our table, and we could see right here, this is now on December 23, 2025. So one way that we can practically use this for our project tracker is what we can do is come into filter, and we can come into department, and we can filter by individual departments here to see what assignments they have and when they are due. If they are close to each other, maybe we can make some small adjustments. Like, right now, marketing looks like they're all good. They're spread out, giving them ample time to complete everything. We see here the same thing with sales. And as we come to customer success, we can also scroll and check things out. You can see here that these two are back to back. Maybe we want to spread this out. But this oir quarter survey analysis into the new year. And yeah, that's good. Alright, now let's go ahead and check out our next view, which is going to be a feed view. So this feed view is going to prioritize a few things. First, we get to see a kind of quick little preview of what each page in our database has, but we also get to see a big part of this is going to be our comments, because if we come into our table view, the only time that we really ever see comments is if we actually open the task, open the page itself, to then be greeted by our comments. And really, that's the case with any one of these views, where we actually have to properly go ahead and click and open this to be able to see those comments at a glance. With our feed view, it gives us these comments immediately. At that glance at that first glance, we are able to see the comments that are going to be associated with this. And, hey, by the name of this view, it makes sense. So this view is going to be most helpful for those kind of collaborative databases that you're going to be having where you need a lot of information, where you need a lot of conversation and interaction between multiple people within these databases or within these given tasks or pages that occur within this database. So for the most part, this feed view is quite self explanatory and it's quite simple. Let's go ahead and now move on to our next one, which is going to be our map view. Now, our map view isn't going to be very helpful for the information that we have in our table because nothing is geographically kind of constrained. Nothing is geographically pinned here to where we are able to see our database pages on a map. Now, if the locations of pieces of data within your database are going to be important, this one could be a meaningful view free. And now that I've added this as a view here, if we come back into our table, we are actually able to see a new property emerge within our database, and that's going to be place. So I can go ahead and put a place in here, let's say, New York City. And as I select it right here, if I come back into our map, we should see that we have this task right here as we zoom out get to see a little pin on our map. And it works just as any pieces of data in any of the other views where if we click it, you get to see that it opens in its own view. Okay. Moving on. Now, after our map, we have our calendar view. Now, our calendar view is going to work super similar to our timeline view, where with our calendar view, where we get a visualization of all of our projects on a time based form based on our due dates. Now, the same way with our timeline view, how we were able to drag and drop to change due dates, we can do that here. So I can grab the CRM cleanup. I can change it to be right here. I can grab this December email newsletter and move it over here. So we're able to interact with this super easily. And you can see as we scroll down, this is, in fact, a continuous calendar, and we get to see the month and year that we're in at the top left of our screen. So as we scroll down, going from March to April, May, June, July, you get to see it. Now, another thing to note about these views with our calendar timeline or really any of the other ones or at least most of the other ones. What we're able to do is also change the property visibility just as I was doing here for our list, because although these ones right here, this calendar and timeline view are going to be based on due dates, what we're able to do is come to our property visibility, and we can make other properties visible if we so please. So I can make all of them visible right here, and we can exit out, and we get to see all of this information for each one of these tasks right here. So this is kind of just a side note if you want to be able to see more than just the task names within these views. Okay, so now we are moving on to our final view, which is a form. And a form is a little bit different. And by a little bit, I mean, it's quite different than everything else that we see here that we've covered so far in this lesson because it's not necessarily visualizing any data for us. Instead, form building is going to be helping us gather data. Which is why this actually isn't going to be something that I'm going to cover in this lesson. We'll cover this later on in the course because it's not visualizing our data. All right. So there you have it. These were all of the different layouts that we're able to use to visualize our data from our databases and notion in a multitude of different ways. All right. So that is it for this lesson. I will catch you in the next. 18. Connect Data Across Databases: In this lesson, we are going to be discussing a property within our notion databases that is actually something that can come quite handy. The property that we're going to be discussing is going to be relations. So relations are quite an interesting property because they essentially allow us to create a relationship, relations between multiple different pieces of data within our database and between databases. So what do I mean by this? Well, we can essentially think of this relation property kind of exactly as the name implies. It attributes a relationship to another task. In our case, because we're working here with our project tracker, it can associate a relationship between one project to a parent project. So let's go ahead and see this relational property in action within just one database, within our project tracker database. So the first thing that I'm going to do here is I'm going to add in a property. I'm going to come down here to our relation, and it's then going to ask us, what do we want this property to be linked to? Do we want it to link to this database right here as we see Project Tracker, or do we want to link this to another database? Well, the first example of this is that I'm going to relate this to this database and our project tracker. So that means I'm just going to go ahead and select Project tracker right here. And now I have to decide on the name of this new property. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to name it related project to make it clear because what we're going to be doing here is we're going to be adding in projects, and we're going to be relating them to other projects here, to mother projects. So I'm going to go ahead and add in this relation, so we get to see it appear right here. Now what I want to do is I'm going to add in a new project here. So this new project that I created was client onboarding survey. And this is meant to be a relational task to our new client onboarding workflow. Right? This makes sense, because what we want to do here is we want to create and distribute this client onboarding survey in order to have the information needed to create this new client onboarding workflow. So the next thing that I want to do here is I want to come to this related project function, and I want to scroll, and I want to select this one right here, the related project, our new client onboarding workflow. And now, as I link that we get to see that not only does it appear right here and linking to our original task, but it also links right here, so we get to see other related projects as well. So you get to see that at least within one database, these relational properties work in a kind of cyclical manner. But using these relational properties within the same database isn't actually the most effective use of this property. Let me show you what I mean in a way that we can use this relational property to actually have some real practical benefit for us. I'm going to go ahead and delete this property from our project tracker. And I'll also go ahead and get rid of this project as well. And now what we're going to do is instead of just focusing on our project tracker database, we're going to come and look at this task manager database. And to start off, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in a couple of tasks here. Okay, so right here, what I've done is I've created two tasks. I created a Create Landing page task and a decide on landing page testing. So you get to see that these ones are different than our projects. These ones are much more kind of tailored, smaller things that we can complete. That's why they're in a separate database and task manager as opposed to projects. So now what I want to do is I want to use a relation property to relate these two tasks to this project right here, our landing page AB test, right? Because we have to create a landing page first to be able to AB test anything, and we have to decide on what variable we want to AB test in this. So let's go ahead and add in a new property. Again, we're going to come to relation and now instead of linking to this table, what we're going to do is link to this database, our project tracker database. So that means what it's doing is it's linking our task manager database into our project tracker database. And instead of just adding in a relation here, what we're going to do is we're going to enable the two way relation. That means that we're able to see this relational property on this project tracker database instead of only seeing the relational property on our tasks manager. So let me go ahead and show you what I mean here? I'm going to go ahead and put in tasks right here as the two way relational name. I'm going to click Add relation. So if I weren't to have checked that two way relation box, then all we would have is essentially what we see right here where we have one relational property in project tracker and we'd have nothing up here. But instead, what we did is we checked that box. So that means that there is a property right here, it's just hidden so to be able to make it visible, we're going to come into our settings. We're going to come into property visibility, and we should now see a new property right here in tasks. So let's go ahead and uncheck that. So we're making it visible here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to relate these tasks into the projects. So they're both going to be related to this landing page AB test. So I'm going to come right here. I'm going to add that one in right there, and I'm going to relate this one here as well. So now we're able to see in both databases where this one is going to be related, where each thing is going to be related. Right here in our task manager, we get to see the related project and within our project tracker what tasks are associated with any given project. Now, if you don't want to have everything visible as such as it is, then what we can do is come here into our settings. We could come here into layout, and then we can uncheck rap all columns because with rap all columns enabled, that means we're able to see all of the data, all of the text on our database. But if we uncheck it, that means that it'll just cut off some, and to be able to see it, what we can do is just come in here and open our learning page ABTS project page. And we're able to see all of these relational property tasks right here. So as you can see, this relational property can actually have a great deal of utility in terms of linking databases to one another, especially if you have something like this. It doesn't have to be something like a project tracker and a task or to do list, but it can be something where you have your entire business, and then you have different departments in your business that are going to link to other overall larger projects, databases, whatever it may be. Essentially just allows us to have coordination and communication across different databases within NCA. 19. Roll Up Information Automatically: All right, so we are back here in our action items page. Now, you can see with our two databases here, I've made some changes. The first of which is I added in a bunch more tasks to our task manager. And I did this to kind of put our relation property right here to a little bit more work and connecting more tasks right here in our project tracker. This is all because what I wanted to do is I wanted to show off this property that we are going to be discussing in this lesson in our roll up property. So this roll up property is something that I am using to track the progress of the tasks within our projects. So as you can see, if we come over here to our Create Landing Page and decide on Landing Page testing variable, that are both two tasks to our landing page AB test. You can see right here that only one of them is checked off completed, giving it a 50% completion. Now, if I go ahead and check this one off, we can see this updated to be 100%. So essentially, what this roll up property is able to do is take our relation property one step further and conveying even more information and kind of just making this all a little bit more copsthetic and a little bit more clear for us. So let me show you exactly how I went about creating this exact thing right here because as you can see, this is a very interactive layout that allows us to see the progress on all of our projects extremely clearly. So let's go ahead and first get rid of this roll up property here so we can go ahead and start from scratch and building it up. Now, one thing that I also added in between this in order to actually showcase that roll up right there in the beginning of this lesson was, in fact, this new property here in it being a simple checkbox property. So I just had this checkbox property, and then what I did is I renamed it. Instead of checkbox, I just put it as completed, so it's clear as to what this is conveying. Now, let's go ahead and get into our actual roll up property because our roll up property is first going to be added right here within our project tracker. Then we're going to come down over here, and we are going to come right next to relation and click Roll up. So, now this roll up property has been added except it doesn't really have any functionality right now. We actually have to set its functionality and set the rules that it's going to abide by in order for it to give us actual meaningful data here within this column. So to do so, we have to right click, and then we are going to come into Edit property. So in order for this roll up to work, it in fact, does need a relation property. So we already have one created here in tasks. So we're going to go ahead and select tasks. And then what this is going to do is ask us for a target property. So the target property is essentially going to be all of the properties within that relational properties database. So as you can see, we have three potential target properties to choose from because down here in our task manager, we have three properties. So the one that we are going to select here is going to be our completed. So as we select completed, we're then going to go to the last step of our roll up property. And that is going to be calculating because this roll up, it's called roll up because it's going to be kind of rolling up some data and doing something with it. It's going to be calculating something. So now that we give it its target property, we have to then tell it what it's going to do with this property. So if we come here and to calculate, we can do a few things. We can tell it to count or we can tell it to give us a percentage. Now, because this is a checkbox, it's giving us options in relation to this checkbox property. So the count, it gives us the option to count all to count only the ones that are checked or to count the ones that are only unchecked. So if, for example, I wanted to go ahead and do checked, then I could go ahead and rename this property, something like tasks completed. So, right here, that is exactly what I've done. And now, as I go ahead and select these tasks, we can see how it updates right here next to their respective projects. But the kind of downside to this is that we're not necessarily getting any meaningful information here because right now there's two tasks completed right here for our landing page AB test, but I don't know if there are two tasks there or if it's a project that consists of ten tasks. So in order to actually get this to be a little bit more meaningful in showing us the percentage complete of these projects, we can go ahead and come here into our edit property. And we can come over here and calculate. We can select calculate. And instead of just going for count, we can go for percent. And in order to show what percentage of the project is actually completed, we want to go for percent checked. So that means once all of them are checked, 100% of those tasks are checked, it's going to show 100% here, meaning that 100% of that project is now complete. But we can also take it a step further here because right now we can see that it's simply numbers. But we wanted to be a little bit more visual because notion gives us the capabilities to do so. So if I come here again and right click Edit property, I can change this. Instead of just showing as a number, I can show it as a bar. We can see right here gives us this percentage complete. I can edit property again or show it as a ring. And if we come here, again, we get to see this shown as a ring, and it shows us these percentages right next to them. So if I come here to edit property, I can also do things like change the color and I can change the number right here. So here, instead of showing the number besides the progress bar, it's just showing the progress bar. But let's go ahead and edit this property. A number. So there you go. That is the power of roll ups. They essentially let you pull in and summarize data from related databases without having to duplicate anything. So whether you're counting tasks under each project, calculating totals or surfacing key info from linked entries, roll ups essentially help you turn notion into a smarter, more connected system. And really, once you master this and you get comfortable linking databases using these roll ups, you'll be able to build dashboards, CRMs, and workflows that actually think with you. Okay? So that is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next. 20. Create a Project Tracker Dashboard: Alright, in this lesson, we are getting into another one of our projects, and here it's going to be a workspace dashboard. So throughout this lesson, what we are going to be doing is creating exactly what we see right here. So this is a dashboard. This dashboard is integrated within a page. It all starts off with a blank page. And then by using all of our views and the things we've learned through databases, we get to input databases here. Into their own blocks to be able to create this kind of layout here that tells us a bunch of different things that each is going to kind of summarize some specific information about our databases in some meaningful way that we decide. So just as an overview, we get to see some active projects right here. We get to see open tasks. These ones are both going to be projects and tasks that are not completed. We have high priority tasks. We have this week's schedule. We have a project tracker, outstanding projects by department, and completed projects by department. So, as you can see, there's a lot here and there's a lot for us to build in this lesson. So let's go ahead and create a brand new page, and we can start creating this workspace. So I'm going to go ahead and come here and hit Plus, and I'm going to click Create a New Page, and we are going to name it just as it was named before in our Workspace dashboard. And along with this title right here, I'm going to also go ahead and add in an emoji here just so we can make it look a little bit nicer. So, if we want to go ahead and copy exactly what we see here, what we're first going to start off here is going to be with a two column layout block. So to do so, we're going to slash here and hit two C. That is going to give us our two column block. So right here, we now have two columns to work with. So with these first two, what I kind of want to do here is set up the kind of most broad view of our workspace. The thing that's going to be kind of most important to us in looking at a high view are just going to be those projects or tasks that are not yet complete, just so we can kind of see everything on our table before we kind of move down into more views that get a little bit more specific onto the things that we decide as important. So with this first one, what I want to do is go ahead and start off with the title here. And with this title, I'm going to make it a Heading one. So to do so, I'm just putting in one hash tag right here, hitting space, and then titling this active projects. And then moving on to this one right here, I'm also going to do the same thing a hash tag. And then we are going to name this open Task. Okay, so now what we are going to do is start off by putting in our inline database right here and we want to create a table here of our project tracker database. So there's a few ways that I can do this. We can use our slash Command and we can just type in database here and select inline database. Another way that I can do this is just go straight to tableview and put in this table view database. And then instead of just creating a new empty data source, what I can do is type in our project tracker. Then you can see right here that it fills and I can just select it, and then now we get to see the entirety of our project tracker here. Now, clearly, we don't want to have our project tracker to be viewed as such because this is just showing us way too much information. We want to have a dashboard here, so we want to have a quick overview. The first thing that I want to do is actually get this fitted in its proper two column layout because right now it's in its own block below all of that. So to do so, I'm going to come over here and move it, and I'm going to drag it to be right below active projects. So now we get to see that it's fitting here. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I want to come over here to this two column block, and I want to hover over the edge right here. And I want to drag it outwards. So we can pull it to be here just so we're able to see just a little bit more. Now, the next thing that I want to do in making this be a little bit more concise is I want to apply a filter here to what we see. Because I name this active projects, these are projects that are currently being worked on or projects that at least have to be worked on. The first thing that I want to do is filter for status, and I want to make sure status is not. Status is not done. Alternatively, I could have it set to status is, and then I just select everything that is not done. Both of them work, but having it status is not then done is just a little quicker way of going about it. Okay, so right now we have all of the projects that we want to appear here. But still, our view here is a little bit more complicated than we like. So what I'd want to do here is come here into our settings, and I want to come to property visibility. This is next going to be the place where we are going to optimize this. And I essentially want to hide everything. But I think one thing that can be important here and seeing, again, this high level overview of all of our projects would be looking at this roll up property that we created and tasks completed. Because here with this roll up property, it gives us more information than essentially everything else here in the most concise manner and being able to see the percentage of which the tasks are completed for this project to be completed. Okay, so now that is completed. What I can do is come back here to our filter, and I can click it again to hide it. Now, alternatively, another thing that I could do is I can come over here into layout, and then I can go ahead and turn off this setting right here, the show data source title. I wanted to just be a little bit more clean, I could go ahead and do so. But again, because this is the first kind of overview, I am going to have this data source title visible, so if anyone is going to be looking at this dashboard and they want to go into the project tracker itself to see a little bit more information, they can do is simply click here, and then they're going to be brought in to our project tracker right here. Okay, so now let's go ahead and get into our open tasks. So here, I'm going to go ahead and do an inline embed right here with our database, and I'm going to search up our tasks manager. So our task manager is now here, and it was inputted here just as it's normal table view. But I don't want to do that. I want to have a kind of diversity of views on this dashboard. So what I want to do is first, I'm going to go ahead and filter this as we filtered before and showing only the tasks that are not completed. So I'm going to filter by this completed checkbox, and I'm going to make sure that completed is unchecked. So now it's showing us only these active kind of tasks. These tasks are yet to be completed. Now, the next thing that I want to do just kind of for visual sake is to get rid of all of these blank page icon. Because I didn't assign any page icons to these, I want to go ahead and just get rid of them. So if I come to layout, I can come over here and I can turn off show page icon. Now, the next thing that I want to do, because these tasks here are just that, they're just tasks, and they're all kind of smaller things that can be completed within a shorter amount of time as compared to a project tracker, I want to change this view to kind of show these tasks in a little bit more kind of clear setting, if you will. So what do I mean by this? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to settings, and instead of having a table layout, what I want to do is change this to a gallery layout. Now, we discussed a gallery layout quickly in our layout lesson, but the way that I'm going to use it here is going to be a little different than how I discussed it in that lesson and how we'll be applying this gallery view to our website in the next lesson. This is kind of all just to show you how dynamic these layouts can be and the use cases that you apply them to. So first, let's go ahead and change this card size from medium to small because I want to fit essentially all of the tasks here in one view without having to scroll or do anything like that. Now, the next thing is I want to come over to card preview because there's no content on any of these pages or any images to show. I'm going to come to card preview and I'm just going to select none. So now we get to see kind of more concise and condensed view of these tasks. Okay, so the next thing that I'm going to do is now I'm going to come outside of layout, and I'm going to come to property visibility because this is going to be the next important thing. Now, with our task, we don't really have much. We have our name, which is always going to be visible, but the next thing that I want to do is really just enable both of these views right here. Now we're essentially able to see the entirety of each one of these tasks all in their own kind of little condensed bubbles right here in their own little rectangles. So from this point, whenever any one task is completed, you can just come over here, check it off. I'll get rid of it from the list, and we can see it update right here in our project tracker from before where it was 0%, now we get to see it's 33%. Okay, so now let's go ahead and again, hide this filter and move on to our next line of views. Here, again, what I want to do is create another two column layout right here. So you can see that we have these two columns, and I'm going to have two different views here, one of which is going to be a calendar view titled this week's schedule, and the other one is going to be high priority task within our project tracker. Again, just as we did before, I'm going to start out with a heading one here, and it's going to be named this week's schedule. And now I'm going to come over here and do the same thing with our other column. And there is a reason why I'm putting in these titles, the heading or the text right here before I put in the database. And that's because once you put in a database on one of these kind of two column layouts, it's hard to go ahead and drag and put text above it. So it's just easier to go ahead and put in your titles first before you add in the view of the database. Now that I have this heading here, I also want to go ahead and add in an emoji. So I'm going to do the same thing Emoji right here, and I can go ahead and select the fire emoji for our high priority. Okay, so now let's go ahead and input our calendar view right here. So I'm just going to do slash, and then I'll do a calendar view right here, and I'll go ahead and type in our project tracker. Okay, so now that we have this project tracker here, again, what I want to do is what I did with the top row, I want to extend this out to give our two views here a little bit more space, especially because this one is a calendar view. And now what I want to do is I want to come into the settings, and instead of seeing the entire month, what I want to do is only see this upcoming week. So now I can come here into our calendar layout, and then I can come to show calendar as, and you can see right now it's set at month. But instead, I want this to be set as we Okay, so now as I've done that, we get to see that the view here has now changed. And another thing that I want to do while I'm here is I want to go ahead and get rid of our data source title because we don't need that here. Okay, so with that, this one is essentially completed. Now let's go ahead and move over here into our high priority view and create a table that shows the projects that are high priority. So I'll go ahead and hit slash Table, and then we'll do our table view as a database. I'll go ahead and type in our project tracker, and now we get to see the entirety of our project tracker. Now, of course, we don't want that. We just want to filter for our high priority tasks. So I'm going to go ahead and click the filter icon, and then we can come here into Project priority, and then with project priority is high. So now we are only seeing our high priority projects. But we're not done with this because, again, here we have a scrolli that shows all this information. And again, I don't want all of this to be shown. So let's go ahead and actually change this up. So now what I want to do is come into our settings. I want to come to our project visibility, and I want to turn off a few different properties. So I'm going to go ahead and start off with hiding all and here I only want to show, let's say, two different properties. Again, because I don't want to have to go ahead and scroll through to be able to see a dashboard's purpose is to see everything that you need at a glance. So let's just treat this one the same way that we treated our overview here and only showing our tasks completed percentage because this is going to be high priority thing, so we want to then see what percentage of these projects are done. If they are so high priority, we want to have kind of a numerical way to identify how close they are to being done. The additionally, if we want, just so we know whose responsibility this is, we could also go ahead and add in a department right here. So we get to see who's responsible for these high priority tasks. So if we have to press anyone to actually get these projects done, we know who to reach out to. So let's go ahead and keep this one as is. Okay, now we are going to move on to the next line. So now before we move on, let's also come back here into our layout and also get rid of our data source title. And we can also minimize the sections right here. Now, let's go ahead and get into the next part of this, which is going to be showing our project tracker based on the status of completion. So let's go ahead and just click down here to get a new block. And I'm going to title this. Again, we'll have a header here. I'll title it Projects by Status. So here I can just go ahead and hit Enter and then what I'm going to do is use a new view that we've yet to use right here, and that is going to be our board view right here. So let's go ahead and select the board view, and I'm going to go ahead and type in our project tracker, and it's going to input all of our different status markers right here. So we can scroll here and have this center to be able to see. So here, this simply just acts as another way that we can visualize the projects and their status as to where they are along the way of getting done. And then, again, what I want to do here is go ahead and get rid of our data source title. So right here, now we have projects by status. And we can move on to our last part here. If we come back here and view, we get to see that our last part is going to be these two kind of sections that each show three different graphs. So this first one is going to be outstanding projects by department, and they're going to be broken up into marketing, sales and customer success, the three departments that we have listed on our workspace on our project tracker. So for now, let's just go ahead and get in this outstanding projects. I can copy this so I don't have to type it back out. But another thing that I actually want to add here to kind of separate our project by status to that next section is going to be one enter, and I'm going to add in a divider right here and one more Enter. And now we have our outstanding projects by department. And now what we can do is go ahead and hit Enter again. And here, I'm going to create a three column layout. So three C, and hit Enter, and now we have three separate columns to be able to put in are three different charts. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come and expand this a little bit, and I'm going to put a heading two right here and I'm going to name this one marketing. So just like this, I can put in marketing. I'm going to come over here to our middle one, do a heading two. I'll put sales, and then come over to our last one and name this one customer success. Okay, so now what we have to do is input charts here. So I'm going to go ahead and start off with our marketing. And then, as you can see, as we will do, once we create this marketing one, the rest of them will be super easy because we'll essentially just be copying and pasting and only changing one small thing. So, what I want to do here is I'm going to use our slash Command, and I'm going to type in chart. So now we have all of our different charts, and what we want to do is go ahead and do this donut chart. Now, one way that we're kind of using this different than you would think is that we're not actually using this to see a breakdown of anything. We're essentially using this as a large counter. So let's go ahead and continue to do this. I'm going to go ahead and select our project tracker to make sure it puts in the correct data source here. And for What to show, I want to go ahead and select department here, and then each slice is going to represent a project. So now it's just changing the name here to ten distinct projects because that is the total amount of projects across all of our departments, across essentially our entire database of a project tracker. There's ten different projects there within our database. So, next, what I want to go ahead and do is add in a filter to filter to only what marketing has. I only want to see the projects for marketing. So I'm going to go ahead and filter. I'm going to filter by department, and I'm going to come and select this, and department is marketing. So now I get to see there are four distinct projects, four projects for marketing. Now, because I already have this labeled entitled here as marketing, I want to get rid of this label down here. So I can do so by coming back here. I can come into more style options, and I can turn off our legend right there. So now we just see this little circle chart. Okay, so all of those settings that I use to do this isn't something that I actually have to replicate and do again for each one of these. Because instead, what I can do is I can come here and command C on the marketing, and then I can move over here into sales, and I can paste it, and I can do the same thing again into customer success. Now, one thing that is a little finicky, there's a little bug in notion right now, and when we want to go ahead and paste charts, it does this occasionally. It says something is wrong with your chart data. But I found a way that we can actually get around this is if we go ahead and add a new view, we add in a table view. Then if we come back to our chart view, you get to see that it has now been fixed. So we can do the same thing right here, add in a table view, but then just come back to our chart view. And again, you get to see that it's all good. You want to go ahead and get rid of this table view, we can then come here, click that dropdown, come to these three dots, and we can delete the view. So we are only left with our chart view. Now what we can do is go ahead and come over here into our settings, and we can come to our filter by department. And instead of having this be marketing because we are in the sales, we can have this then uncheck marketing and select sales. Now you see that it's updated. We can do the exact same thing right here, come to our settings, then come over down to filter, and for department instead of marketing, we can select customer success. So now we get to see that we have distinct projects for each one of these. But there's actually one other filter that I want to go ahead and add because right now, this is just showing total projects. But what I want to do is I want to show outstanding projects. So that means we have one more filter. So I'm going to come back here into filter, add a filter, and I'm going to come into status. And for status, I wanted to click this drop down, and I'm going to say status is not done. So now you get to see there are two outstanding projects right here for our sales, and I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for our customer success and marketing. So now we get to see with all of these actually applied, how it changed. Here, this went 3-2. This one also went 3-2, and marketing stayed at four. They're not doing their jobs over there. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on to the next section that we have. If we come back over here, we get to see that this is completed projects by department. So let's go ahead and come over here, and again, I'm going to go ahead and copy this title. And what I'm going to do is come here. I'm going to add in one more divider, so that's just three dashes. I'll enter once to have some space, and now we have completed projects by department. And again, what I want to do here is just for simplicity because we already built out these charts. The only thing that we're going to be doing is changing some filtered criteria. I'm going to go ahead and just copy this entire section right here and I'm going to bring it down right here. Now, again, we get to see that this kind of problem still persists. So we can just do our solution. We can add in our table view and then we can come back into our chart, which then fixes it. So I'm going to go ahead and do that for all of these, and then I'll come back to you. Okay, so now that we have this all set up and ready to go, it's going to be time to come into our settings, and we're going to come back to our filter. Now, this one is actually quite simple, because instead of adding in more filters, the only thing we have to do to see our completed projects by department is come from status, and we can change this from is not to is. Now, you get to see here with marketing, there's no data because they have zero completed tasks over there in the Marketing department. So now let's go ahead and do the same thing over here, como settings, filter and status, and change that from is not to is. They have one project completed, and then come over here, filter, and status is complete. So right here, we get to see that there is zero here, one completed here, and two completed here. Now, I actually didn't even change anything over here. So I think there's actually an error in this one. So if I come here into the settings, this one should be is not complete. I'm going to come to our filters and status. Yeah, right here, it's not showing as it should. I'm going to change that to is not complete. Have one outstanding project here, and they have two completed projects. So you can see in this kind of manner, maybe this is something that you would set up to see the progress of each of your departments. And this can maybe be a setup for some kind of reward system to see who completes the most within, let's say, a given month. But there you have it. What we've just done is created our very own workspace dashboard. Now, of course, this dashboard was specific to what we've been working on throughout this course with our project tracker and our task manager. But just with your knowledge that you've garnered on how you can use views, how you can use filtering, sorting, grouping, you can go ahead and now create your very own dashboard or even your own second brain notion. Because these dashboards don't only have to be dashboards that are based on one database. They can be one dashboard that maybe is going off your entire life where you have your personal stuff in one view, and then you have work stuff in another view. But there you have it. And even from this point, what we can do, if you want to kind of give this to everyone within your workspace, you can not only share it, but we could go ahead and publish this as its very own website where maybe people outside of your workspace could also view as to what your accomplishments are and what the progress on certain projects or whatever you are going to be creating is going to be. Okay. All right. So there you have it. This lesson is now done. Now, let's move on to adding in and kind of sprucing up our website with this new database knowledge that we have. 21. Power a Website with Databases: All right, so now it is time to apply the new knowledge that we have on databases to the website that we've been building. So the last place that we left off on this website was having created what we see now. Now in this lesson, what I want to go ahead and add is what we see down here. So essentially, what we're doing here is we're taking this section and we are changing it into this section, where as you can see here, these ones aren't just mixtures of images and text and button. Instead, this here is actually a database that we're working with. And more specifically, it's a gallery view of a database. Now, we're actually not just going to stop here because let me go ahead and take us to our actual site right now. So let's go ahead and get right into building this. So right now we are here on our website, and where I want to bring your attention to is these little tabs that we have up here, because in this lesson, we are going to be working with the courses tab because right here at the bottom of our site where we're going to have our featured courses, and, of course, we'll be removing this one, as well. What is happening here in this gallery view is that we have featured courses. So you can see that they have a tab here. This is a multi select tag that I apply to these. So that means these featured ones are going to be appearing here under featured courses, under this gallery view specifically because I filtered it to do so. But in the courses tab, what I want to do is have all of the courses. So there's going to be many more than just three. So let's go ahead and get right into it and start building. Okay, so let's go ahead and begin with getting rid of everything that we see right here. So I'm going to get rid of essentially everything in this featured courses section except for this one title here. Okay, so now we have our blank slate to deal with. Now, the first thing that I actually want to do is create a brand new database. So I'm going to come over here into our team spaces. I'm going to come to my workspace, and I'm going to add in an empty database, and I'm going to title this one courses. Now, I want to note that what I'm doing here doesn't have to only apply to courses themselves. Instead, if we come back to our site, and another way that this can kind of be practically implemented in another notion site is these can, instead, instead of courses, be blogs. And that one, honestly, is probably one of the most common uses of using a gallery view on a site on notion. If that's something that's kind of more your style, then everything that I will be discussing in this lesson is going to be exactly applicable to doing that. So let's go ahead and come back into our courses database right here. And the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to add in a couple properties. So the first of which is going to be a multi select property. Then I want to add in a text property. We can call it description. Another one's going to be important, especially for our gallery view and actually getting the thumbnails visible. That's going to be a file and media tab, a file and media property. And lastly, for those of you that maybe want to use this in a kind of blog context, I can add in another property here, and this property can be created time. Okay. So now let's go ahead and start off with three new pages. Now, what I want to do here for the name is just pull in these course titles. So I'm just going to go ahead and copy and paste these ones in, and then I'll come back to you. Okay, so our first step here and actually getting in these course titles has been complete. Now what I want to do is I want to add a new view. So instead of just looking at our table view, let's actually have a view that is going to reflect what we're going to see in our site, which is, of course, going to be our gallery view. So we can use this gallery view for every time we make changes in our table view, we can kind of come here and preview them how they're going to look in the gallery because it is easier to kind of add things in here within our table view as opposed to our gallery view. Now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and add in tags for these courses. So if we go ahead and come back here, and I scroll down, you get to see that there are tags associated with these courses. Now, this is kind of just to help the people that are on our side to kind of get an idea what kind of category these can be in. And as you can see, I have three separate distinct tags here. I have a featured one, which is going to help us in filtering to get this featured courses section on our landing page. Then we have our project management and we have a marketing tab. Now, I can add in other tags as well. Like maybe a best selling tag if that's the case, or maybe if the reviews are above a 4.5, something like that. These are all different kind of ideas, but for now, we can go ahead and stick to this. Now, if you're writing a blog here, these can be tags that are going to be related to specific things about that blog. Maybe the category you're writing in, maybe if there was any kind of critical acclaim, maybe some important places where that blog was cited, things like that. So let's go ahead and come in here and create these tags. So first, I'm going to type in featured. Then we can go ahead and put marketing. And then, lastly, we can have project management. If I want to go ahead and change the designations of these, change the colors, then I could go ahead and do so. Like featured can be some yellow. Let's go ahead and put marketing as blue, and we could have project management as green. For this Linktn course, I'm not going to have project management because that is not going to be relevant for it. But for Air table, that is exactly where I will have a project management tag, and for male champ, I will also put the marketing tab for it. But as you can see, I put featured on all of these because these are going to be the ones that we want to have appear in our featured section of our Landing page. Now, if you're not sure exactly what I mean and how this kind of relates, you'll see as we actually get to doing this on Landing page in a moment. Now let's go ahead and move on to the description. Now, this description, the reason I added it, is because I wanted to be able to have this subtext right here, kind of like we see right here. So what I'm going to do is the same thing as before. I'm just going to go ahead and copy, and I'm going to paste it into these descriptions. So I'll do the same thing with these two, and then I'll come back to you. Okay, so now that we have these descriptions over here, let's come to our gallery view to kind of preview how this is going to look. Make these descriptions visible, we're going to have to come to property visibility. And right now, only one property is visible in the names. So let's go ahead and make our descriptions visible, and let's make our multi select visible because those are the two that we've added content to. Now, as you can see, we see that we're not actually able to see the full description here, right? They cut off after a certain amount of characters. But we can go ahead and fix this. The place that we can actually go ahead and fix this is going to be first in our settings. Then we're going to come down here and to edit properties. And this is going to allow us to edit some things where we wouldn't have been able to do so otherwise. And for example, if we come here to our description, what we want to do is this rap in view setting. If we go ahead and enable this, then that means that we're able to see the entirety of our descriptions. So just as if we were going to be using this function for the title, and let's say any part of our table because with our table, that is a basic function here, this wrap in view if we come into our layout, and I go ahead and come here and to wrap all columns. We get to see that this is something that we went over earlier in this course, but it shows that it's able to see all of it. Everything from our name and everything of the description. Nothing is cut off. So let's go ahead and turn that off and come back into our gallery. So right now we get to see that this here is looking much more like it should, right? It's looking like what we were trying to create right here. Now, the next step of this is going to be to add in the actual images. So that's going to be part of our files and media. So what we're going to do for this is quite simple. We're going to just come, click here into each part, and then we can go ahead and upload each respective thumbnail, each respective image. So now, again, I'm going to do that myself, and then I'll come back. All right. Now, just a few seconds later, we now have all of these images imported into our files in media property. So now let's go ahead and come back over to our gallery view, and let's actually look at this. Because right now we don't see anything, and that is just going to be fixed in a couple of clicks. We're going to come to our settings. We're going to come to our layout, and then you get to see right here our card preview. Our card preview is now our page content, and all of these are new pages that I created, so there's no content on them, so that's why we see nothing here. Instead of having this as page content, what we want is to have it as our files and media. So we can go ahead and select this, and now we get to see all of our images right here. So now, this is essentially exactly what we need in terms of having this shown on our landing page, right? Because these are the three featured courses that we can see right here. Except, as I said before, I don't want them to be just this featured courses. We're going to be using this exact same database here to be highlighting our courses section right here to highlight all of our courses. So what we need to do is go ahead and expand this database to have more courses. Now, instead of just going ahead and plugging all of my courses, what I'm going to do just for time's sake is I'm going to go ahead and duplicate. So I'll duplicate these a few times just so we can have a good amount of these courses here listed, so it kind of looks like a more full page. So to do so, what I'm first going to do is I'm going to get rid of these featured tags, just so I don't have all of these duplicated courses, having the featured tag on them. Instead, I'm just going to have it like this. I'm going to select all three, and then I'm going to hit Command D to duplicate. And I can do this. Let's say I think this amount of times here is perfectly fine. So now what I want to do is I want to come to this multi select at the top. And for the top three courses, I'm going to have this featured badge associated with. Okay, so now it's time to actually come back to our website and start working with this. So let's go ahead and move over to the website where I got rid of everything right here. So now we have some space to work. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure there is at least one block of space, one block of padding between our title here and the database that we are going to input. Now I'm going to do slash. I'm going to do an inline database right here. And I'm going to put the title of our database, which is courses. So right now, we get to see all of our courses right here, but that's not what we want to see. I mean, the very first thing, instead of just filtering this to our featured, is the fact that this here is a table, and we need our gallery view. So we're going to come into settings. We're going to come into layout, and I'm going to change this from table into our gallery view right here. Okay, so now that this is the case, we then see that we have the same issue as we did before in that we're not seeing any extra information. We're just seeing the titles here. So what I need to do is first come to settings, come to property visibility, and then we are going to uncheck description. We're going to uncheck our multi select field as well. Okay, now for the next problem, again, we don't see the thumbnails here. So then we have to come back into settings. We have to come into edit properties, and then we can come over here into our description. And first, we have to go ahead and wrap in this view. To be able to see our descriptions. And if we come back here, we can then come to our layout, and then we can come to our card preview and select files and media to see all of our thumbnails here. Okay, so now it's time for our filtering because we don't want to see all of these right here. We don't want to see all of these courses. Instead, we want to see just our featured courses. So we're going to come over here into filter. And we are going to filter by our multi select field, and we just want to select this featured one. So we only see the featured courses right here, the courses with the featured tag. Okay, so now if we go ahead and close this filter, we get to see that we have our featured courses right here. But there's still a few more things that we want to tweak. First thing that I want to do is I want to get rid of this right here, this little link. So to do so, if we come here into settings, I can come to layout, and then I can uncheck our show data source title. That gets rid of that. Okay, first step is done. Now, the next thing is that I want to go ahead and change the layout here because we get to see there's two here, and there's one here, but I want these all to stand side by side. Now, there isn't a necessarily easy way to go about this or at least straightforward way, but there is a little workground that I can show you. Now, it's not always the most kind of consistent method, but in this case, when we're kind of forced to work with what we have, it is frankly, our best option. So, what am I even talking about right here? Well, let me first go ahead and come up here. I'm going to again add in a new block. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to do three C. So I'm going to create a three column block layout right now. So now with this three column block layout, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this and I'm going to set this gallery view into our middle block right here. Now, as you can see, right now, it doesn't look the best. But with some repositioning that we are afforded to with this three column layout, we're able to make this fit exactly how we want it. So first, I'm going to come here to our edge and I'm going to drag it off to the side of our screen. So right now, this essentially allows me to work with the middle columns right here to make adjustments as I so please. Okay, so right now, I've repositioned them by again, using this three column workaround to have them central. But one thing that I kind of want to do here is that I think these are a little bit too small. So instead, what I want to do is I want to make this a little bit bigger because when it's going to be on a website, it's going to kind of be hard to decipher everything, and I just think it would look better if it was bigger. So to do so, I can come here into our settings and again come into our layout. And then for our card size, I can change it from medium to be large. Okay, so now we have large cards, but again, you can see that we've run back into our problem of our sizing and positioning here. So let me go ahead and come back to our little dragbs right here, and I can drag them out, and I can do the same thing on this side right here. So we can pull them out to stretch and fit to the point where just before it adds a new page. So let's go ahead and have it like this where you can see this is a perfect layout. Okay, so what we've done here is essentially created our featured courses section of this. Now, there is something that I want to note here that differs this gallery view from what we previously had right here. Now, before, what I was able to do is because these were images, this was an image block, what I could do is attach a link to it, where if somebody clicked it, then they would be redirected to the link. Now, that isn't going to be the case with our database gallery view right here, because when somebody clicks it, as I just did, we get to see that it opens up a page in itself. There's a few things that I could do with this in this example, or if you're doing this for again, let's say, a blog. Now, if this is a blog and you have your featured blogs, if someone clicks it, you can then just have your blog right here exactly what you were writing about. Now, in our case, because it's courses, what I could do is I could have, let's say, our course outline, and I can have maybe some reviews listed here. I can use this kind of empty space here, this page as a kind of benefit. And what I could do is throughout this, I could leave links or even buttons to our course. Now, again, another solution, what we can do here is just as before, as we had these three column layout in buttons, I could then have this view course button. And again, each of these links could then lead to the courses themselves. So that's not necessarily something that I have to do here, but this is kind of just mentioning maybe problems that you might run into if this is a kind of approach that you want to take and the solutions that we have for them. Okay, so now let's go ahead and move into the courses tab that we'd see over here in our header, because there is exactly where I want to add in this database. So right now we get to see that we have these three tabs that about me, the course is in contact. What I want to do is come here into our courses tab. Now, in our courses tab, what I'm going to do is the same thing as I did before. And here, we're going to be inputting in our database. So here, I'm going to type in gallery because we're going to start with this gallery view, and I'm going to type in courses. So right here, we have our courses, and I'm going to go ahead and select our gallery view because it already exists and it can just import it in for us without us having to do any of those extra steps. Okay, so one approach that we can do here that I didn't want to do on our main page is actually come up here to the top right of our screen where we can adjust our page settings. Now, what I can do here is I can make our page full width. Now, as you can see, in making it full width, we get to have all of our courses right here kind of span the width of the page. So this is kind of more of an easy workound if you don't want to go ahead and do the method that I showed you with the three column layout. Now, that is, of course, something that we could do here. But before where we were on our website, if I were to have one ahead and come here and make everything full width, then you could see that it would really just mess with the layout of everything here. So I didn't want to do that on our main page. But right here, this is a potential place where we could go ahead and do that. Now, again, because this is a page here, what we can do is add in more elements, if we so please. So I could go ahead and change in this title. I can maybe add an icon, add a cover, and I could hit Enter here. I could put in some text, maybe some promo codes, maybe other information about this, essentially, whatever we would like to add here on this page. Now, another thing that I want to note here is that you get to see that if we hover over these, we have this little reposition icon. That means that we can reposition how these thumbnails are going to appear, how these images are going to appear in your gallery view. Now, what's happening here is that notion is kind of just fitting them to this current kind of layout right here. Now, one thing to note is that as people kind of change how they view it, if they minimize their screen, if they change the aspect ratios, this is going to change. They might not see exactly how it appears right here. Things might be cut off. Now, if you want to ensure that nothing is cut off on these images, then what we can do is come into our settings. We can come into the layout settings here under gallery, and we can fit image. Now, if we fit image, you get to see that everything kind of zoomed out a little bit, and now we have these little bezels on the side, but that's kind of the price that you have to pay to ensure that everything is going to be visible on these images on your gallery view previews. Okay, now let's go ahead. And actually view this site and see how everything looks. Okay, so now we are here back in our site. We get to see the same old good stuff right here. And as we scroll down, we get to see our featured courses right here. 03 featured courses. If we click on them, we get to see that they open as pages. Now we can also change the setting for them to open as full pages with just a few clicks. But for now, I think this is good here for our featured courses because right here, we get to see that we get little bits of previews. Maybe we'll have some ratings right here, maybe a little description, maybe a little outline, whatever it may be, and then we could have a button here that's a call to action. Again, or we can have the button present right here. Now, if they want to go ahead and see the full course catalog, you can come right here, and then they'll be able to see everything, and they'll be able to interact with any course they so choose. Again, this has so many applications, especially if you want to use Notion to create a blog. Alright. Now, with that, that is this lesson on integrating databases into the website that we have been building. I want to take this moment to remind you that at any point in this course, not just with this lesson, but with any lesson, if there is anything that we've discussed that maybe is a little difficult or a little bit confusing to you, you can always drop your questions in the Q&A section, and me and my team will be there to answer anything that is frustrating you or that you're just having a little bit of trouble with. Alright, that's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next. 22. Create Pages You Reuse: In this lesson, we are going to begin to look at templates with in notion. Now, templates with the notion take many different forms. So templates in notion take many different forms because we can have templates within our databases. We can use our buttons and essentially have those buttons create templates for us, and we can access the templates that notion provides for us as well as use their notion marketplace, as well. These are all places where we can see templates. But in this lesson, we are going to start off with kind of the most basic form of this, and this is going to be the immediate templates that notion provides for us. Because if you've been tracking our sidebar here from the beginning of this course, you can see that these ones right here are goals tracker, our meeting notes right here, you can see that this is a kind of opening of us going to be able to start to create this meeting notes template from what Nian gives us, which is going to be essentially the same thing as our document hub and our projects right here. These four tabs right here, these four pages are all templates that Noon has given us from when we created our account. If you want to follow along with me, you may or may not be able to see this on your notion. And if you aren't, then it's as simple as coming into our workspace right here, clicking that plus button. And then you get to see right here from our suggested, these are the templates that we're essentially going to be looking through in this lesson. Right here, it gives us six basic ones. But if we go ahead and click more templates, then we get to see that there are a handful of these templates that notion has created and given to us. As you'll see in a later lesson, we will explore the marketplace, as well. But for now, let's look at these first ones. So right now, before we look at this goals tracker, let's go ahead and have this first one right here, our Task Tracker. So we get to see as we click the Task Tracker, we get to select features to turn on or off. And as we do that, we're going to be able to preview exactly how this is going to look right here. So, in first glance, we get to see that this here is titled Task Tracker, and it is a table layout in this first view. But we also get to see that there are a few different tabs that, again, we get to go ahead and preview. We have this con Bon layout right here. And right here, we have another one that are my tasks. So let's go ahead and come and look at all tasks, and let's go and change some of these features. So right here, we have priority. We see that that one is enabled, and we get to see that right here. If I turn it off, you get to see it, it disappears. But if we turn it back on, it reappears right here. We have our task type, we have effort level. So if we go ahead and move over, we get to see effort level right here. We have an updated app feature. We have pass due. We have an attached file property, and there is an AI summary which we will be going over later on in this course. So let's just go ahead and turn everything on right here so we can have the most packed Task Tracker that at least is afforded to us right here within this template. So let's go ahead and click Continue. And now we get to go ahead and configure our views. So you get to see that these three views are enabled, but we also have one more here in a checklist. This checklist view essentially takes our all tasks and just pulls the task name and has them able to be checked, done, complete or kind of this other one here, which maybe you would denote as being in progress. So again, we can turn on all of these and just go ahead and continue to actually create this task tracker. So now that we're here, let's go ahead and kind of just have a quick overview because we do have a lot more templates to get through. So most of these properties here are going to be quite familiar. We have our status, our assignee, our due date, and our priority, all things that we have already worked with. Here we have our task type, and in this case, this is just a multi select field. It just has a different icon. But you can see as we open this, these are just a multi select field. Again, we're able to select multiple options from the property. Then as we move on, we have description, which is just a plain text field. We have attached file. And this right here, our past due property is one that we haven't yet went over. It's a formula property. And no worries. We will be going over formulas, but this one is a little bit more of an advanced concept, but there are some kind of more easy practical uses for them. An example, right here, using it as a past due function. So if we just look at this real quickly, what this is essentially saying is if due date, and then we get to see a less than sign right here, and now it's naming it past du. So this essentially means if the due date is before because of this less than sign, now, then we are going to name it past Du. So because all of these due dates over here are in the past, meaning they are less than today's date, then this is named past Du. So that one there is quite simple. It's one of the kind of easier uses of this formula property. And when we do go over this, I'll show you again how we can set this up from scratch. And then as we move over, we get to see when these were last updated. We get to see effort level, which as you can see right here, as I switch this, we get to see that it is a single select field. Lastly, we have an introduction of a new property, again, we have yet to go over, but we will. It's a AI summary. This is essentially just giving us a summary of each one of these tasks. So let me go ahead and come here into our layout, and I'm going to enable wrap columns just so we're able to see these summaries right here in full view. You essentially get to see that what this summary function does is take all of this information before it and summarize it into one text block. Okay, so that here is kind of like the biggest overview that we get to see of this template in our Task Tracker. But we can also see how these different views manifest as well by having them by status, by having our task by our tasks, and having them here in our checklist. Okay, so now let's go ahead and move on to our Gals tracker. Our Gals tracker is again going to be essentially the same thing. But instead of task, we're going to be tracking maybe more long term goals. When looking at this, we get to see a lot of properties here, almost all of them, which are quite familiar. Right here with our owner property, this one is just going to be an assignee property. Then we have our status. We have our due date priority, and then Team, which is a multi select property right here. And just like the other ones, we also have other views, again, we have a con Bon view right here. We have my goals. So let's go ahead and put this right here, assigned to myself, and we get to see that it is appearing here in my goals. So essentially, the only thing that dictates this view right here from all goals is that with this view, it's still a table view, but there is a filter here. And the filter is simply that the owner is me, Adam Taylor. Okay, so now let's go ahead and move on. Now let's look at our meeting notes. So with our meeting notes, again, we get to see our preview right here. Right here, our first tab is all meetings. We get to see meeting name. There's a date, the category of the meeting, attendees of the meeting. And again, we have an AI summary of this meeting that is going to be based by the other information within the rows. So again, let's go ahead and just turn on all of these. We can click Get Started, and we can turn on this by category view. So we get to see this kind of layout right here. We have my notes. And lastly, we have by category. So as I'm going through all of these templates, the main thing that I kind of want you to get out of it is just inspiration. How can you go ahead and implement what you get to see on these templates into your own notion workspaces? Now, with that, let's move on to our document hub. And our document hub is going to be a little bit more condensed because all of these are going to be just individual documents. So the difference here is if we go ahead and open them, you get to see each page has its own template within it. We get to see there's a background title, analysis, recommendations, and implementation. So while the tables and properties maybe may not be as advanced, we at least get to see some structure here within our pages that we didn't look at in our prior ones. And the same as before, we have a M Doc tab. So this one is essentially going to be another table view that is filtered by docs that are created by me, Adam Taylor. So again, let's come back right here, and let's go ahead and move on to our next one, which is projects. So in looking at these properties, we get to see, again, these are not unfamiliar properties to us, right? We get to kind of see and recognize each one of these. We have assignee status, start and end date, priority, our team, which is a multi select field, our attached file and status. One different tier besides the extra views that we get right here are going to be, again, the page layouts. So with these project templates, we have to see all of the layouts within the pages are going to be structured like this. We have an about project, so we can give a little description here, and then we have action items. So things that need to be done for this specific project to be completed, then we have some document links right here. If we want to go ahead and embed a Google Drive, we could click that and we can paste in the link. If we want to embed a Figma, then we can go ahead and do the same thing right there. Now, the say Embed Google Drive or embed Figma isn't limiting us to just putting in the links for these respective kind of software. Instead, they're just kind of giving us recommendations as to what to put in here because they are labeled as such. So when people are going to be going through your projects, they know that if they go ahead and click this and you did, in fact, put a Google Drive link, then they will be redirected to the Google Drive, and they don't have to kind of go through the links, and it's just not clear. Here, with these blocks that Noon gave us and naming them as such, it just makes it clear for your workspace to know exactly where everything is and know what each link is going to be redirecting them. Okay, so now let's just go ahead and look at maybe one or two more right here. If I go ahead and open this up, let's look at a few more templates right here before we go ahead and move on to the next lesson where we get to kind of see more templates in action, more than just these basic ones that notion gives us. We're going to take it a little step further. First, let's go ahead and look at this content calendar. So again, with this content calendar, we get to choose all of the different features that we get to have within it. I'm going to select all of them just so we can see. I can continue, and we also get to choose all of our views here. So now I'm going to hit done, and now we're going to be brought into a template that looks a little different than what we've been working. So this first view that we have right here is going to be our calendar view, which makes sense because this is a content calendar. If I come over here into all content, we get to see that all of these are in March and in February of 2025. So let me go ahead and go a little bit back into the past to be able to see this. Right here within February, we do get to see two posts right here. And just as if it's any other calendar view that we created ourself, what we're able to do is not only see these tasks or in this case, content within our calendar, we can go ahead and drag and drop it to update when these are going to be due and to plan out our content in this case. But we're not only given this, we're given our table layout. So we're able to see film date, published date the content type and platform. And speaking of platform, we can also look at a view that is by platform. So you get to see this one here is using our grouping function to split up all of these different pieces of content into respective mediums within Instagram, LinkedIn, blog and website, email, Spotify, and Tik Tok. So this one here can be a super useful starting point if that is one of the uses of notion for you that you were thinking. If you wanted to use as a content calendar, this template here can be a great choice for you. Now let's go ahead and look into one more final template in this lesson. And this last one that we're going to look at is going to be a brainstorm session. So again, just as before, I'm going to turn on all of these, and we get to go ahead and look at this initial table layout. So this brainstorm session template here is one that I particularly like because it really is quite well built for what its purpose is listed as as a brainstorm session because here, it's super simple to go ahead and add in these new ideas. And once you do, you get to see not only who it was created by we also have this up vote function. And when we upvote, this essentially runs in automation that then increases this field property by one. And also because we are able to see who it's upvoted by you're not able to up vote multiple times, so it locks you only to one up vote. So if it's your idea and you want to spam it with a bunch of up votes, notion doesn't let you, which is kind of nice. And then along with this, we also get to see two more views. One of them is going to be by category. So if you want to kind of come in here and put new ideas per category, then this is kind of an easy way that you can go ahead and do so instead of adding in new ideas and then assigning the categories each time. And then we have top ideas. And then this top idea tab is going to be breaking down each idea. It's going to be filtering them or sorting them by which one has the highest votes at the top. So we're able to see that this is the case, because if we come over here to our sort function, we get to see that it's blue, meaning that there is some kind of rule applied here, and we get to see that it is filtered or sorted by total votes in an ascending order. Alright, now, with that, that is going to be the end of this lesson. So let's go ahead and keep pushing on and see all the ways that templates can exist with a notion. 23. Find Templates (Notion Marketplace): This lesson, we are diving into our notion template marketplace. Now, first things first, to get here, you're going to want to come over here to your side bar, and let's go ahead and open this up. And to get here, you can scroll all the way to the bottom, and we're going to come to our marketplace. That's going to lead us to where we are right now. The marketplace is an official hub where other creators on notion share all of their powerful intricate templates that they've created on notion. So here, you essentially have everything that you could imagine and some other things that you probably didn't imagine. Like, first off, we have some consultants right here. So, if this is something that you actually want to be really serious about and start to invest a lot of money into having a consultant come into your business and give you a tailored kind of plan as to a notion setup that is going to be best for your business, then you have your consultants right here. But just note that you are going to want to have some kind of a budget here because as you can see, the project budgets are going to be running 1-15 thousand here, and this is a very kind of common price range for what you'd be paying for these consultants that are a notion. But that's really just one little thing that I wanted to point out before we get started because everything else that we are going to be able to look at in this lesson is going to be highly, highly accessible, no matter what your budget is because as you can see, a lot of these templates that we see here are going to be free for our use. The first thing that I want to kind of bring your attention to is going to be this top part right here where we're able to kind of navigate different categories as to the kind of templates that are accessible on this marketplace, because right here, we have three kind of large categories in work, life, and school. And among each one of these, we have another several other categories that kind of make up. And there's even more that we see here because, let's say, if we want to come and work, we can click View All, and there are going to be a whole lot of different templates that we can use. Some of them are going to be free, but also others we are going to have to pay for. For example, this one right here, $79. Now, one kind of benefit that I do want to mention here is that a lot of the templates that we see if they are going to be paid, a lot of the creators have a light version. So a free version where you're not going to have as much functionality, but it's still nice because you can try out that free version. And typically, they have messaging on that template that alludes to what you would get with a paid version, for example. So now let's go ahead and come back to our homepage here. Now, I want to show you these top little suggestions because actually we can go beyond just looking at different categories here, because here we see these red ones are going to be school categories. The blue ones are going to be work, and then these yellow ones here are going to be life categories. But you can see, for example, right here, we have this gray one that's titled formulas, and that's not any one of these. And that's because this lives outside of these categories because what this is is essentially teaching us things about notion. And in this case, it's teaching us how we can use formulas because there are a multitude, multitude of ways that you can go ahead and apply formulas within the setups that you create a notion. There can be an entire course dedicated completely to formulas and notion. Now, in this course, we don't go over it as extensively because, again, this isn't supposed to be a course where we're going to go ahead and dedicate, let's say, 10 hours to formulas. No, this is a course that's supposed to be an overview on everything and notion, and spending 10 hours on formulas is probably not something that most of you want to watch. If you do have extra kind of curiosities or questions on kind of these specific parts like formulas or automation, you can come to the marketplace and find different templates that kind of teach you more about it. Again, if you do have those kinds of questions, you could always drop those in the Q&A section because me and my team are always going to be there to answer whatever you have problems with. Now let's go ahead and actually get into these templates. So what I want to show you here is this ultimate habit tracker first. As we click into them, we get to see that we have some features. Now, this one, we only have the formulas being listed. But if I go ahead and back out here and we scroll down, let's say to this projects and tasks, you get to see that there's more than just the formulas. We have layouts, you have charts. Essentially, this is kind of another way that we can preview what these kind of templates have to offer. But let's go ahead and come back into our ultimate habit tracker. The next thing that I want to show you is that we have a bunch of information that kind of summarizes. We also have reviews, all things that are related to these specific ones that we click on. So we get to see some information here. There's over 900 ratings, 4.8 stars on this exact template. You have almost 40,000 downloads. You have version updates. You have an about section, and again, we have ratings and reviews that you could go through and look. Now, next, if all of that wasn't enough to convince you, you could also come into the preview section. And with the preview, it essentially just loads up this template. So you're able to see everything right here. Now, in terms of interacting with it, you can't because it's just a preview. But if you look through and you like what you see, you can go ahead and click Add. And then I'm going to add it into our workspace. It's going to take a few moments to kind of populate. And then when it's done, it'll let us know right here. Again, it should just take less than a minute, and then we could go ahead and hop in and kind of take a look around here. Okay, so now we get to see that the template is ready. We can go ahead and click C template. And now this template is hours. It's a page that exists within our workspace. We can see this bread comes right here. So with that, we're able to essentially change whatever we want because everything that we see here, they're all just blocks. So we get to see right here we have our habit lists, right? We have these ones which are in an order that reflects the exact same order that we have here because we have sleep seven to 8 hours. We see that's the first one right here, our sleep seven to 8 hours, we have eat healthy meals. Social media less than 90 minutes. And now, every single time, we click one. We get to see using this kind of formula property right here. Let's see. Let's go ahead and edit the formula. We see that this here is a little bit more complicated than simple here. But with this, we're able to essentially create this progress bar out of all of our habits. This can be a super helpful template. It doesn't really matter if you want to use notion just for work purposes, because stuff like this is the kind of thing that can get you to use notion for things outside of work for these habit trackers. This exact template is actually one that I used myself, and it's super intuitive because let's go ahead and fill these ones in right here. Let's say we got a 70% on November 18. If we come down right here, we get to see that this month is right here. We get to see that this is the same kind of database, but they're just different views because this one here is filtering for this week. This one here is the same database, but it is using an entire month's view. So we can see everything. And then down here, we have our monthly overview so we're able to see kind of our progress with sticking with our habits across the month. And looking at views like this, especially in terms of habit tracking, is a great way for you to go ahead and stick with the habits that you've created, because if you're in January, February, March, and those are all at 100%, then you want to keep that kind of streak going as the months progress. So this year is a great template. Now, let's go ahead and look at another one. Again, I'm going to come here to our side tab, and then we're going to scroll down, and we're going to come into Marketplace. Now, let's look at one that is more related to work category. Another thing to mention here is that when you are here within any one of these categories, not only can you choose your use case here and choose the kind of subcategory, what you can also do is choose the price right here. If you want to filter to only free plans, you can go ahead and do. And if you want to see templates that are made by other creators, you could do so or maybe just by notion themselves. And then also coming by here, we get to go ahead and choose different features that we want to be present within our databases or here, within our templates. And lastly, you also have this sort feature here where we can sort by popular most recent and duplications. Now, let's go ahead and check out this company Wiki. So let's go ahead and check this out so you can see, essentially what I mean if that's not something that is immediately intuitive to you because we get to see here that we have our overviews, which is our mission, vision, and values, and clicking this is going to take us to a page within this company Wiki, where it's listing our mission, vision, and values. Now, if we come back to our company Wiki, you get to see company stories, goals, and OKRs, we have processes and workflows, meeting schedule, core policies. This is essentially just going to be the hub of all of your important information about your business. Essentially, like your business handbook right here. Now, this one isn't as important to go through in terms of functionality because we kind of understand what we are able to see right here, right? Because here we have linked pages. Here we have a gallery view. Of a kind of an overview of all the important things that we have within this. It all makes sense to us at this point, but it's essentially a maybe new way, a different way of thinking about how we can go ahead and lay out all of this information. So it's essentially just lay out inspiration for you. Okay, now let's go ahead and look at one more before we wrap up this lesson. We're again going to come back to our marketplace, and I'm going to go ahead and again, come back into our work category. And we can go ahead and look at this product roadmap right here. So in this product roadmap, I'm going to go ahead and add this just so we're able to see a different template that uses charts as well. So let's go ahead and get right into this template. One nice thing about this template, and it's something that a lot of them do is they essentially give you an overview about how you can use this template to the kind of best of its abilities. So as you can see, the overview here says that this page has two connected database. One of them is going to be projects, so overview of all the projects in the pipeline, and then the other one is going to be tasks. So this is your detailed breakdown of every task under your projects. Now, this is essentially what we built in our action items page. But, again, you get to see this is kind of more inspiration about how you can lay out all of this information. So, essentially, the thing that I want you to walk away from with this lesson is that whenever you want to create something new within notion, this marketplace is always a great place to start because throughout this course, I'm giving you essentially all of the tools that you need to know how notion functions, but there's still a creative aspect to this. And with this creative aspect, the best place that you can go to gain inspiration is to look at what other people have created within your same categories. So the marketplace is always a great place for you to start if you're going to be building something new for your own workspace. So it's likely whatever you are trying to build, it's something that maybe other people have also gone through the same thing, and maybe there is going to be some template that exists on this marketplace that, again, you couldn't get inspiration from. Now, also another thing to know is that if really that is all you want to do, you kind of want to come here and look for inspiration, then we can go ahead and again, come to our work. And if I want to go ahead and filter by paid ones, you're still able to come into these paid ones and read up about what they exactly kind of offer. And you can go through. You can still look at the images here. So you can kind of get a feel for what these paid ones have to offer, and maybe you could even recreate it yourself. Alright, that is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. 24. Automate Work with Templates: This lesson, we are going to be taking a look at templates that live within databases. So one thing that we've seen throughout this course is that whenever we're in a database, we get to see that we always have this new button right here. Now, typically, what this would do is just add in a new blank page if we have started with a blank database. So let's go ahead and do so right here with our active projects and our project tracker. If I click New, then we get to see this new page pop up right here. Now, if I come over here into this new database that I created upcoming courses, and I click New, we get to see that this here is giving us something different. Instead of just a blank page, we get to see a page that's already pre filled with some extra blocks. That's because what this database is right here is actually a database template that we looked at last lesson, where it was named projects. Now, what I did here in this lesson is I renamed it from projects to upcoming courses, and I switched up our properties right here just a little bit. But you could see what has remained here is this templated page that every single time we add in a new project here, we get to see that this project, this new page here, essentially contains the same exact information. And that's because all of these pages, these new projects that are being added are templated. So let's go ahead and look at this project right here which I named notion. So this is going to be an upcoming course. This is our notion course. So you get to see right here what I created. I created an outline section. So this outline section here is going to have multiple sections, and each one of these sections is going to contain a certain amount of lessons within them. And then right here we have our action item. So we have our outlines. We have our script recording and editing for the lessons. We have the script recording and editing for our promotional videos, we have a thumbnail course description and promotional email. So this here is essentially a template that I created that is going to be necessary to fulfill for every single course. But as you can see, when we create a new project here, this thing that I have created is not what's autofilled. What's autofilled is what was there before. So let's go ahead and see how we can change. I can go ahead and implement this exact kind of template into every single new project or new course that I create within this database. So the very first step in doing so is going to be coming over here into our drop down menu right next to our new. So instead of just clicking New, we're going to come to this, and then we are going to be introduced for our templates for this specific database, again, named upcoming courses. So if I go ahead and click New template right here, we get to see a new page that appeared, a blank page. And here, what I'm able to do is create a template. Now, one thing that you should know is that all of the fields, all the properties that we have within this database remain right here. So if I want to go ahead and set in some basic properties, so maybe I can go ahead and assign this to our friend Nick Noon, meaning every single kind of new project from scratch is going to be assigned to him because he is going to be the person that's creating the outline for the courses. For example, the next thing that I'm going to do here is actually fill in the information here, fill in the page and what I want to create a template. But now instead of going ahead and just creating this from scratch, what I actually want to do is I want to come here into our notion page, and I want to go ahead and select everything and copy it. So now that I hit Command C, I can come back in here and I can come to this template right here. I can edit it, and now you see we're back into the template ding. And I can go ahead and now Command V and paste in all of this information right here. One thing that I can also do is I can go ahead and add in a title here and have it be new course. But just keep in mind that if you do put a title here, whenever you create an instance of this template, whenever you actually use it, it's also going to have this title right here. So now I'm going to click out of this. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back to our little drop down menu, and what I'm going to click is now this new course. Now, when I click this new course, we get to see that this new page has been added into our database, title, content and all. Now what I want to do is I want to come to this new project button because this is usually the button that people are going to come to in creating new rows in their databases. Now, if we click it and we come in and look, we get to see that it's still this old template, the template that we do not want to use. So to fix this, we can come back in here. And as we drop down, we get to see a few things here, but what's most important is going to be this default badge. So if we want to make another one a default badge, like this new course, we can come here to the three dots and we can set this one as default. We also have this pop up that comes up and it asks us if we want to use it for all views or only specific views within this database. In our case, I'm going to do all views. Also, if you want to go ahead and delete all the other templates that exist here, you can just come to the three dots and we can delete this template, and we can go ahead and stick with this. Now every time we add in a new project, we get to see that not only is it added here, but we also see our friend Nick Noon has been assigned to it by default. And also, if we want to go ahead and add in an icon, we can also do that super quickly just by coming here into editing, and then we can come into Add icon, and let's go ahead and select this target. So again, new course, if I click out, we get to see that it has the default target, Mogi icon. I also want to show you another way that we can also go about implementing these templates within a database because if you go ahead and add in, let's say, a blank page right here, so we can see that it has nothing. If you want to go ahead and add in this new course template, you can still do so. But you just have to ensure that there's no text or writing within the template. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this block. And again, we get to see that we have these options right here. We have the template of an empty page, which isn't very helpful because that's what we're in right now. Or we have our new course template that we can go ahead and click and apply to this. So as you can see, applying these templates within databases can be huge for your productivity. So you don't have to go ahead and duplicate everything and drag in some blocks into a new database. You could just create one template once, and then that can be the one that you reuse, especially in databases where you are, for the most part, going to be repeating the same content within the page, for example, like this. 25. Save Hours with Keyboard Shortcuts: This lesson, I want to make you faster, really fast. So Noon has dozens of hot keys and shortcuts that are built in, and if you know just a few, you can navigate and build pages twice as fast as anyone who's just using their little old mouse. I'll walk you through the most useful ones for formatting, navigating and managing blocks, and then you'll have this entire page that will have all of the shortcuts here available for you in the resources. So this first batch here is labeled most popular. So these ones are going to be the commands are shortcuts that are probably going to be the ones that you are going to use most in your day to day and really have kind of the most usability. So the first of these we already looked at, and this one is going to be using Command in F to search within a page. So this one is simple as that, hitting Command in F, and then this pops up and we can search for anything within a page. Now, you see here that it says Command Slash control, and this is just because if you are going to be on Mac, it's going to be command, and if it's on control, then that's going to be your Windows. Next, we have Command plus P or Command plus K, and this one is going to take us to our search. So super fast, just two buttons will get you to that search instead of having to come up here to the search. Next we have Command plus L to copy a page's URL if you want to share it. And next we have Command plus these brackets, either one of these, either going back or forward a page. Now, this one is especially helpful because it doesn't give us a function that is clearly here. Like with search, we could come to search. But if we are, let's say, within a few pages within a page, then using this Command plus back bracket is going to be able to take us back to where we were super quickly. And more than that, we can use this multiple times. So if you want to click Back multiple times to go back a few pages instead of having to navigate here to your sidebar and then open up specific pages to then get to the right part, no, all you have to do is click Command and then hit that back bracket to go exactly where you want to go. Here, lastly, for these popular ones, we have Command shift in L to toggle between dark and light mode. Now, this is a keystroke that especially is going to save you time because in order to do this, you're going to have to come all the way here into your settings, and then you're going to go to appearance and then change your appearance from dark to light or vice versa. But with this keystroke, we can do it in literally less than a second. Okay, now let's move on to the next set of shortcuts. So now we have our navigation shortcuts. Now, these ones are definitely some of my favorite, probably my favorite group that we're going to go over. That's because once you get these down, you're going to be able to navigate and create new pages, create new tabs and windows in literally less than a second. This first one here, we have Command plus N, which creates us a new page within whatever category we're in. So if this is going to be something that I did with a page with my workspace here, then we'll get a new page within that workspace. But because I did it in private here, we get to see that we have a new page in our private section. The next shortcut here is going to be the same thing as the one prior, except we're adding a shift in there, which then creates an entirely new notion window. So now if I go back here, you get to see, there are two windows open on my desktop here, all for notion. So this is going to be especially useful for you if you are going to be navigating between multiple different projects that you have in notion, and you need information from one of them to then be input into another. And you just want to be able to see both visually at the same time because that's going to make your life easier in some manner. Example, in my case, I actually do use multiple windows of notion in recording this course. That's because I actually use notion within my business to keep track of all of the lessons I've recorded. So I have one notion window here that's using the account that we're going through throughout this course, and I have another notion window that uses my main account where I actually keep track of all my business happenings. Now, below this shortcut that we just went over is a way that we can actually use this prior shortcut a little bit more efficiently. If we already have in mind the page that we want to have open as a separate window, then instead of doing this, the Command Shift plus N, which creates us another one, and then let's say we're going to open up this page right here. Instead of doing that, let's go ahead and get rid of this. We can then hold Option Shift and then just click the page that we want to open in the Ntab. So if we go ahead and do that, hold Option Shift, and then click, we get to see that this has now opened right here beside our page that we were already on. And if we want to expand this to be the full thing, we can go ahead and do so. And if not, then we can go ahead and just exit it out or tile it over. Then below this, we have a Command plus click to Open Link in a New Notion tab. So instead of right clicking and clicking Open New Tab, we can just hold Option. We can just hold Command and then click. Then lastly, right here, we have Command plus T, which gives us this option right here to open in a new tab. I can just go ahead and select that. And then we have our new tab open instead of coming over here and click. We have Markdown style. And the first one that we have right here is going to be typing this little character on both sides of your text to create inline code. And that's actually exactly what you see all of this as. This is all inline code. Were you see command control and N, why this text looks different. That's because this is all inline code that I typed here to make it stand out for you guys. And with that, I want to show you exactly how we do this with adding in one more right here. Because honestly, I just forgot it, but it's one of the most important keyboard shortcuts. And that's going to be Command plus Z to undo. So now I'm going to go ahead and type in this funny little character right here. I'm going to do Command Control. And then I can go ahead and put that character again, and now you get to see that change into inline code. And now just again, what I'm going to do that character plus a capital Z right here. And then the character again, and now we have this Command Control plus Z to undo. And with this, we actually have one more. And that, of course, is going to be Command plus Shift plus Z to redo changes. So now if I go ahead and hit Command Z, we get to see the process of me creating this one, and if I hold Shift and click, then we get to see how this appears right here as we want it most back to recent. Okay, so now let's go ahead and continue on with our markdown styles. Here we have our asterix, our minus sign or plus followed by space to create bulleted lists. Then right here we have our brackets. If we type them back to back like this, then we can create to do checkboxes. And then right here, if we type one period or A period or I period, and follow that by a space, we can create numbered lists. These next ones here are probably some of my favorite here to create these headings because this is so much faster than going out here, typing something, let's say, style here, and then clicking it, clicking these six dots right here, and turn it into a head or two. If we just go ahead and put in our two hashtags and hit space, Bm, we have heading two. And the same goes for these other ones right here. If we go ahead and type in this character right here, hit space, we now have atg lists. So these ones from Markdown Style are super, super helpful. Okay, so this is going to finally take us in to our last category of shortcuts. And now having covered this markdown style, we're going to get into our last two smaller categories of these keyboard shortcuts. Okay, so for our last two categories here, we have Edit and Move blocks, and we have our at commands. So first, for our Edit and move blocks, we have command and aim to select all the blocks on our page. So if I go ahead and select that Command plus A, we get to select everything right here. Now, if I want to go ahead and hold down Shift and then use the up and down arrow keys, then what I can do here is I can select multiple different blocks all at once. This is not a command that I tend to use very often because one that we also have access to is this one below. So that one is using Shift and click to select all the blocks between your two selections. So right now, I have this one selected, right? I didn't click anything. I just selected it. But now, if I click Shift here and I select these six dots right here, then what will happen is all of these will be selected. So that one tends to just be a little bit more efficient use of kind of this goal of trying to get all your selections between multiple blocks. Now here we have another fun one, which is similar to our second one over here, and that's going to be Command Shift plus our arrow keys. So with that, we're able to move our selected blocks up and down, and this one is specifically useful for when you have toggle lists. This is where I tend to find myself using this the most because within a togglist, sometimes you're going to be dragging and dropping blocks. That's the way that people tend to navigate their blocks within a page is this drag and drop feature. But within a togglist sometimes it's a little harder because you have to kind of weave the edge of getting within the toggle list but not below the toggle list. So if you use this function here, this command shift use arrow keys, then it takes it one by one, and it makes it way easier to do so. Then next we have Command plus D. This one is just going to duplicate the blocks that you selected. So if I command D, this one right here, we get to see, it's been duplicated. Backspace, gets rid of it. And then another one that I tend to find quite helpful here is the Command Shift plus H, because if you're going to be going through editing and commenting on different pages or whatever it may be, going to highlight and then come over here into either the text color or into the highlight feature, it's just a lot of work. Here, if we can go ahead and do this once, let's go ahead and change the text color here. Uh, let's say we want to make it red. So if we do this once, then I can come over here, I can select this bit. I hit Command Shift plus H, and then we get to C those changes are now applied. That exact same color has been applied to this text. And now I can just hit Command plus Z to get rid of those. Now moving on to our last section, which is going to be our at commands, we have a few ways that we've already talked about and a few that maybe we haven't. First, we have mentioning a person. So this one is going to be the best way to get somebody's attention within your workspace. That's just going to be typing at and then their name. The next one is going to be mentioning a page. So this one here can be especially helpful if you are discussing some page with, let's say, another person within your team, like, Hey, check out at and then list the page for some reference on how to do whatever project or task that you're assigning. Can be a great way to kind of reduce friction and just give your team members everything that they need upfront, so they're not wasting time sifting through all the different pages or folders that you have to find what they need. Then mentioning a date here, this one is going to be good because if we type in at here, and then we say yesterday, today or tomorrow, then it's going to understand that, and it's going to format that correctly how we need it to. So we don't have to go ahead and come over here and look at the current date and then do whatever with that. So this is helpful, so we don't have to come up and look at whatever the current date is. And then, let's say, if we want to have something due next Friday, then we have to go into the calendar and see what is the actual day. No, you don't need to do any of that. If you type in at here and then say next Friday, then it's going to give that date in the correct format. And lastly, which is a super fun command, which is something that may be reminiscent of discord, if that's something that you use, is going to be the at remind command. So whenever you say at remind and then follow that with any kind of date or time format, you're then going to receive a notification at that time that you set. Okay, so there you have it. Again, I will provide you with this page in the resources if you ever want to come back and reference it. But these shortcuts are going to be a game changer when it comes to using Notion more efficiently. Yeah, sometimes you are going to have to come back and consult this list. But really, once you have this as just second nature, you are going to think yourself because it does pay dividends and saving you time. Okay, that's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next. 26. What Notion AI Is Good At: So now that we've been building a Notion for a while, creating pages, designing databases, setting up workflows, you already know how powerful the tool can be on its own. But there's another layer to notion that lifts everything you've built into an entirely different category. And that layer is notion AI. Now, Notion AI isn't just a chat bot inside of your workspace. It's not just another AI writing tool. And it's definitely not something that you only use when you're stuck for ideas. Think of Notion AI as the assistant living inside every page, every block, every database that you create. It's woven directly into the fabric of notion, and once you understand how to use it, it becomes one of the most practical, integrated and time saving tools that you'll ever touch. And this lesson is your introduction. You'll learn what Notion AI actually does, how it works inside your existing workflows, and where it fits into the system you're building in this course. Later, we'll even dive deeper with hands on demos. But for now, think of this as the tour guide moment. Let's get into it. So what is Notion AI really? Well, the simplest definition is this. Notion AI is an AI system that lives inside your notion workspace and helps you work faster, think better, and automate the writing or reasoning parts of your workflow. But that definition doesn't do it justice, because unlike standalone AI tools where you have to copy and paste or switch tabs, notion AI is context aware. It sees the page you're on. It understands the database you're using, and it can analyze your existing content. And it works directly inside of your pages, like a natural extension of your workflow. So, in other words, you're not using AI. You're enhancing what you're already doing in notion, using AI. And that distinction is what makes it so effective. So what does Notion AI actually do? What is the core elements of it? Well, notion AI shines in four main areas, and the first of which is writing and editing. Now, this one is the obvious one, but not in the generic Chachi PT sense. So Notion AI can do a bunch of things within this category. It can generate first drafts, rewrite content in different tones, shorten or expand sections, clean, messy writing, translate text, correct grammar, restructure paragraphs, summarize long pages, create outlines from scratch. Now, because it works inside your existing pages, you're able to keep the context, formatting, and the structure that you've already built. The next area shines in is thinking and planning. Now, this year is where Notion AI gets interesting because you can use it to brainstorm ideas for projects or content, map out workflows, generate checklists, break up complex problems into steps. And it can even suggest improvements to page layouts and turn vague goals into structured plans. It's like having a brainstorming partner built directly into your workspace. The next is extracting and understanding information. Now, this one here is one of the most underrated features, in my opinion. So in this sense, what it can do is first summarize meetings. Now, this one here is probably my most favorite feature because you can just go ahead and record a meeting on your phone, and it can go ahead and take that transcript and summarize it into points. And along those lines, it can distill long documents. I can highlight action items, pulky takeaways, turn messy notes into organized pages, and turn raw text into structured databases. This one is huge if you're working with research, client notes, planning docs, or any large chunk of writing. Now, the last thing to mention here is that it can automate routine work. Now, in terms of automation, Notion AI can't automate everything, but it can handle a surprising number of repetitive tasks. Including creating docs from templates, filling gaps in data, generating content for database items, creating descriptions, instructions, or summaries, and helping you draft SOPs, notes or updates. Now, it doesn't replace databases, formulas or relations, but it supports them by taking care of the writing and thinking tasks. I want to stress how notion AI is actually so much more powerful than any other AI tool like Chachi BT. Because most AI tools can generate great answers, but they don't know anything about your system. And Notion AI is different because it has context. It sees so much. It sees your pages, your structure, your content, your databases, your tasks, your notes, your documentation. When you ask it to summarize a meeting, it pulls from the actual notes. And when you ask it for ideas, it uses the content already on the page. And when you ask it to rewrite something, it edits your text directly. No copy and paste needed. So you're not leaving your workflow to use AI. AI is integrated into the workflow itself. Now, this is the biggest reason why people who adopt Notion AI tend to use AI more consistently because it's frictionless. Okay, so now, where does Notion AI live? Because it does exist in multiple places within Notion. The first of which is inside any block. So you can select text and you can click Ask AI and instantly transform, rewrite or expand. The next is inside any page because you can summon AI with the space bar. You can use the Ask AI button. You can use your slash Command, and this all lets you create a multitude of things. You can create outlines, first drafts, summaries, and brainstorms. All of this right inside the page that you're already working in. Now, the third place that lives is inside databases. Now, this one here is incredibly powerful. Now this is because we can have an entire property that is all notion AI. So this AI property can help you generate descriptions, summarize items, draft content for each row, and create content using templates. So just for a second, I want you to imagine clicking into a database item and having AI generate a task description, a meeting summary, a project outline, a video script, a client update. It's like having copyrighting, planning, and analysis baked into every database item. Now, notion on its own is powerful, but notion combined with AI becomes something completely different. A workspace that writes for you, summarizes for you, organizes with you, thinks with you, and adapts to your workflow. Now, Notion AI doesn't replace the systems you build. It amplifies them. It turns your workspace into a partner that helps you think more clearly and work more efficiently. So now that you understand how Notion AI fits into the big picture, we're ready to start using it. So that's exactly what we're going to get into. And the next lesson. I'll see you there. 27. Add AI Inside Databases: All right, so in this lesson, we are now going to be looking at how we can apply notion AI to our databases in the form of properties. Let's go ahead and get right into this. And when I go ahead and come over here to add in a property, have all of these properties that have been quite familiar to us throughout this course. But you don't really see anything that says AI blatantly. And that's because we don't really have specific AI properties, but we do have properties that we've been working with that integrate with AI, especially well. For example, the most obvious of these is going to be our text property. Now, with our text property, this is simply going to be a property where we're able to put in text here, just from our keyboard, we can type it in. But with AI, what we're able to do is have this generate text for each one of our projects here. So how do we set this up? Well, to do so it's quite simple. We're going to come here into our text property. And let's say we want to make this a summary property, right? We want this to summarize everything else that we have given within each row. So if we do this, I can then come here to set up AI autofill. So once I click this, we're given one direct option, and that's a fill with function. It says fill with, and then we can select an option. We can choose summary. We can choose translate, a key info or a custom autofill. Now, in our case, what I want to do right here is I want to start off simple. I just want to go ahead and do this summary. We get to see one setting right below this, which is auto update on page edits, and this essentially means that a little bit after you do any changes to your rows to the items within your database, it's then going to update this summary column with whatever kind of changes you made, or it's going to at least take those in account to give a new output. So now before I hit Save Changes, what I can do is I can just click Try on This view. So now we get to see that by trying with this, it applied this AI fill to our first five pieces of content. So if we go ahead and click into these, we can go ahead and see what these summaries are. So it took in the name of this project. It lists who it's assigned to. It says it's low project priority. It's in progress due by August 11, 2026. If we go down here, we get to see more of the same information. Here, it's a Lead Gen campaign assigned to Adam Taylor with medium priority. Now, we get to see this here isn't really giving us much, but that's because I'm not really providing the AI with much. And that's because all of these here are really just blank pages, right? I used these and created these as examples. But there's not, let's say, a description property here, where we give an in depth description as to what each project pertains to. So that's just one thing to kind of keep in mind when you are going to be using these summary AI properties. Now let's go ahead and come back into this and we can come back to the setup AI Auto fil. We can come here to select our option. And when it comes to translate and key info, that is all going to be kind of self explanatory. If you want to translate some specific text, let's say, again, this is in your description, you can go ahead and do so if it wants to take some key info from each project or item that you have within a database, there you go. You have that option. But we also have a custom Auto. So for this custom fill, what I could do is, let's say again that I have this description property here. And within this description property, there's a lot of information regarding the projects. With this custom AI autofill, what I could do is have a prompt like this, generate a project brief from the description. And once you have a prompt that you like, you can go ahead and save the changes, then it's going to ask you to turn on Auto update for the summary. Essentially the thing that you have to know here is that it's going to apply whatever AI autofill that you have to the entire column, and if you have anything else in the column, then it's going to override that. So if we go ahead and turn that on, then you're going to see that in just a few minutes, this here would be all autofilled and replaced with new content. But because we don't have a description right now, it's not going to be very meaningful. Now, the next thing that I want to cover here is that this AI functionality isn't only available with our text fields. We can also use them with single select fields like our department or even with our project priority. So if we come here into the department, we can right click, and then we can set up the AI autofill. You can see this setup right here is a little bit different. What we can do is first turn on our AI autofill. And then if we click down to more, now we get to see a similar view to what we had. So here we can type something like, based on the project title, assign a department label. So if I go ahead and try on this view, we get to see that these ones here are now updated. And we can see that it did change up my own labeling, but these ones can be helpful if you're going to be creating a bunch of new projects, and maybe the person that they are assigned to or the department they're assigned ton't going to be something that has to be very rigid. You could just have AI go ahead and do that for you and you can review them. And if there are any projects that are kind of glaringly incorrect or wrong, you could go and change them. But if you see it's just super off the mark, you could go ahead and undo. And you can see the only one that it had different than what I did was marketing right here, at least out of these first five. But we can do the same thing here with our project priority. We can set up our AI autofill. We can turn that on. We can go ahead and come here and to more. And then we can tell it what we want it to actually decide on the project priority based on specific either page content or specific other properties that exist within our database to make that final decision. There's another thing that you might have noticed, and that is the generate new options. For our single select fields, what the AI can do is actually generate new options. If it feels that, let's say, with the department here, that these departments are marketing sales and customer success isn't sufficient to assign for a new project, then what I could do is create a new option, and in this case, it would be creating an entirely new department, which maybe wouldn't be the best. But for project priority, it could maybe create a new option, which is some kind of priority level that's between low and medium or medium and high, for example. Another way that we can also use this AI is that we can autofill in this view. What that essentially is going to be doing is updating all of the priority in this view that we have right here. So it's going to be updating all of the pages. So this can be especially useful if maybe you changed up the prompt that it was working with and you had this already applied. Then if you want to go ahead and kind of reapply this, so the AI can kind of try again and actually assigning these labels, that's when you can just come right here and it's done. Alright, so now you know, you know, that notion AI properties are a powerful way to keep your database entries dynamic and context aware. Now that you've seen how to set them up and what they're capable of, feel free to start experimenting with prompts that fit your specific workflow in your own databases. 28. Use Notion AI as an Assistant: Okay, so now that we've been introduced to Notion AI, it's actually time to see it in action. And to start this all off, what I want to do is show you exactly where Notion AI lives and how we can actually access it because one place that we'll always see our notion AI buddy is going to be right here in the corner of our screens. Like, if I go ahead and go back here into this database, right here, our action items database, we get to see that our notion Ai, buddy is right here. If I go ahead and come into anything else, let's say our buttons page right here, we get to see that our notion AI buddy is right there. So that's the first and maybe most accessible place that we can have our notion AI buddy. Now, accessing our Notion AI from right here is a great way to go ahead and call it when we want to go ahead and do something that is page specific. If we want to give it the context of the page that we're on, then using him right here is the best way to go ahead and do so. Now, this next way that we can use AI is great if we want it to actually create something on a page. And that's simply by whenever we're on a page, on a blank line, on a blank block, we can go ahead and just hit space. And by hitting space, we can ask AI to do whatever we want within this page. We can draft something, draft an outline, make a table, a flow chart, I can write whatever we want, brainstorm ideas, even put in some code right here. Or we can simply just ask it a question, and it's going to go ahead and search online because, yes, it does have that capability, and it will give us some kind of response, and it will also cite its own sources. And right here, we also have a draft function where we can draft an email or a meeting agenda. So by this way, just by hitting space on our keyboard, we're able to access our notion AI within pages super simple. Another way is we can come back here. Whenever we're on a new fresh page, we can get started with our AI. Now, the last way that I want to note is over here in our side panel, we can come down here. Instead of being at search or home, we can come to Notion AI. And by clicking this, this is essentially going to open us into our very own chat as if we're in Cha Chi PT. And here, within this view, what we're able to do do things like add context. So we can add in specific pages right here, like the notion AI page that I just created for this lesson. We can add in our buttons page. We can add in whatever we want for this context for it to then create something for us. And it can create new databases. I can create new pages. It can even create dashboards, which are going to be an integration between our pages and databases. Now let's go ahead and back up into our new and fresh page, and let's go ahead and test some things out. The first thing that I want to show you is how we can go ahead and put in some messy notes, maybe a meeting transcript and have our notion AI summarize and kind of format everything in a nice way or even just communicate the main ideas to us. Now, one way that we can actually do this, a function that I love is going ahead and using our slash function here. And the AI meeting notes. The AI meeting notes are great because essentially what we're able to do is come in here. We can have this open on our computer for a meeting, we can click start transcribing, and then it's going to go ahead and record for us. It's going to record, get that transcript, and then it's going to summarize it in any way that we want. And once we hit Stop, then it's going to go ahead and give us an output here. I have no audio connected, so it says there's no transcript or notes provided for me to summarize. Now let's go ahead and get rid of this. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste in this right here. So now I have pasted in these meeting notes. So they're here, kind of all scattered. There's a bunch of different things that are listed here. And now what I want to do is I want to select all of them. And I want to come here, I can click these six dots and I can come into Ask AI. And I can ask AI anything here. So let's go ahead and tell it that I wanted to summarize these notes and give me and give me an action plan. So now I'm going to go ahead and hit Enter. So now it's given us a summary of these notes, and it has output our action plan. It says, Assign owners immediately, give it to either Jess or Amir. We also have our API research for AI integration, clarify who owns this pending task. We have design clarification, competitor research, timeline and dependencies. An entire action plan has been created for us based on what we already had pasted into this page. Now, another thing that we can do here is also change tone. So right here, we see that this is all kind of pasted in here, extremely messy, right? It's not kind of formatted. The language use is kind of just extremely casual. So what I want to do is go ahead and edit here. And I want to change the tone, and let's go ahead and change this to be professional. So now we get to see all of the changes that it made. It takes off things that it wants to remove, and it highlights what it wants to go ahead and keep. So if I go ahead and accept this, so now we get to see much more structured and definitely a list that has a much better language as compared to the other one. But it still retains all of the actual information that we needed. It doesn't sacrifice essentially anything. Now let's go ahead and see how we can use this for brainstorming. So I'm going to go ahead and type that in right here, and we can go ahead and enter. I can hit space, and I can come down to brainstorm ideas. So right here, I just typed in, give me ten course ideas for freelancers. I'm going to put that in and let's see what it goes ahead and gives us. We see that it's continuing to go ahead and create this and type in line by line, bullet point by bullet point in a super neat and concise fashion here. So I can go ahead and accept this. But if I wanted to, I could also give it a little bit more feedback, and then it could change what it has already created for us. This is one way that if you do want to have a kind of brainstorming tab within, let's say, a database here, you could go ahead and use this and kind of then weed things down, weed down ideas, or maybe build upon them, use them for inspiration, whatever you may do. But you can at least ensure that everything is on the same page. All of these potential ideas are going to be listed here, and you don't have to go out to let's say hachPT to then bring it in. Okay, so now let's go ahead and see how we can use this to create flow charts or tables. So I'm going to do a table heading right here, and then below it, I will do a flow chart. So now, what we're going to do is we're going to come here. Again, we're just going to hit space, and then I'm going to come to make a table. And here, I'm going to paste in this prompt for you. Right here, I said, create a table comparing different pricing plans for a SAS product. Include columns for plan name, monthly class, features, and ideal customer type. So let's go ahead and put this in and see what it gives us. Okay, so just like that, it created us a table. With just a one sentence input, we got this entire table. So now let's go ahead and do the same thing. But instead of a table, we're going to create a flow chart. Okay, so what I put here was make a flow chart that shows the decision process for qualifying a sales lead. Start with the initial contact, then branch into interest level, budget availability and decision maker access ending with qualified or disqualified. Alright, so with that, we now have this flow chart right here where it then takes us from the initial contact to our interest level. Is the interest level high or low? If it's low, then we immediately take them to disqualified. If it's high, then we then ask, is the budget available? If yes, then we ask, is there access to a decision maker? If no, they're disqualified. If yes, then they are a qualified lead. Then, if not, we ask the question of, can we connect with a decision maker? If yes, then they are qualified. I no, they're disqualified. Okay, so with that, this shows us kind of a few ways that we can use Notion AI to create from scratch within pages. But that isn't showing the full potential of notion AI because yes, these are here only a few examples. It can do much more from creating with scratch, but really what makes Notion AI powerful is how it uses context. So now let's go ahead and look into that. And to do so, let's go ahead and move over into our Workspace dashboard. So now that we're here within the dashboard, what I want to do is I want to come down to our little notion, AI buddy here in the corner. And we get to immediately see that the context is right here, because right here, if we mention a page person or whatever, we can go ahead and add this in, and it adds in context. But because we're on this page already, it's added in the Workspace dashboard as our context. So now let's go ahead and use one of these prompts right here. I'm going to go ahead and click Analyze for Insights, and it's going to be looking at our workspace dashboard. Okay, so with that, we now have this entire output here. We have workload and status overview. It says four projects needs review. Three projects are completed, one active project in progress. Right here with department breakdown, we see that marketing leads volume. They have five projects total. Sales has three projects, and customer success has three projects. And we have the upcoming courses pipeline, which is just data from this database right here. And there's three courses here, and all of them are marked not started. So there's not much to write home about when it comes to that data but we get to see that this is kind of just a little taste of how we can use this. Because what we can do is add in multiple databases. We can add in multiple pages and then ask it to give us a kind of entire overview of what's happening, what maybe needs to be done, and just other insights that might be valuable for us in any given moment. Another thing to note here is that we can also come up here and we can look at our chat history. So if you ever want to go back to any prior chat, you can come up here, click the little dropdown and take you back to any previous chat that you had. Now, I've saved what's arguably the most powerful way that we can use notion AI for last year within this lesson. That's going to be creating pages and databases from either scratch or from content that we already have existing. So let me go ahead and add in context right here. What I want to do is instead of coming to my dashboard, I want to come to a specific set of databases here. I'm going to come to my project tracker and I'm going to add in our task manager as well. So let's go here. I can come to our task manager. Now what I'm going to ask it to do is to create a dashboard out of these two databases right here. Okay, so the prompt that I put in here is using my task manager and project tracker database, create a clean and functional dashboard for managing my work. Now, we could leave it there, but I wanted to give it a little bit more context, a little bit more direction, so it could create something that's maybe a little bit more to my liking. I said group tasks by status and priority show a calendar view of upcoming due dates and include a filtered view of high priority active projects. Add any useful widgets or roll ups to help me quickly understand what needs attention this week. So now we can go ahead and hit Enter, and now we get to see that it's crafting. So now we get to see that it's done a lot in essentially less than a minute. It's created our W dashboard here. It needs to then configure the linked database views, so it's setting those up. And then right here, it's essentially editing the work dashboard that it already created. So I'm going to go ahead and confirm what it's doing. I'm allowing it to delete those pages that it created here because I wanted to configure them to be a little bit more useful. So I'm allowing it to do so. And now it's continuing to update everything. So here, this is some pretty good work, at least so far. We'll see what it comes up with. Okay, so now we see that it has created the Work dashboard, and it tells us what the dashboard includes. But let's actually go ahead and check out the dashboard itself. So we get to see our Work dashboard. It gives us this quick overview. It's your Command Center for managing projects and task. So it starts off here with our high priority active projects. Now, one thing that it's not doing here is it's not filtering down our views. So it's taking all of our properties and putting them in here, which can be an easy fix for us if we just come into our settings and change the property visibility because we do not need 14 here. We get to see that they are tasked by status. It shows us them in this view here where we have our completed and not completed. We have our calendar view right here and we have our CBN layout board right here that is grouping these projects by their status. Now, you get to see that knowledge of actually how to work with databases and pages is going to pay off here because right now, where the notion AI is it can be quite helpful, except in terms of formatting, it's just not as good as what we have already created here within our workspace dashboard. Here. Things are way more compact. We get to see things right next to each other, but they're still in a manner that is clean and easy to understand. There, it's kind of a little bit of everything, where they're all just one after another in this kind of plain view in terms of having to scroll down and see anything. Just isn't very efficient. Isn't the most efficient, but it's still extremely impressive because all we did was give it a couple sentences, and it created us this. Created us this much faster than we would have been able to do so. And what we're able to do here is we can go ahead and copy and paste things that we like from what it creates us into the dashboards that we've created ourselves, which are going to be a little bit more kind of structured and formatted just a little bit more proper. So now that you've seen that it's been able to do this, you could probably assume it's going to be able to tackle much easier and simple projects. Like, you could go ahead and ask it to create you a database with a few properties that you wanted to go ahead and do for you instead of you doing yourself, which of course can be a helping hand. But in terms of those kind of smaller easier projects, you might as well just go ahead and do it yourself, but then let the AI tackle those bigger things like creating dashboards as we just did to at the bare minimum, give you some kind of inspiration of how you can utilize different views of your databases within your dashboard. Okay, so now before we go ahead and move on to the next lesson, one last thing that I want to kind of note for you here is that we can come up and we can personalize our AIs. We can even give it a name. We can give it little customizations right here, and we can also set up specific instructions. So we can say if we want it to be, like, our sidekick, warm and friendly, minimalist, simple, and efficient or an analyst, which is structured and logic. So that is just a little note here to kind of end out this lesson. So in the next one, we're going to be looking at how we can use our notion AI within databases as its very own property. So let's go ahead and move on there, and I'll see you there. 29. Automate Database Workflows: All right. In this lesson, we are going to be talking about something that might seem a little bit intimidating at first, but trust me, when I say it is one of the best features that you are going to be introduced to within Notion. And that, of course, is going to be the feature of automations within our databases. So when people hear about automations, they tend to think of something that's going to be extremely complicated, where you're going to have a bunch of different properties, a bunch of different things that you're going to be working with to then get some kind of complicated output. But in our case, within Notion, that is just simply not the case, because, as you can see here, we have a simple setup to actually do and create these automations. So to start this entire thing out, to actually go to where the automations live within our databases, we're going to come right here to create and view automations. So right here, because we don't have any automations that exist, it's going to take us into our automation builder. And the first step of this is going to be offering us the opportunity to name this automation. The next thing that we're able to do is right below this, we get to click where we want this automation to take place. So right now it's set to our entire data source and our project tracker. But if we want, we could set it to only one specific view that exists within this database. But for now, what I'm going to do is have this select to our entire project tracker. So now we actually get into creating this automation. And again, this is not a complicated thing, because what this automation is is it's broken down into two separate parts. So these are broken into exactly what you see. It's a trigger and an action. So when some event takes place, when a trigger event takes place, notion is going to go ahead and do this certain action that we say. So let's go ahead and look at these trigger actions right here. You get to see that it's essentially broken down into what we're mainly going to be using in our properties. So this is going to be when a certain property meets a certain condition that we set, then some action is going to be taken. Now, alternatively, we could also set it to an event. An event can be trigger. So that can be any property is edited or a page is added, or it can be an event of every kind of certain time span. We're going to come back to this kind of event trigger in a later lesson when we work with integrations and integrating slack within our notion. But for now, let's go ahead and focus on properties. Now, when you want to create automations, the thing that should be in your head is, what are the most repetitive tasks that I'm doing within my databases? Because typically those things that are being repetitive are the kinds of tasks that you could go ahead in auto. Again, I want to stress that this isn't for advanced notion users. Essentially, anyone, no matter what kind of skill level or proficiency you have of notion, can go ahead and use these automations. So let's go ahead and look at this project tracker. There's a few things that just from the top of my mind, I could automate here. But let's go ahead and take it one by one. If this was going to be a project tracker that is going to be used by a business or a team with this status right here, we see that there is this needs review function, meaning that whenever someone gets to a certain point within their project, they're going to need review from someone else, maybe their boss, manager, whoever it may be to go ahead and kind of continue working. They need them to give them an approval. Now, without automations, the way one would probably go about this is they would set the status to needs review, and then they would probably come in here into the page and come into the comments, and they would at they would mention a person. They would mention, maybe their manager, again, mention maybe their boss and say, Hey, I need review on this certain project, just to let them know that this was the case. But you can immediately see that this is a kind of process that is always going to take place whenever someone goes ahead and marks something as needs review. So, given this is the case, this is a good sign that we can automate this. And in our case, right now, that is something that we are, in fact, able to do. So let's first come into create and view automations, and now we have to set our trigger. So our trigger is going to be when then we can come down to property. It's going to be when status right here, when status is set to, and I want to uncheck these, and I only want to select Ns review. So right now, our trigger is when status is set to needs review. And right there, that is a full trigger. Now what I need to happen is I need a specific action to take place. So I'm going to come down here into our action, and we're going to click New action. And now here within the actions, we get to see that we have some new kind of options here. We have an edit property, ad page, Edit page, send notification to, and then we have some integrations here with send Mail and send Slack, and we have some other things in webhooks and defining variables. I'm going to do is I'm going to just send notification to someone because, again, we want to notify them that, Hey, this project needs review. Right now, I can't go ahead and continue until you give me the AOK until you approve what I have done. So let's go ahead and click Send Notification too. And now I get the option to select specific people or person property. What I'm going to do is select a specific person because we are going to assume that all of these projects here are going to be overseen by the same person. In our case, we can just select myself, Adam Taylor. So now what we have is when the status is set to needs review, Adam Taylor is going to receive a message. But right now the message is blink. So let's go ahead and actually create a message that is going to be sent out to me. Now, before I go ahead and type anything, I want to again bring our attention back to our at command here, because if I select this, then this only isn't kind of just using this as an at to an individual, but we can use this as a kind of smart property here, where I'm going to at whoever triggered. No, this isn't me notifying them about something, like typically how we would ask someone within a comment section. No, what this is doing is creating a kind of property where it's going to be filled with the information. So that means if Nick notion was the person to go ahead and set the status to some project as needs review, then instead of this notifying Nick notion, no, what this is going to do, it's going to input his name within this property right here. So right now, essentially what this message is saying is Nick notion. Assuming, of course, he was the person that triggered this automation to happen. He was the one that triggered he was the one that actually set the status to some project as needs review. So right now we have the person who triggered. Then I'm going to write the word set here, and I'm then going to come back to our at function. And I'm going to come into a property from Trigger Page. So we're going to come here into property from Trigger Page, and then I'm going to come to the project name. So right now, if Nick Noon went ahead and set Needs review to our sales playbook update, then what it would say, the message as it currently stands, it would say, Nick Notion, set sales playbook update. Now I'm going to go ahead and finish the sentence and say to Ns review. So, just like that, we're able to use two personalized functions within this message to give more context to the person that we're messaging about what has just happened here. And we created this just once, and it is going to be serving our purpose now forever as long as we're going to be having this database. So now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and click Enable. Then we're going to go ahead and do the exact kind of example that I just said here. I'm going to take this sales playbook update, and I'm going to come to its status, and I'm going to change it to Ns review. Now, right now, I have one notification, and we can see now that my inbox here instead of just one notification has increased to two. So let's go ahead and click to see what new message I got here. We can see just now I got this message, and if we go ahead and come back instead of me clicking on it, let's just review says that Adam Taylor set sales playbook update to needs review. So we get to see that it pulled in my information because this is me and Adam Taylor and using this account, and it pulled the name of this project to then send me that notification because I was the person that was set to receive that message. Okay, so that was just one use of using our status to go ahead and trigger an action that would notify an individual within our workspace. Now, one thing that I want to note here is that these don't only have to be single trigger to single action. Because instead, what you can do is you can stack triggers onto one another. So, let's say that you have multiple kind of managers within your workspace, right? Because here we have multiple departments, and maybe there's a head of each department, and each one of those heads is going to be who's reviewing a project when it's marked to Ns review. Then what we can do is come here to our trigger, and we can then add in another trigger where the department is, let's say, a specific person marketing, and we go ahead and set that. Then we could go ahead and have this notification set to the head of marketing. And then we can duplicate this automation two more times and then have the heads of each department right here as we change them, we can also change the person that is receiving it. So that's just a kind of way to make these automations even more efficient as you scale up. But also another thing that I want to know is that just like you can add in multiple triggers here, you can also add in multiple actions that can take place after your trigger. So right here, we have our notification to Adam Taylor, but we can also add in another action where we can edit pages in some other document. We can add a page to whatever database that we choose. Or we can simply edit a property within our database already. So if we want to go ahead and edit a property, and then, let's say, come to assign then in this case, if we're only going to have one person that is going to be reviewing all of this, we can also have it set to Adam Taylor, the same person that's going to receive this message. So if we go ahead and hit done here, then now we're able to see this kind of full automation here in layman terms. And if we want to change it up, because right here it says replace assigned to with Adam Taylor, we could also still come back in here and instead of replace with, we can do add or remove or toggle. In this case, what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and add Adam Taylor in. So now let's go ahead and hit Done. And let's see this again in action. Let's go here. We'll go Needs review. Right now I have one notification only. You can see that it'll take a second to kind of populate, and then you get to see right here. Now Adam Taylor is assigned to here, and you see that we have notification right here. Okay, so there you have it. This is kind of the rundown on automations, because as you can see, they're quite self explanatory. If you have these things that you are going to be doing that are repetitive within your database, you could kind of always find ways to go ahead and automate them here with our automations. And again, you saw that it's super intuitive, just a few clicks, and you're able to get it down. Now, unfortunately, within our automations here, we're not able to yet do automations with our due date. So notion has yet to add in that feature, but one way that we can kind of work around this is with formulas, which is what we are going to cover in a couple lessons from now. 30. Trigger Actions with Buttons: Alright. In this lesson, we are going to be covering buttons. Now, prior to recording this lesson, I was deciding whether I wanted to put this in the template section of the course or if I wanted to put it in the automation section. And I ultimately decided to put it here in this more automation focused section of the course because there really is so much to buttons. And yes, while they do work with templates, they honestly do so much more, which is why we'll have this entire lesson dedicated to the button property. So, the first thing that we have to start out with is asking the question of what is a button? Well, this right here is a button. So a button, just like essentially every other thing in notion is a block. So to bring up and create a button, we can go ahead and use our slash Command here, and we can type in butt. And then we'll see it'll autofill right here in button, and we can select to create this new button. Now, with each of these buttons, let's go ahead and edit this button right here. We get to do a few things. The first of which is we are able to name this button and choose an icon or an Emoji to stand right beside the title. Now, once we do that, we then are able to see a familiar image here where we have a when and a do action. So you can see immediately that this here is akin to our automation function within databases. But instead of the trigger being something that we decide, the trigger is just the button itself, clicking the button. And then this leads us to do some sort of action that we decide. Now, you get to see here that there is a large list of things that we could do with this button. But with this page that I've created, I've went ahead and had some use cases as to how we can actually employ all these different functions and actions of buttons. So let's go ahead and actually get into this. So we could see some of these actions, well, an action. Okay, so let's go ahead and continue on here. And we can start with our first section here, which is using a button for templates. So the first function that we have here is going to be inserting blocks. So let's go ahead and click this button and see what it does. Well, now you can see that clicking that button gave us this set of output here. They're action items. So essentially, one use case for buttons is if you have a page where maybe you're going to be tracking some kind of deliverables, you could have one button, always output the same list right here. That has to be done. So for example, if this is going to be in a course document and a course page, then this can be clicked every time a new course is being worked on. So you can create this little checklist to be able to check off every single thing that needs to be done for that course. So let's go ahead and actually look at how we can create this course checklist button. So let's first off create ourselves a new button, button right here. And then we can go ahead and title it the same thing course checklist. And I went ahead and chose an icon that was a checkmark, and I selected a green checkmark. So now it's time to get into this action. What is this actually doing? Well, once we select action, we have all of these options, but the one that we are going to focus on is going to be inserting blocks here. Now, what we get here is essentially just a new blank page. We're able to put in anything that we want in here. Let's go ahead and look at our slash command. So you can see that you can put in essentially any block, any media block, any advanced block, even databases within this little part to where once you click the button, it is going to output whatever you have right here. So, in our case, what I did is I went over to our upcoming courses database that we created in prior lesson, and I went to one of our templates where we had a new course template and among that template, we had this list right here. So I went ahead and just pasted this in, but you can see that with this slash function right here, we're able to just type in here as we would anything else. So this here is just a header, and this is our to do boxes, and these are some toggle boxes. So you already know how to do that. No need to bore you with the easy stuff. You get to see that another thing that we're able to do is choose where these blocks are going to be inserted. So do we want to insert it below the button above the button at the top of the page or at the bottom of the page? For now, we can just have below the button, and also another thing to note is just like automations, we're able to add in multiple actions. But for now, that's not what we need to do. All we want to do is just create that inserting blocks course checklist button. Now you can see by clicking it, we're able to get this output that we want. So now let's go ahead and move on to our next one. I'll delete this. And now we can move on to duplicating pages. So duplicating pages is essentially going to take the same kind of function that we use in the course checklist and inserting blocks. But instead of inserting blocks, what we're doing is putting in a page here to be duplicated. So let's go ahead and get into this button to see what I mean. So, right here, you get to see that the action is, in fact, inserting blocks. But instead of just any normal blocks here like text or to do boxes, what we have here is an entire page and a Workspace dashboard. Let's go ahead and see this in action when I click this. We now get to see that a duplicate of our Workspace dashboard has been created. So why did I choose this example? Well, what could be the case within a workspace is everyone could have some kind of dedicated dashboard that is to them. This dashboard can be filled of views that are related, again, only to them. Maybe they work in a specific department, so you have some databases that are going to be filtered to their specific department. Maybe you're going to have some views that are only going to show tasks that are assigned to them. These can be things that are what would appear in a person's personalized dashboard. Then maybe you might have all of these dashboards, everyone's personalized dashboard on one page, so it's consolidated into one master document. So let's go ahead and come back here into our buttons. This is exactly the place where you would maybe have one of these buttons because one of these buttons could create a kind of default template of a person's dashboard. So whenever they create it, they can then come into the dashboard itself, and then they could put their name right here at the front of it. So we could say atoms, Workspace dashboard. And then there you go. I will have been created right for them. So how did we go ahead and go about doing this? Well, again, let's use our Command back bracket to come back here. And I'm not going to create this one from scratch because we already saw how we can create a button. But here, what we did is, let's go ahead and get rid of this one completely. So right here, we have our clean slate, and what I did is I came over here, and I had this workspace dashboard. And what I did is I just came here and I duplicated the Workspace dashboard. And essentially made it act as if it was a template here. So what I then did is I just dragged it from the sidebar and put it in right here. So now what we're able to do is have this go ahead and give us a brand new template every time. Now, one thing to keep in mind here is that if you do have databases that are going to appear, then these are going to be sync databases. So it's not necessarily a blank document every time, but it is going to give you a kind of good place to start off, especially if this is going to be a page that's going to be formatted, and it's going to be a kind of page where that formatting is where a lot of the power lies. Okay. So now let's go ahead and move on to now using buttons with databases. So the first example that I have here with using buttons with databases is adding pages. You get to see that I titled this button, New task Du Today. So let's go ahead and click it and see what happens. Now you get to see that a new page was opened right here, but kind of more importantly, we get to see that a new task was added right here to the bottom of our task manager. And more importantly, we also get to see that the due date is, in fact, today's date. The power of this is to be able to add in a new page quickly with just a quick of a button that has the due date set to today. And with this button, it opens up the page for you to go ahead and input any other relevant information that you need to do. So this essentially saves you quite a few clicks because before you would have to add in the new page, click the page to open it, then go to the due date to then click and set today's date. And then you would finally get to the point that we are at right now where we're going to actually title it and set the name of this task. Then maybe add in some other properties and actually linking it to some bigger project within our project tracker. Okay, so here, let me show you how to do this one because it's going to be the first one that we have here that has multiple actions within the button. So if we go ahead and just create the new button, I'll go ahead and title it and put in that icon right now. So now when it comes to our action, what we want to do is instead of inserting blocks, we're going to just go one down to our ad page two. So once we select that, we then get to select our data source. So I'm going to come here and I'm going to type in our task manager, and now we have it linked to our task manager that appears right here. So now we have the kind of first step of this complete, where it's actually adding a new page for us in the dedicated database for us. But now what we want to do is we want to edit a specific property here, in our case, our Duda property. And this is nice because not only are we able to kind of set a specific setting for this property, but with due date, it's actually a dynamic property because instead of just setting one date that once you click it, it will always be, let's say, today's date, November 17. Instead of that, we can actually click this and we could set the property to the date that it was triggered. So that ensures that every single time someone clicks it, no matter the day, if it's today, tomorrow, next week or next year, it will always add a task that is due that specific day. So let's go ahead and select that as date triggered. And for the rest of the properties, we don't want to add any because we don't want to have it actually dedicated to any specific project because we don't know what it is. And, of course, we don't want to have it set as completed. And now, while we want to leave the name here untitled, because we want to actually set the name of the task, we also want to do is make sure that this button opens up this page that we just created, so we are able to go ahead and title it because that is going to be something that we are going to do naturally. If we are going to create this page, then of course, what we want to do is name it. So I'm going to add in a new action here, and this action is going to come all the way down here to open page form or URL. In this case, what we're going to do is we are going to open up a page. Now, again, just like we were able to set this date triggered as a dynamic property, can do the same thing here. So what we can do is open from this automation, the page that was added. Instead of just one other page that exists within this database, no, we can actually open the page that was created from this automation. So we can select that, and now we get to select how we see it. Do we want it in a side peak, center peak, or full page? Personally, I'll just go ahead and select our side peak. And then from that, we can go ahead and hit Done. So now if I go ahead and let's say, delete this one, so we have a clean database here. If I select this, then now you get to see a new task has been added here, a new row, the due date is today, and we are able to title it whatever we want. So there we go. We have now looked at how we can use a button to add a page. Now, lastly, the next one that I want to look at is how we can use buttons to edit pages. So before we get into actually building this, let's see what this button actually does. I'm going to go ahead and click it. Get to see that there is a confirmation message here, and I'm going to hit Continue. And now we get to see all of these populating right here. All of these habits are being checked off, and the progress bar went all the way to 100. Okay, so what's happening here? Well, let me go ahead and come into our settings and come into our layout, and I'm going to enable our data source title to see that this is, in fact, our habit tracker that we looked at in a prior lesson. So before I go ahead and talk about this button right here, I do want to know how I added in this habit tracker. Now, this is because this can be relevant for you, especially if you're creating some kind of dashboard that is going to be working with dates like this. Now, don't worry, I'll keep it quick. But essentially, what I was able to do to have this view right here showing the habits of only this week is first, I went ahead and typed in our inline database right here, and then I, of course, selected our habit tracker. So typed in Habit here. And once this was input, you get to see there's all of these dates, they're completely unorganized. Then what I did is I came here into sort and you want to sort by date, and then I had it set by ascending order. And then next I came into filter here, and the filter is really where all the magic happens because we're going to filter again by date. But in this case, what we want to do is make sure this start date is relative to today because typically we'll have it on something like is or is on or before, all of these kind of other kind of filters that aren't going to be as relevant for us. So what I have it is start date is relative to today, and then I have it set to this week. So I'm able to see only the habits, only these progress bars, only the pages that are going to be relevant to this week itself. Okay. So now that I have got that out of the way, let's go ahead and talk about this button here because this one here is quite cool because you'd imagine if you are going to be using a habit tracker, maybe you're not going to be coming in day by day, and throughout your day, you're going to be checking these things off. It's very likely that just at the end of the day, you're going to come here, you're going to come to your notion dashboard, and you're just going to want to check all of them off at once because you've completed all them. So how do we do this? And if you remember, there was actually another step that happened here in that we were able to see a confirmation. So this button consisted of more steps than you might think, because not only do we have this confirmation message here, but we also have ten other individual actions that are taking place here. That's exactly why, if I go ahead and uncheck all of these, you get to see that when we click this, we see the confirmation here and we hit Continue, that it all doesn't happen at the same time. What happens here is these are all kind of filling in one by one. Now, for some reason, I think I accidentally duplicated these. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this line right here, so we get to only work with this one. Okay, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of all of these, and now we're going to go ahead and create this button. So, again, we're going to do this, and I'm going to go ahead and name it. So I'm naming this completed today because I want this to reflect all of the habits of today have been completed. So I completed today, and now the first thing that I want to do is add in this show confirmation. So, again, if you didn't see quite clearly, this show confirmation is essentially going to ask us to confirm whatever action we want to be done by this button. So it's just going to say right here by default, are you sure you want to continue? And if we go ahead and continue, then it's going to go ahead and actually initiate all of the actions that follow. You want to make sure that this confirmation actually stands as number one in the line of actions that are to do, because if you have this show confirmation all the way at the bottom, then it's only going to ask you to confirm after all the other actions had already taken place. So now let me go ahead and come over here. And let me copy this confirmation message right here that says that they're proud of me. So I can come over here and we can go ahead and paste it right here. Now, another fun thing that we're able to do with this show confirmation action is we're able to change the button text. So the continue button text right now is continue, and the cancels cancel, but we can change this up to make it a little bit more fun. So instead of continue, we can have Oh yeah. And instead of cancel, we can go ahead and have oops cause maybe you just clicked it by accident. Okay, so now let's actually get into this serious action that's going to be taking place here. So what we're doing here is we are editing pages within this specific database, within our habit tracker database. So we're going to select the source as our habit tracker that we see right here. So now what we see is that it says it's going to edit all pages in Habit tracker, but we don't want that to be the case. So we want to come over here. We want to click, and we want to change this to where it says, We notes contains this. We want to change notes into date. So now it says where date and then start date is relative today this week. There's a lot of things that are here, but we can just change this to where date is then today. So now that we have that one set, we can then come in here and now we're going to edit the property. So now, essentially what this is is this is only going to edit the property in the pages that match this filter that we set, that filter being pages that are today. So we want to go ahead and edit this property. And essentially what now we want to do is select every single habit that we have here, and we want to go ahead and make sure that they're all checked. So what I did is I went ahead and selected one of them, and then I just came here and I duplicated this nine extra times because there's a total of ten habits here. Okay, so now that we have ten duplicates of this, we're then going to want to come through here, and we're going to want to edit this and make sure that we have every single habit done. So I'm going to go ahead and do that right here for every single one. This one is boring for you guys, so I'll catch you when I'm done with it. Okay, so now with that, we have all of our habits here checked off. So now let's go ahead and hit done, and we can go ahead and get rid of this old one. And now let's go ahead and see this in action. We have completed today. I'm going to select it. We say, Good job. I'm proud of you. We can say, Oh, yeah. And then here we get to see all of our habits kind of filling in. And personally, I like how it goes just one by one here. It's quite satisfying. It makes it feel like there's more kind of completion going on. Okay, so there you have it. Now, with this lesson, we have looked at kind of the most useful use cases that we have for buttons within Notion. Now, I also do want to know that there is still more that we can do with buttons. So if we go here and look at the actions, we've covered a lot, most of them. Insert blocks, add pages to, edit pages in, show confirmation, open a page form or URL. But just note that's not the extent of the functionality. We also have send notifications to, send mail, send webhook, and define variables, and send slack notification. Now in the last lesson of this section, we actually will be looking at how we can integrate slack within our notion. So that's just another thing that you can go ahead and look forward to. But with that, that is this lesson on buttons now complete. I'll see you in the next lesson. 31. How Notion Formulas Think: If databases were the moment notion started to feel powerful, formulas are the moment notion starts feeling smart. Most people think formulas and notion are scary, like writing code or doing calculus. But here's the secret. Notion formulas aren't about math. They're about logic. What they really are are simply little automations inside of your database. And once you understand the logic behind formulas, even the simplest ones will start saving you time, removing friction, and making your system feel alive. So this lesson is your introduction, not to scare or overwhelm you, but to give you a mental model. After this, formulas won't feel mysterious. They'll feel like tools, and you'll know exactly when and why to use them. So let's go ahead and begin. So let's first answer the question of what formulas actually are. Well, on the simplest form, a formula is a way for notion to calculate something for you. Just know that calculate doesn't just mean numbers. Because formulas can do a bunch of things. They can combine text. They can create automations. They can trigger warnings. They can also clean your data, react to other properties, create dynamic labels, and make your database more intuitive. Really, this all just comes down to the formulas help your system think for you. So just think of formulas as if a database had a brain, formulas are the thought. There are tiny pieces of logic that help notion interpret your data and do something. But one thing to note here is that formulas don't live outside your database. It's not like you're going into notions code and adding in some things that's going to change your entire experience on the platform. No, formulas are always tied to a single property. So you're not adding formulas to a page. You're adding a new column that gets automatically filled by that formula. So this means that every item in your database instantly receives an output based on that logic that you give it. All right, so let's make this real. Imagine you have a content calendar database. Without formulas, you'll manually check published dates, you manually flag overdue tasks, you manually track how many days left. But with formulas, you can have notion automatically do a lot of things here. You can mark items red, if they're overdue, mark items green, if they're done, you can count the days until the deadline, and you can create a status like due today. And, of course, that's just a little taste of what formulas can with these formulas, your database essentially starts behaving like a mini assistant. And that's the entire point. There's less manual work and more intelligent automation. Now let's talk about the three building blocks of formulas because most formulas, even complex ones are made from the same three ingredients. The first of which are functions, and these ones are built in commands. So some common categories you have here are text functions like concat, format, and replace. Math functions like addition, subtraction, multiplying, dividing, around. Logic functions like if and or or not, date functions like date between now date add and property functions, which are referencing other properties within your database. So think of functions like verbs. They make things happen. The next building block here are properties because formulas rely on existing properties within your database. So you might want to reference your due date property, your status property or your priority property. Now here, if you don't have good properties, then formulas can't do much. Next, our operators, which again, are like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, equal than sins, less than greater than less than or equal to, greater than or equal to. Operators are really just how formulas compare things and create logic. That's it. So we have functions, we have properties, and we have operators. Now, once you understand these, formulas are honestly quite straightforward. Now here, I want to mention the single formula that unlocks everything, which is if statement. Really, if you only learn one formula in notion, let it be this one. This one expression is basically the brain of every smart database. Here are some natural language examples that we can create with this. If the due date has passed, show overdue. If the task is checked off, show done. If published date is today, show publishing today. If the due date is past due, then show past due. And if the item is missing a required field, alert the user. Now, again, I'm going to stress that this is the foundation of almost everything you'll eventually build. Here's the good news. You already think in if statements every day. The only thing different is here with a notion, you're just putting it into notions own syntax. Now let's go ahead and break formulas into categories so you understand what they're capable. The first is automation and status logic. So examples of this are going to be auto label overdue, auto generate status like due soon, ready and not started, and auto check if required fields are missing. So these ones here make your database react to some kind of behavior. The next is text formatting. So you can combine texts from different fields. You can format dates into readable strings, and you can create dynamic titles. So this one here just keeps your database tidy and readable. Next, we have date calculations. So these are things like days until a deadline or how long a task has been in a certain stage. You can even automatically calculate weekly cycles or generate a due date based on start dates. Now, this one here is huge for project management. Next, we have mathematical calculations. So here you have totals, percentages, averages, cost formulas, even time tracking calculations. So if your workspace involves any numbers, this here is gold. And lastly, we have Boolean logic. So this is going to be true false calculations. So these ones here are quite simple. Is this done? Is this late? Are all required fields filled? This is essentially how you trigger conditional displays. All right. Now, before we wrap up here, I want to leave you with a few words. If formulas intimidate you, remember this that you're not learning math, you're learning logic. Logic is something that you already use constantly. The only difference is that now you're teaching notion to think the way that you think. And once you get the hang of formulas, they stop being scary and they start feeling addictive because suddenly everything in your workspace becomes smoother, cleaner, and way more automated. So this here is where your notion system starts working for you, not against you. So with this foundation in place, we're ready to dive into the hands on part. And the next lessons we'll look at some use cases as to how we can actually implement these formulas within the databases we've been building. 32. Use Case #1: Smart Tagging: So in the last lesson, you got a feel for how notion formulas work, the syntax, the different data types and how to write basic expressions. But writing formulas is only half of the story. In this lesson, we're going to focus on how formulas can actually make your workspace smarter. So you'll see some real practical use cases and how they help with things like tracking deadlines, tagging priorities, additing visual cues, and making dashboards just more dynamic. So in this lesson, we are going to be working with these two databases here with our task manager and our project tracker. And with this, what I'm going to do is add in a blank formula property here to both of these task managers. So I already added one right here with our project tracker, so I'm going to go ahead and do the same right here with our task manager. Okay, so now we have a blank canvas of a formula in both of these databases. Okay, so now what we are going to do is we're going to bring in some automation into our project tracker. So right now, as you probably noticed, our project status here is all manual, meaning that anyone that is going to be working with this database has to come in here and they have to change the tags right here manually, whether it's in progress, whether it needs review or it's done. But what I want to do is go ahead and use this relation that we have between our task manager and our project tracker to automate a majority of so how are we going to do this? Well, we have our relation property here in our task manager that relates these tasks to certain projects. And additionally, we also have this completed checkbox property that marks whether or not a task is completed. So what we can do with this kind of as we're doing with our roll up property, is we can use this to track the progress, and ultimately, we can use this to automate the status here. Now, one thing that I do want to note here is that you should remember that our formula properties only work within their dedicated column. Meaning that we're not going to be actually coding some kind of automation that is going to be changing our status here. Instead, what we're essentially going to be doing with this formula is creating a new status column. So let's go ahead and get right into this so we can see this in action. First thing we're going to do is we're going to right click our formula property, and we're going to come here into Edit formula. Now, before we go ahead and get started with this, I do want to note that we do have an AI buddy here. We have our notion AI buddy. While this functionality here has an extremely high potential and being able to just put our ideas right here and then having it create an entire formula, it isn't quite there and actually being able to do what I just described, because we will be using him along the way in actually creating these formulas. I'll show you some particular use cases which are quite useful for. Okay. So now let's actually get into creating this formula now. So the first thing that I want to do is I want to set out an if statement. Now, we can go ahead and type in if or we can come here into our general and we can select I. So with this if statement, what I want to do is create three technically four different arguments. And let's not complicate things. Let's go ahead and start from scratch in our first one right here. So I'm going to say if empty so I can go ahead and enter here, if empty, and then I'm going to put in our task completed property here. I can just come down here into properties, and as I hover over task completed, I can just hit Enter, so it can autofill this. So now that I have this in, if our task completed is empty, then what I want to do is I want to come out here, get out of this bracket, so I can get out of the empty statement, and I want to put in a comma here. I want to put a comma, and then I want to go ahead and put our little quotes here, and then within those, I want to type in not started. So now what I just did is said, I our task completed is empty, then I want this formula to output this string that states not start. And remember that a string is essentially just going to be text. Now what I want to do is I want to get to the next part of this argument. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Shift and enter to get to that next line. And again, to start this, we are going to go again with our if statement. So again, we have our I. And here, instead of putting anything prior to our property, like before we had empty, here what I'm just going to do is put in our property itself. So we can do this in a few ways. The way that I tend to go about it is I just go ahead and type in property here, and then we can put in a bracket, and then I'll type in the property. So I'll say task completed. And you can see, as I put in tasks here, we also get the property to autofill right here, so I can again hover over it and hit Enter. But it is a little finicky because you get to see that this T is here and we don't need that, so we can go ahead and get rid of it. And also, because we get to see the property kind of auto filled in this manner, what this is with this kind of background to it is actually the entire statement of property task completed. So that means what we're also able to do here is actually just go ahead and get rid of this property completely. And we can also get rid of the brackets around it. Now what we're going to do is go ahead and put in two equal signs right here. So now we're saying if task completed is equal to some value, what we're going to put here is one. If task completed is equal to one, then what we want to output is going to be done. So here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put another comma because essentially, our commas are going to work as are then statements. So if task completed is equal to one, our comma is then, then we want to output. We can go ahead and put in another quote here and then say done. To formulate our string output. Now, one thing that we should also do, which I realize I didn't hear is that after each one of these strings, we also have to put commas. So these commas are essentially going to be connecting each one of these to one another and saying, Hey, we're onto this next line of code. This string here is now done. So I'm going to go ahead and put that comma here as well. And now so we can move on to our next line of code. We're then going to hit Shift and Enter. Now you should essentially get the gist of this, what we're doing here. So now what we want to do is kind of cover what we haven't covered yet. Cause right now, we see that if something is going to be empty, as we can see with our CRM cleanup, what we, of course, want to output is not started. And if something is one, meaning if this is going to be 100%, because 100% and one is essentially going to be the same thing within code, we then want to output done. So now what we want to cover is two more things. We want to cover the case where tasks do exist, so it might not be empty, but that doesn't mean that it's not started. So those are going to be the case where we have tasks, and it's at 0% here. That one is also going to be not started, but the kind of more obvious one is we want everything 0-100, meaning those ones are going to be in progress projects. So let's go ahead and get this one going here. We can then start again with statement, and within if we want to go ahead and put in our task completed property, so we can come down here and then we can just go ahead and hit Enter to put in this task completed. Now, what we want to do is use one of these built ins here, and we want to use the greater than symbol. That's because what we're going to do here is we're going to say if task completed is greater than zero, then, so our coma, we want to output a string that says in progress. Alright, so now we have to go ahead and put in our last argument here. Because right now if task completed is greater than zero, then we want to have in progress. But one thing that we haven't covered is if task completed is zero. So if task completed is zero, what we want to do is go ahead and put in the comma here, and we want to state our string as not started because if it's zero, then of course, that means it's not started. So if I go ahead and type that in here, close this out. And now what we have to do is close out all of these arguments and put the parentheses that are all open and have yet to be closed. So that means right here, we have three of them because all of these if statements with these open parentheses, you can see, don't have any closing remarks. So we have to do that to go ahead and close out this string. So now, what we have done is essentially created a formula here that replicates our status property right here, except it does all of this on autopilot by looking at our task completed roll up. So let's go ahead and exit out, and let's look at things. So right now, we get to see some are not started. We have some in progress. And we could also see that these are all relating to our task completed roll up. We get to see this one here has nothing in it. It says not started. This one here is 66%. It says in progress. We have some not started. We have some in progress. We have some in progress here. Now, let's go ahead and check out this completed task right here for our landing page AB test. And now you can see that has changed from in progress to now it's done. So our formula is working as it should. But right now, it's still not perfect because one of the benefits that we get from our status property over here is that we do have color coding for each of the statuses. So it makes them quickly and easily distinguishable from one another at just a glance. Here, we get to see that it's just text here, and it's kind of hard to decipher exactly what's going on. So now what I want to do is I want to come back into our formula, and I want to edit the formula, again, to kind of add in some changes here. And specifically, what I want to do is I want to color code all of these different outputs. Remember, when I said our AI buddy can come in handy for some of the things. Well, this is exactly one of them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and put in a prompt for our AI buddy, and then we can go ahead and see the output. So this is the prompt that I put in for our AI buddy. I said, This formula currently assigns a Smart tag for the status of my projects. Now, I want you to add a color to each of these labels so they're easier to distinguish between. Now, let's go ahead and send this in, and I can talk you through the result that it gives us. Okay, so now it has given us an output, and let's come over here and see. All right. So this here is now much cleaner, but I still want to go ahead and make some changes here. So this, again, is why it's important to actually understand what is going on here. You get to see that between some of these lines, we have this kind of text right here. Now, this is Notion AI, describing to us what it is doing in the line below. So here it's saying that color not started is going to be in red. So in order to do that with code language, it's saying style not started is red. Now, the first thing that I want to do is I want to add bolding to all of these. So how do I do that? Well, it's quite simple. What we want to do is just come here, we can come in between the label and the color. And what you can do is put another quote here, and I can just put a B. I put a B, I close off the quote, and then we can put in another comma to distinguish that. And now what we can do is I can go ahead and just copy this little marker, and I can come between all of the other ones and do the same thing right here. So I have this one and we have this one. So now let's go ahead and take a look at it. Now we get to see that these ones here are bolded. Now, what if we want to go ahead and change the color? Well, again, as you probably would assume, this one here is quite easy. So what I want to do for not started task, I don't want to have them to be red. Instead, what I want to have them to be is a simple gray color. So I want to change both of these times where they appear as red as gray. So all we have to do is type in gray, and if we come here, you get to see that they are now grade out. And then I can also come in here. Now I want to edit this formula, and I want to change in progress from yellow to blue, so I can just type in blue. And now we get to see all of these right here. We have now our new status formula. So let's go ahead and name this status. And we get to see that it's not allowing us to name this right here because we have our other status right here. Now, we can do a few things with this. We can either change this one to be a needs review property with, like, a question mark, and if something is marked as needs review, then that could be kind of its only purpose, and we could kind of just get rid of all of these other ones. Or we can just go ahead and delete it completely. And if you really do need a needs review property, then what you could do is create another checkbox, and we have an automation right now that's tied to our needs review, but you could easily just change that automation to that new checkbox. So now what I want to do is just go ahead and rename this. I'll add another S, and I'll just go ahead and hide it for now. So now we have our single and only status property that is going to be visible. And of course, we can always change the icon itself. We can even bring back our status icon. So right now, it essentially looks the same. But instead of having to go ahead and manually do this, this is now all automated for us. 33. Use Case #2: Priority Logic Enhanced with Deadlines: Now, for this use case on formulas, what I want to do is walk you through creating a clickable link icon. For our databases. Now, this is because many of your databases might have this URL property right here. And with these URL properties, we essentially have a bunch of long, ugly URLs. So with formulas, instead of having these links, what we can do is just have little images here, little icons of Emojis little buttons that just by clicking them, they're then going to open us into these links right here. So let's go ahead and actually get into building this. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and delete this formula property. So we're just left with our URL property right here. So now what we're going to do is we're going to come in, add in our formula property, and we're going to get right into editing this formula. Now, luckily, this one here is kind of a quite simple one to go ahead and so the last one that we looked at had more kind of facets to it. But here with this one, we're able to kind of get started and showing an example of formulas that is clean and simple for you to go ahead and get started. And it's one that you can apply to your databases super quickly, and it's something that's quite useful if you do, in fact, have this URL property. Okay, so let's go ahead and get right into this. The first step of this is going to be typing in link right here. So we get to see our link. And looking at this description here, it says it creates a hyperlink from the label text in the URL. So right here, you can see that it's taking in two arguments. The first of which is going to be the output, the string that we see that we're going to want to have this hyperlink come from. And then the second one is going to be the actual link that is connected to this string that we have right here. So let's go ahead and input in this link. And the first thing that we want to do is put in the string, put in the text, put in the image that we want to have actually shown on this property. So we're going to use our quotes here. And what I'm going to do is just paste in an emoji of a chain here, which is going to be our link emoji. So just by closing this in, we have now created this as what is going to be visible. Now, for our next argument, we, of course, have to put in a comma to separate them. And what we're going to input here is going to be the property itself, our URL property. So we can come down here to properties and we can come to our URL, and we can just hit Enter. So right now, just like that with only a few clicks on our keyboard, what we have now created a formula where we're able to go ahead and click on these links to then have them redirect us to the pages that they are linked to. You can see right here that they opened up all here because all of these links are just notion pages. But of course, these links can be anything, and clicking them is then going to redirect you to the page that it's going to lead to. And now let's go ahead and not just finish here. What we can do is we can improve this. Because, first off, right now, this is just an Emoji. It doesn't really look very clickable as it was before when I showed you in the beginning of this lesson. That's because what we can do is we can come here into our property. We can edit this formula. And what we can do is use a function that we discussed last lesson in style. So to use our style function, what I want to do here is first go ahead and hit Shift and Enter to open up a new line right here. So now, above this, what I'm going to do is type in style. So we get to see right here that we have our style. And again, we also get to see that this takes in two different arguments. It takes in a value and the style that we want to apply to this value. So let's go ahead and hit Enter here. And now, what we're going to have to do is because this just input it right here, we have to do is fix these parentheses because what we want to do is have our link here encapsulated by our style. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here I'm going to come to a new line, and then I'm going to have our close parentheses. So now, this link is encapsulated by our style. So now we can go ahead and put in our next argument as to the style of what this is going to be. So now what we have to do is come after here, I can put in a coma, and now I am free to put in the style that I want. Now, typically with styles, you would think of colors, you would think of bolding, italicize. But actually, what I'm going to do is a kind of bit of a workaround, because what we can do here is instead of going ahead and applying some kind of background here through our style function, we can simply just click three buttons here. We're going to click our quotation mark to actually start delineating the style. Then I'm just going to type in the letter C, and then we're going to go ahead and close this off. Now if we go ahead and look out here, we get to see that this formula now has this background that looks much more akin to a clickable button instead of just Mochi itself. What did I do here? What is this C that I applied? Well, this C is marker for coding. Now, how does this apply to actually giving us a background? Well, the style of code within notion, the way it appears within notion, it has this background to it. It has this background that has a kind of gray box to it to show that the code here, that everything within this box is kind of separate from the normal text that you would get throughout the rest of the platform. So although this here isn't code that we put into, we essentially use that kind of styling to give this a kind of makeshift background. Now before we wrap this lesson up, there's also one more thing that I want to do here because as you can see, we have this image here. We have this link image, this link emoji for all of our values here within the table, except not all of them have links. And you can kind of see that by the way this appears. With the ones that are clickable, there's a little underline, and the ones that aren't, there's nothing. Instead of having this, which isn't that clear, what I want to do is either give this one a different emoji, the ones that don't have URLs, or I just want to get rid of that emoji completely for the ones that don't have URLs. So let's go ahead and come back into our formula. We can edit this formula. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to again come back to the top here I'm going to start a new line because I want this to take precedent over everything else. I want it to wrap all of our other arguments right here, and I'm going to start with our if statement right here. So I can go ahead and put in this if, and again, I'm going to take that parenthesis and I'm going to pull it down here. Now what I'm going to do is say, I empty, so we're going to again put in our empty function, and then I'm going to pull in the property of URL right here. Then what I'm going to do is come and put in the second part of this argument. So if the URL is empty, then what I want to show is going to be a new emoji. Let's go ahead and just put in an emoji. For that, we're going to go ahead and put in our quotes here. I'm going to paste in the emoji. And then, lastly, what I'm going to do is put in one more comma here to mark the rest of this having applied if this isn't true. So if it's empty, then we're going to do the X. Now, this comma is again saying, now, if this isn't true, then we're going to apply all of this. We're going to apply our style, the link. So let's go ahead and come in and see how it looks. So now we actually have a different delineator here. Now, if I want to go ahead and just show nothing, then what I can do is come here and I can get rid of this X, and now it's just going to be a blank value that appears just like this. Now, if this is in your database, what you'd be able to do is just come over here to your URL property, and then you could hide the property because now you have the links here for all that you need. We could kind of change this up. We could change the name here, we can change the icon. But if you would want to go ahead and put in these properties here for the URL, you could come to any given project, open it up, and then you can come down to the URL property and actually put in the URL for it to go ahead and show here in our new form. Let's go ahead and rename this. I can go ahead and change it from formula to Link, and I could even just change our icon here to the same kind of image here with our chain link. Okay, so with that, we now have this use case completed. 34. Use Case #3: Making Due Dates Come Alive: All right. In this lesson where we go over the third use case of formulas within our databases, what we are going to create is going to be a system that outputs an emoji or text, if you like, that is going to be fully in relation to our due date. Right here, what we have is a fire emoji that is going to be related to overdue tasks. So these ones are going to be tasks where the due date is prior to today. We have the fire emojis. We have a clock for tasks that are going to be due or projects that are going to be due in the next three days. And then we're even going to have one that is going to be giving us an output for tasks that are going to be due in 3-7 days. As you can see, we have this calendar emoji. And along with those, we have a checkmark for things that are due more than a week from today, and we have this little kind of mailbox emoji that is going to demark when a project doesn't have a due date. So now let's go ahead and get into actually building out this formula. Want to see the near finished product, then let's go ahead and come over here. And this is essentially how we are going to end out this lesson, but with a slight tweak to this row right here to make it be a little bit more actually specific and useful. Alright, so let's go ahead and get into this by adding in a new formula property and getting rid of this property. Okay, so to start this one out, what we're going to do is we're going to come in here into our formula. And before, what we have been doing is using multiple if statements. But instead, now what I want to show you now that you've been introduced to these if statements and how they work individually, I want to go ahead and use our if statements. So this one essentially allows us to use one function instead of having to continuously on every single line at every single different argument, put in a new if statement. We can just go ahead and have this ifs, and this is going to be what we are going to work with. So I'm going to go ahead and add into a new line here, and we are going to start out in creating this formula. Okay, so for the first one, what we are going to do is we're going to start off with an empty. So this is essentially going to say, I empty, here, if our Du date is empty, then we want to output a emoji. So if Du date now is empty, then what we want to do is go ahead and put our comma here, and we want to have some kind of output. You can go ahead and put overdo here if that's more your style. But I'm going to go ahead and put in a emoji. And what I'm going to do is do an open mailbox Mogi, just to say, Hey, there is no due date right here. Let's go ahead and put a due date. Okay, so now that condition is met. That one is all good. We can now put in a comma here, and we can hold Shift and Enter to move on to the next line. And with this one, what we're going to do is we're actually going to start out with our due date property. So let's go ahead and get that one in right here. And then what we are going to do is we are going to use a built in, and we're going to use the less than function. So what we want to say here is if do date is less than or before, now, then we want to have an output of the fire emoji. So if the due date is before today's date, then that means that that project is overdue. So what we want to do here is put in now. We see that this is under our date category, and it returns the current date and time. So again, if do date is before today, then what we want to do is output a fire emoji. So we're going to put a comma here and then I'm going to put in our fire Moji. Okay, so these first two have been quite simple and straightforward. We've now gone introduction to our if statements, and we're able to use familiar one with our empty function, and we've been introduced to this now function. Now, let's go ahead and go to a new line here to do a new one that we have yet to be introduced to, and that is going to be our date between function. I'm going to go ahead and type in date here just so we can narrow this down, and I'm going to come to date between. So essentially what happens with this function is that we get to see that it returns the difference between two dates. So if we set this and we say due date and now, and then we put an operator to the end of that that says, If the difference between due date and now is less than or equal to three days, then we can go ahead and put in our output of the emoji that we want to dictate that. Let's go ahead and do that with our date between. So now I'm going to go ahead and put in our due date, and we want to say that we want to calculate the difference between the due date and today's date. So that's just going to again be our now function. And we want to specify that we are calculating looking at days. So I'm going to put another comma here and I'm going to put some quotation marks, and I'm going to say days. Okay, so now what we have here is a value that is output that is taking the difference between the due date and today's date within days. So now what we want to do is we want to say that this right here, if the output of this function is less than or equal to the number three, because we're looking at days right here. So this is three days. Then what we want to do is we want to output another emoji. So I'm going to go ahead and again put in our quotes and our emoji, then followed by a comma, so we can move on to the next argument. Okay, so now that we have this one created, what we essentially have in front of us is if the dude is empty, we have this emoji. If the due date is overdue, if the due dates in the past, then we have this fire emoji. And now with this third one, if the dude is within three days from now, three days in the future, then we have this emoji. So now what I want to do is I want to do another function that is going to output if it's within seven days from now. So, what we can do for that one is actually just go ahead and copy this entire line, and then we can just paste this in. And now all we would do is have to change this three, to a seven, and that clock emoji to our desired emoji or you could put a set of text if you want. It doesn't have to be an emoji. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that and now paste in our actual emoji. So now if you're following along, you could essentially kind of track that these two are technically overlapping because what this is saying is that if the due date is within seven days, then it's giving us this calendar G. So now, if you've been tracking, this is kind of a good part to give another tidbit of information about how these formulas work, because you might have noticed that with this statement added right here, this is one that would technically be true for all of those situations where this one would be true. Because if something is within three days, then it is certainly within seven days. But the reason why this one will always output this emogi and not this emogi is because of its order of priority. This one here is listed above this one. Now, if I change the order right here and I put this one on top of this one, then that means there would be no situation where this emogi would ever appear. This emoji would ever be outputted within a formula in our database. But because we have it ordered properly, we now see that it is going to work as it. There's going to be one more thing that I'm going to add for now, and that is simply going to be the addition of just another quote right here, and then I'm going to put in our checkbox MOG. Is going to be stating here essentially that if none of these are true, then go ahead and output this. So the only time where none of these would be true are going to be projects where the due date is more than seven days away from today. So that's kind of just an easy way for you to go ahead and do this without having to put in another function that says, If the date is more than seven days away, then you go ahead and output this Emochi No. This is just an easier way for you to go ahead and do it. And now, if we look at this, we get to see how this is appearing properly. Now, there is actually one change that I do want to make with this. There is one issue with this formula that in its current state, it doesn't address. Because if I go ahead and come over here to, let's go ahead and look at what this is our product launch campaign. We have to see that this one is overdue. If I come down here into our product launch campaign and I go ahead and check this, we get to see that it's now complete. It's at 100%. That means our status over here is now done, but we still see this fire Muji here. We still see that at least according to this formula, it's overdue. And of course, we don't actually want this to be the case. But luckily, we can fix this quite easily within our formulas. So let's go ahead and come to our formula. But instead of coming here to the output, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come right before this comma and now, and I'm going to add in some syntax here. And the first of which is going to two and symbols. So this here is essentially just saying, if the Do days before now, and now I have to add in my second condition here, which is going to come to status, and then I can go ahead and put this one in right here, and then I can add in some other operators. So here, what I want to do is I want to use this one right here, our exclamation point with our equal sign because it checks if two values are not equal, and that's what we want to be the case, because we do not want this to be done. Oh, now I can just go ahead and put in quotes and then type in the syntax here of the output of our other one and done. And we can actually copy this, and we can also paste it into all of our other lines right here. Just to make sure that this isn't something that is going to appear for projects that are, in fact, listed as done. So now if we exit out of here, then we get to see right here with this one, with November 21 due date, we get to see that this is, in fact, done, and we no longer have that firemji. You have a checkmark emoji. And in fact, this is going to be something that applies to everything else. So we're not going to see this emoji or this emoji if something is listed as done. Alright, so now we have it renamed to D soon and we can have a little alarm clock as the property. And we can even close it up a little bit just to go ahead and save some space within our database. Okay, so just like that, we now have this last formula here all done and created, something that you could go ahead and just copy and paste into your own database. 35. Integrate Slack With Notion Seamlessly: Alright, so throughout this course, we've been looking at how we can essentially master notion, how we can use notion to the best of its abilities, so we don't have to go ahead and use other softwares out there because notion is one of those platforms where it really is essentially all in one, where you can do project management, you can interact with your teammates. You can do so much. But still, despite this, you might want to go ahead and integrate other tools withinoNion because you might still use, let's say, Slack for maybe more efficient communication. And you might use Google Drive to actually house a lot of your files. So in this lesson, what I want to do is I want to talk about integrating those two platforms specifically within your notion. Now, we're going to start off with looking at how we can integrate Slack within our workspace. And to do so, I actually want to illustrate this with an automation because this is one way that people integrate their slack into notion in just a kind of very common manner. So let's go ahead and do a new automation, and I want to set a new trigger. Now, what I want to actually create here with this automation is I want whenever a project is going to be marked as done or complete, I want this to then result in a slack notification. So let's go ahead and do this where a new Trager and the status is set to done, then this is going to trigger an action here where we're going to send a slack notification to a specific channel. Now, in order to set this, what I have to do is slack. So to do so, you're just going to click Connect here, and you're going to follow the prompts. I should be able to be done in about a minute or two. So let's go ahead and do that, and I'll come back to you. Alright, so now that it's done, I can go ahead and select my channel. And what I'm able to do is I can set a notion log right here. So I can select this channel, and then I can put in a custom message here. Now, if you remember, with these messages, what we're able to do is actually have some customized message. So if I come into here, I can mention this, and I can mention a property from the trigger page. So I'm going to go ahead and select that, and what I want to select is I want to select the name of this. So I'm going to go ahead and come down here into our project. So this is going to be the project title. So now that this will be AutoFild here, I can just say, that was marked as complete. If I want to, I could also go ahead and add in who marked it as complete. So I could say this project was marked as complete, and then I can come over here and I can come down into people and I can click whoever triggered. So this project was marked complete by whoever triggered it. And simply just like that, I can go ahead and hit nb. And now if I go ahead and pull open our original status right here, and let's say I mark the CRM cleanup as done. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and move back into Slack. And now we can see that right here within our Notion log, we have a message from Notion app that says CRM cleanup was marked complete by Adam Taylor. So just like that, we have an automation setup that allows us to integrate our notion with our SL. You can really set up a bunch of these automations that are going to be crossed with Slack and notion. So if let's say you go ahead and assign some kind of project to someone specific within your notion, then you can have an automation that also notifies them in Slack that they have this assigned to them. These automations are really just great in terms of increasing your team efficiency in terms of communication. So now let's go ahead and get into the next integration that I wanted to talk about now in the next lesson, we're going to cover how we can integrate our Google Drive within our notion. 36. Integrate Google Drive With Notion: All right. So now we are here to go ahead and integrate our Google Drive with our notion. Now, this one here is honestly quite a convenient one that we're able to do. It's one that I personally use all the time in my own workspace. So the way that I typically tend to do it is I go ahead and add in a property here, and if we scroll down, we get to see that we have a Google Drive file. So right here, we can go ahead and integrate this. So with this property, we can go ahead and add this in. We can name it whatever we want. But now, within all of these, we are able to select a file from our Google Drive simply from our tableview and our database. We don't have to go into Google Drive and then get the link and then paste the link to then be able to use it. We can just select it right here. But of course, to do so, we have to connect to the integration. So let's go ahead and do that. Now, again, just like the Slack integration. This one here is going to be quite self explanatory. You'll be able to click on it and then follow a quick few prompts, and then we'll meet back up here to actually see this in action. Okay, so now that we have it all integrated, all we have to do is come in here. We can come into whatever project that we want. We just click on that specific cell. And then we are then going to be prompted to select an account to browse the files. Here I'm going to select my account. And then it's just going to take us into a separate little pop up. And then we can browse all the files that you have within your Google Drive and attach whatever you want to them. So let's go ahead and select this one. And then we're able to go ahead and see that right here, we have this linked file. And we can also add in as many as we want. And if you want to access it, it's as simple as a click of a button. Now, there's other ways that you also have integrations that appear. Like, for example, if we come into any one of these projects and we come here and I go ahead and use our slash Command, when we come down to our integrations, we essentially see that we're able to embed anything. So we can embed a Google Drive here. But here, it's essentially just packaging the block to look like exactly what we're embedding. But in fact, you could really embed whatever link you want into those blocks. But now because we have the integrated Google Drive, instead of going and getting that link to put it in here, we can now just browse the Google Drive and we can choose from the account that we have linked. And if we want, we could also connect other accounts as well. So, there you have it. Integrating our Google Drive within our notion is actually a super simple and easy process that can really just speed things up and remove friction in terms of communicating with your team. And again, before signing off, I do want to let you know again and remind you that if you have any confusion, any questions about the platform whatsoever, go ahead and ask me that question. Drop it in the Q&A section, and I'll be there, and I'll answer your question with due time. And I'll answer your question as soon as I can, I promise.