Obsidian: The Ultimate Course for Organized Thinking

1. Unique Features and Benefits of Our Comprehensive Obsidian Course: Welcome to Obsidian, the ultimate course for organized thinking. In this introductory section, we'll be covering three main topics. What makes this course different from other courses? What will be covered in this course? Lastly, just a brief introduction of myself and who I am. What makes this course different to other courses? Well, I like to live by the acronym Kiss. Keep it simple. Stupid. Unlike most of the courses out there, my goal is to keep this course as simple and to the point as possible. In my personal experience, I found that there's nothing worse than buying a course that's hours long, only to find out that the content is actually made up of filler conversation. As someone that values their time and has a lot on the go, I want to have the minimum dose and get the maximum amount of information out of a course. Meaning I want to learn how to use a piece of software or principle as effectively as possible so that I can get started utilizing what is taught as soon as possible. Therefore, this course will not cover full of topics that do not have a direct influence on you using obsidian as soon as possible. Secondly, I believe it's highly important to ensure that when you are learning a new concept, you should ensure that the content has some relatability. Sometimes learning a new concept can be extremely difficult. But relating your content to that of a tool, principle, or application that you already know can decrease the amount of time needed to learn a new concept. That's exactly what we're going to do. 2. Comprehensive Curriculum Topics Covered in Our Obsidian Course: What exactly is going to be covered in this course? Well, firstly, we'll start with the introduction. We're then going to move on to Obsidian basics, where we're going to look at what is Obsidian? What is the difference between the paid versus the free version? General set up, getting a general understanding of the layout, what the settings look like, what volts are creating notes ending with links, hashtags and graphs. We'll then move on to advanced obsidian editing techniques, where we're going to take a look at adding RLs, exporting options, adding code, images, tables, diagrams, and even mathematics call outs and just good practice techniques. We'll then move on to advanced Obsidian features. We'll take a look at themes and support followed by Obsidian Plug Ins where we're going to take a look at core plug ins as well as the top five community plugins. Lastly, we'll look at a real world obsidian case study followed by an obsidian course exercise where you'll be able to apply what you've learned through the 3. Instructor Introduction Learn from an Accomplished Knowledge Worker: Before we begin, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Ryan Dean Brink, and I am passionate about growth and success. My life's journey has been a testament of my unwavering dedication to personal and professional growth. I have a background in genetics and biochemistry, and I have a proven record in excelling in both academics and in the workplace. I've hone my skills in time management, self discipline, self motivation, and effective process optimization. My mission is to help others reach their full potential and live their dream life. I love sharing my wealth of knowledge that I've accumulated over the past few years in four main categories being health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lastly, as a project orientated and results focused professional, I like to approach each challenge with enthusiasm, creativity, and initiative. And so I really hope this course is going to add value to your life and get you to where you want to be. 4. Exploring Obsidian An Introduction to the Innovative Knowledge Management Tool: So what is obsidian? Well, what sets obsidian apart from other note taking applications is its focus on actually interlinking your notes to help you connect ideas and basically create a web of knowledge. I like to think of obsidian as a brain or spider's web, whereby you're actually creating links across multiple nodes that you can think of. Create a spider web or neural pathways in your brain. Basically, what this means is you can create a web of connections between your notes. This makes it easier to explore your ideas either in the present or even in the future, and see how they relate to each other. Obsidian also has a very powerful search function, which allows you to quickly find notes based on the content or the metadata. And it also supports or allows support for plugins and themes, which means that you can basically customize the application according to your needs. Lastly, one of the big differences is that Obsidian does not run off a browser and it actually is a standalone application. I believe this is a big benefit of using Obsidian. The fact that it's not browser based means that it's easier to actually get into a workflow free of distractions. And this is a huge benefit, especially for those looking to use Obsidian for professional or academic uses, where you need to get in the workflow and you need to have that focus. Lastly, Obsidian uses what we call markdown File format distorts notes. Markdown is basically just a very lightweight markup language that allows you to add formatting to the text using a very simple syntax or language. Markdown is actually supported by many text editors and writing tools including Atom VS, Code, Github, Stack, Overflow, Jupiter Notebook, and even Sublime Text. This basically means you can use Markdown to write and edit your notes in Obsidian and then export them to other programs or platforms as needed. 5. Choosing the Right Version Navigating the Paid vs Free Features of Obsidian: So looking at Obsidian, there are a couple of options that you have when it comes to licensing. You have three licenses that you can opt for, which is either the personal license, the catalyst license, or the commercial license. For this course, we're going to be using the personal license. I believe that if you're using Obsidian for personal use, the personal license is more than adequate because it's 100% free to use. You don't need an account or you don't need to sign up. And you do have access to the plug ins, the API's, and the community support behind the program. If you are looking for something a little bit more robust, you can opt for the catalyst or commercial license, which is going to give you additional functionality. But we won't be covering that in this course. 6. How to Install and Setup Obsidian A Step by Step Guide: Now let's move on to the set up and installation of Obsidian. The first thing you're going to do is go to Obsidian, or simply Google Obsidian. And when you land on the home page, you're going to see in the middle of the home page, it already says Get Obsidian. And in my case, for Windows, because I'm using Windows, the homepage will pick up what operating system you're using and you can simply click on Get Obsidian and it will download the appropriate files. If by chance you are using a different operating system and you'd like to see what other options there are, you can click on more platforms, which will bring you to a page with download links for Macos, Linux and Windows. Depending on what operating system you're using, you can click on the appropriate link and download the file. Once the file has been downloaded, you're going to click on the file and follow your normal installation process. Walla, there we go. 7. Obsidian Layout Optimize Your Workflow: In this section, we're going to cover the main sections of the platform and what they're used for. But as we go through the course, you'll then start to figure out where each section is applicable and how it can be used to improve your workflow. Let's take a look at your top left hand corner. Your first button is going to be files. Under your file section, you'll see your vault name, as well as any folders and notes that fall within that vault. If we look above the vault name, there are four buttons there. First one is going to be to create a new note, The second one is going to be to create a folder. We then have a sorting button, and our last button is basically an expand button. To expand what you have within your vault. We can then move on to the search button. The search button is going to work like any other search function, where you'll be able to type in a keyword and search through your associated notes, four notes that contain that keyword. The nice thing is we also have a search setting button, which will allow us to toggle between collapsing results showing more context. Which is quite a nice feature as it allows you to see context behind your search results. And then we'll have our explain search terms. We'll also have your button, which will allow you to basically filter your results by file name, modified time, or created time. Then we've got our bookmarks and our bookmarks. If you do have any bookmarks, they will appear there. Looking at the left hand side, you have your quick switcher. So what is the quick switcher? Well, if you find that your note taking environment is getting too large and you're basically struggling to find the notes you're looking for. You can then use the quick switcher to switch between notes by searching the note name. I believe that if your work environment is structured enough and you're using folders and naming conventions correctly, you'll really need to use the quick switcher, but the functionality is there if need be. Under that, we've got our graph view, which we will cover in depth at a later stage. But this is basically going to show you a visual representation of how your notes link to each other. We then have our new canvas view. We have your today's daily notes, which is also a plug in. Then we have our template button, which obviously right now we don't have any preset templates. And then lastly, we have our command palette. And our command palette is going to basically list out specific commands that you may want to carry out. This will also be covered at a later stage purely because you can enable a shortcut to your command palette, which I use quite frequently, and that's going to be your forward slash. If you go to the bottom, you'll see that we've got open another vault button, which will allow you to either open different volts or create different vaults. I highly recommend, as stated in a future video, to create 1 volt and then multiple folders within that vault just so that you know exactly where everything is at all times. Under that, we've got our Help button. And then lastly we have our Settings button, our Settings button. We will cover our settings in detail in the next video. On the right hand side, we can basically see our back links, which is going to contain our linked mentions and our unlinked mentions mentioned links, meaning having a physical linkage to another note. And your unmentioned links on notes that may mention something in the note, but don't actually have a physical linkage to another note. This will be covered later on in the course as well. Once again, if we look at our four buttons above our linked mentions, we've got our collapse results, which will obviously just collapse. The results once again, show more context. We've got a sorting button and we also have a search filter as well. Next to that we've got our outgoing links, which is also containing your links and unmentioned links. We then have our tags, or our hash tags, which if there's any hash tags represented within a specific note, they will appear over here. Then we have our outline section at the very bottom, You'll also be able to see a quick snapshot of your back links, your word count as well as your character count. Then extremely important, if we take a look at our center panel, that's exactly where your notes are going to appear. You can see we've got tabs at the top very similar to your browser. Below that, you'll see this button here which basically will allow you to switch between editing mode and reading mode. This is extremely important and we will get back to this at a later stage. But just be aware that to switch between editing and reading, you'll click here next to your Edit and Reading mode toggle. You'll then find more options which is also extremely important. Because this will allow you to do various things such as Pin notes. It allows you to split notes either to the right or down. Rename your notes. There are multiple options to choose from. Once again, that's going to depend on your need, but we will get back to this at a later stage. That's going to be your outline of Obsidian. Now that we know exactly where everything is, let's jump into our settings. 8. Configuring Obsidian to Fit Your Workflow: Let's take a look at our settings. In our Settings window, you'll see that our options open, Our editor settings. Now within your general settings, you'll see that the default view for new tabs is set to editing view, which can be changed to reading view. Your default editing mode is set to live preview, which can be changed to source code. We know how to change between our editing mode and our reading mode, But what exactly is the editing mode and reading mode? According to Obsidians official documentation in Obsidian, a document can be viewed in either the edit mode or reading view. In edit mode you will see basic markdown rendering, but certain things like code, syntax highlighting, and embedded files will only show up in reading view. Most notably, any images you embed will only be visible in reading view. Therefore, there are two different ways in which you can edit or view your edits. By default, Obsidian sets it to edit view with a live preview mode enabled. This basically means that while you're editing, Obsidian will actually show you what your edits look like in reading view in real time. I believe this is the best way to work as it keeps everything clean while allowing you to add edits and see the results in real time. If you do want to work with two different views, then I suggest changing the default editing mode to source mode. Moving along, you'll see your display settings, which I would recommend leaving as default for now, unless there is a specific setting that you would like to either enable or disable according to your needs and your preference. We then have our behavior settings. Now within the settings group, I normally enable spell check because my spelling is terrible. Then as we scroll further down, you'll see your advanced settings and once again, I would leave these as default. Then going onto our files and links. Firstly we'll see at the top confirm file deletion. I normally take this off, but I think it's a good idea to keep it on because this will basically send you a prompt before you delete a note to just confirm if you'd like to delete the note, it is an extra safety precaution. We then have our deleted file settings, which will allow you to either move the file directly to your system trash or your obsidian trash or to permanently delete the notes. We then have our automatically update internal link setting. And what this basically does is if there is any changes and those changes affect linkage between notes, the system will automatically update all of your notes across the platform so that there is no broken links within your platform. Moving onwards, we do have your default location for your new notes. The other settings in the section I would once again keep as default unless need be. Moving on to appearance, we're going to start off with your basic color scheme, which is either going to be light or dark. I prefer the dark color scheme. You'll also have your accent colors, different themes that you can install depending on what your preference is. It's then got your fonts, which allows you to obviously change your default fonts and your font size, which is obviously very important. We then have our advanced settings. Under our advanced settings, we have translucent Windows. These, once again, it's going to be completely personal preference. I would normally leave these as default, like I said, unless you do have a personal preference that you're used to using, whereby you can either enable or disable a setting or change it within the appearance settings. I would generally leave them as default unless you have a specific look and feel that you like to work with in, then you can go ahead and change as need be. Next we've got our hot keys, which we're not going to cover in depth because this is obviously a very personal section as well. If you do like to use hot keys, this is where you can obviously enable them and set them up. We then have the about section, which is going to give you a bit of detail about what version you're running, allow you to check for updates. It will also allow you to see if you are logged into your accounts or if you have a specific license. You'll obviously be able to activate it or purchase it in this section. And then at the bottom we've got our advanced settings. Once again, I would recommend leaving this as default for now. Then lastly, we have our core plug ins. We will go through our core plug ins and community plug ins in a later section. But within the section, there are one or two things that I do like to enable from the get go. The first one is going to be random note. This allows you basically to rediscover notes that you may have not seen in a while or that have been lost. I'll then normally enable our slash commands, which basically acts as your command palette. And what this allows you to do is while you're typing out a note, you can click on the forward slash button. And it'll bring up your command palette so you'll be able to add commands straight from your notes instead of having to go into your command palette. Other than these plugins, I normally keep everything else as default, but we will go through the plugins in detail in a later section. With that, that's our overview of our settings complete. We're now going to move on to volts and creating notes. 9. Supported File Types for Importing and Exporting in Obsidian: I'd like to just point out that Obsidian does have specific accepted formats, and I have attached them here from the official website, you can clearly see that the Markdown files are MD. It also has specific accepted formats for your image files, for audio files, for video files, and your PDF files. 10. Mastering Obsidian Vaults Organize Your Digital Knowledge: Grass, grass, grass. We've now covered what is obsidian, the different types of licenses. Within obsidian, you'll set up an installation where to find what and your settings. We're now going to move on to vaults. What exactly is a vault? Well, according to the official Obsidian supporting documents, Vaults can basically be classified as a folder on your local file system where Obsidian stores your notes. You can keep all your notes in one vault, or you can create several volts for each of your different projects. Therefore, your vault is basically like a main folder in which your notes will be stored. Now the great thing about this is that either you can create multiple vaults that relate to different content, or you can create one main vault with multiple folders in which each folder represents various projects. Each of those folders can then store multiple modes that relate to that project or to that folder. For example, let's create a vault named courses. I can then create separate folders within that main vault for each course that I would like to create for demi. Then I could store my notes pertaining to each course within that appropriate folder. Therefore, the hierarchy would look something similar to this. As stated before, you can also open multiple vaults at the same time if need be, but I highly recommend rather having a main vault with multiple folders so that there's less confusion as to where your notes are. Especially when you're looking for something very specific. It's far easier to know that all your notes are under one vault where you can use the search functionality then to try and figure out what vault, what note is in. 11. Mastering Note Taking and Linking in Obsidian: All right, now the fun part, which is actually creating notes in Obsidian. Before we get into creating notes, please remember that we do have our editor view and our reading view which can be changed either using control or command E. That these are two separate ways in which we can work with edits with in Obsidian, the default being our edit view with live preview mode enabled. Please remember as well, if you'd like to work in another mode, I suggest changing your editing mode to source mode. Now that that's covered, let's jump into actually creating our notes. We've created our main vault, but before we create a note, let's create a new folder called Obsidian. Now let's create the actual notes. When we're creating a note, there are multiple ways to create a note. The first way is by clicking on the New Note button above the Vault name. Let's name this note Obsidian Introduction. Next we can either use control command or click Create a new file in the middle. This one we're going to call Obsidian Introduction. Then our last way, which is one of my favorite ways to create a new note, we're going to jump ahead a little bit, but that's to create a link. If we go to our course outline and we hit our double square brackets, we can then create a new link. Firstly, new links will be displayed in blue. And you'll see under the notes window, there is no Obsidian Basics note until we actually click on the link. Then what Obsidian is going to do is it's going to actually create that note for us. It's going to link that note to our course Outline notes because that's where the new link that we've created sits. A great way to see this is to actually go to the outgoing link section. And you'll actually see there that there's an outgoing link to obsidian basics within our horse outline note. Once again, if we take a look at the top, we'll also see that we've got multiple tabs open. And those multiple tabs will represent each note that we're on. Now that we've got a couple of notes, let's go through renaming. If you'd like to rename a note, you can simply right click on the notes and click Rename. We can also go to the three dots that we saw at the top, which is your additional options. And we can click Rename. Or lastly, we can actually just rename the notes by clicking on the note title at the top and renaming it. When we're looking at deleting and saving notes to delete a note, we'll basically do the same thing. We'll write, click on the notes and select Delete. But when it comes to saving, Obsidian does have an auto save feature, but if you'd like to do a for save, you can do a For Save using the standard shortcut of either command S or control. What about navigation? Well, if you'd like to have multiple tabs open, which will represent multiple notes, we can simply write, click on a note, we can just say open as a new tab. The best way to think about this is like having multiple tabs open within your browser. It's the exact same concept, but the difference being that each tab will represent a different notes. We can also control click on a link which will open the new window next to our current window. Continuing with your workflow regarding new notes, you can also open new notes, whether it's the same note or a different note adjacent to one another by right clicking on it and selecting open to the right. If you prefer to have a note open adjacent but horizontally, you can do so by clicking on the three dots once again in the options menu and selecting split down. Running adjacent tabs is a great tool for those that want to work in both the editor mode as well as the reading mode. Or if you just want to have two notes open at the same time, maybe one is a reference and one is an edit. If you want to work with each view open. You can also link adjacent tabs by clicking once again on your three dots, which is your options menu, and clicking Link Tabs. Once you've clicked Link Tabs, you'll then be prompted to select which tab you'd like to link with. Once you've clicked link, you'll see on the tab, it's actually got a link icon. What's really nice about this is now if you notice when we scroll down on the one note, both notes scroll down. It's a really nice way to just to link both notes as you're editing each note. Lastly, we're going to cover our pinning notes. If you find that you have a note that you would like to have open on a consistent basis, then you can pin the note by simply clicking on the three dots and saying pin. Once a note has been pinned, you'll see that if you click on a new notes, it will keep your Pin note open. In our case, I'd like to pin our course outline because this will be the outline of our whole course as we work. I don't want the outline closing, but I do want new tabs to be opened so that I have a quick reference to our course outline while working on different notes. To summarize the section, there are multiple ways to create new notes. You can either use control in or command in. You can create a link and then click on the link to create a new notes, or you can just use the New Note button. You can also rename your notes, you can delete and save your notes. You can also then have different views on your notes, whether they be adjacent or horizontally adjacent. Lastly, if you have important notes that you want to have open on a consistent basis, you can also pin your notes. Now that we've created a couple of notes, let's move on to hashtags, graph views, and links. 12. Enhancing Your Obsidian Knowledge with Additional Linking: Moving on to Linkage. What is the benefit or the advantage of actually having linkage between notes? Firstly, linkage allows for better structure and organization. Using note linkage allows you to potentially connect ideas from several notes to form a network of information that once again resembles a spiders. We, this basically makes it easier to arrange and connect your thoughts and your ideas. Secondly, you have improved comprehension and context. By grouping notes that are related to each other together, you can basically browse between them and you can acquire better understanding of the links and the connections between various concepts. If you're using obsidian as a learning tool, this can basically lead to in depth learning. If you're using it to create notes and write content, it may give you extra insight. Thirdly, you'll be able to quickly and effectively retrieve information that you need. And this is made possible by note linkages. When looking at, retrieving and discovering information, you can basically follow a link to the relevant content to find the specific information faster and easier than looking through numerous notes whereby you only have keywords to search through. Fourth, basically, it encourages innovative thinking and idea generation. Obsidians linkage basically will allow you to generate fresh thoughts and get your creative juices flowing to uncover important discoveries that you may have not seen without the linkage. Therefore, linkages in obsidian basically provide you with another tool that you can use to unearth important discoveries. Lastly, linking notes together will allow you to basically cross reference and integrate knowledge from different fields and different notes into unrelated fields and unrelated notes, which then may promote interdisciplinary learning. What I mean by this is the ability to take old knowledge and apply it to new problems in an unrelated field, which may actually lead to a solution. Meaning taking information from a completely unrelated topic and actually applying it to the topic that you're working on currently. Which may actually provide you with a better understanding a solution or a new idea. Now that we've gone through why linkage is important, I'd like to just remind you that we have different types of links. We've got our mentioned links which have basically a physical linkage to another note that's represented as a node with a line as we saw in our craft view. We also have unmentioned links which is nodes that have a mention of another node but no physical linkage. This is basically represented as a node that does not have a line, as we know, also known as an orphan. Other than your mentioned and unmentioned links, we can also link specific pieces of information to your note that is contained within another notes. We can do this by using the circumflex symbol within a link. Once the symbol has been inserted into a link, you'll then be prompted with which section of a note you would like to link within your link, you simply click on it and. 13. Organizing and Navigating with Hashtags in Obsidian: Moving on to hashtags. When looking at social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, hashtags are a type of meditated tag that are often used. The hash symbol which precedes or comes before a word or phrase makes that word or phrase clickable and searchable. Users can then organize their content using hashtags, which makes it simpler to identify and follow certain topics of interest. Just like on social media, hashtags and obsidian can be used to classify and arrange notes according to a particular subject or theme. By inserting the hash symbol with a turbo phrase while creating a note. You can incorporate one or more hashtags in the text of the note. For example, you may be writing a piece which has the word time management in it. And creating a hashtag with time management will allow you to search for this hashtag at a later stage and find relative information or notes that pertain to this keyword. Once you've added hashtags to your notes, obsidian tag pine makes it simple to browse and categorize them. You can simply click on a specific hashtag to view all of your notes that have been tagged with that specific term. Using hashtags, you can organize your notes, making it simpler to discover and retrieve information in obsidian. Additionally, it also enables you to make connections between various notes based on the shared theme, topic, or subject, which might inspire fresh thoughts and discoveries. 14. Exporting and Options for Obsidian: So now that you've created your notes, I'd like to just talk about exporting your notes. This is going to be a very brief short section, but I didn't want to just show you guys, if you'd like to export to PDF, how you can do that. The first way in doing this is if you've enabled your shortcut for your forward command palette. You can literally hit forward slash and type in exports. And you'll see the option for export to PDF. If we click Export to PDF, you'll get a dialogue box that opens, which will allow you to include the file name as a title. It'll include your page Sars, whether it's landscape or not, your different margins, and also downscaling. Then all you need to do is simply hit Export to PDF. This will then allow you to save the PDF of the current notes. You can save it anywhere on your computer, but it'll basically save that note as a PDF. Alternatively, if you're not using the shortcut, you can basically go to the top right hand corner where you've got your three little dots. Click on that and you'll see export to PDF. Clicking on this will bring up the exact same dialogue box as if you were using the shortcuts. And it'll allow you to export the page you're currently viewing or the note you're currently viewing as a PDF. 15. Visualizing Your Knowledge Network Graph View in Obsidian: Now one of the features that really makes obsidian stand out is your grapht view. There are two different graph views. Standard graph view which will show you all of your volts, notes and the linkage. But if you prefer to see the graph view for a specific note, you can then once again select the three icon and select local graph, which is our second option. This will then show you a graph specific to your note you're currently viewing. When in graph, any node that is attached with a line links to another note. Meaning there's something in one of the nodes that links to an additional notes. While nodes that don't have a connecting line or standalone nodes that have no linkage to any other note. Once in graph view, you can add filters, groups, display settings, and forces to your graph view, which will help you to refine your view of your needs. Now let's go through your graph view settings. The first section is going to be your filters. Your filters consists of four options, which are toggle options whereby you can display your tags, you can display attachments. You can also display existing files only. Or you can display your orphan files, which are basically files that don't have any linkage to any other file. Next we have our groups, whereby you can group specific nodes. This is followed by a Display View, which will have a toggle for your arrows showing the linkage between each node. You'll have text fade threshold, which will basically be the capacity of each of the headings. We'll then have node size if you want to increase or decrease your node size. Lastly, we'll have link thickness, which will just be the thickness of the lines if there is a linkage between nodes. Next you'll have your animate. And your animate basically will just start a time lapse animation for each of your nodes and the linkage between your nodes. This is one of the features I don't really use, but it is something quite nice to take a look at if you've got some spare time. Lastly, we'll have our forces, and this basically controls the force between different nodes. So you'll have your center force basically, which has got your originating node and what the force is between your originating node. You have your repel forces as well, your linkage force, and also your link distance as well. These are all controllable settings which basically just give you a different view of your graph view, whether you want your nodes spread out or a little bit more centered. This once again, is complete personal preference to play around with it, see what you like best, and use those settings. Now that we've covered the graph view, it's a good time to note that this is a feature that Obsidian provides which basically can give you a little bit more insight into your notes. Once again, it's not about the tools, but specifically about how you use the tools for some graph view is going to be really insightful. It's going to allow you to maybe discover new ideas or new linkages behind certain ideas. But for others, it may be a feature that may not stand out to you, which is perfectly fine. Personally, I don't actually use the graph view very much, but it is a nice feature to use if you are stuck and you are looking for a couple of linkages or some new ideas. 16. Incorporating Visuals Image Management in Obsidian: Including photos and images can significantly improve your notes comprehensiveness. Let's take a look at how we do this in obsidian. Obsidian adds a very simple way to add photos or images to your notes. And here's how you go about it. Firstly, you're going to locate the image on your computer or device that you wish to include in your notes. Step two, you're going to open Obsidian, and you're going to navigate to the note where you want to add, Insert the Image. Step three, you're simply going to drag and drop the image directly into your notes. And remember, alternatively, you can insert an image using an embedded link once the image has been added. If you need to resize the image, you can simply add a bar after the image link name, followed by the dimensions needed, starting with the width followed by the height. If we insert this image, let's just pop it into our note here. You can see we've got our image now simply if we would like to resize it. We'll add our bar, and then we'll start with our width, and then we'll follow that by our height. Now that we know how to import images into obsidian, I'd like to also just discuss why or what the significance is of creating a dedicated attachment folder. This is just good practice. You can add an attachment folder by simply creating a new folder and naming it attachments. This folder will serve as a centralized location for storing all of your notes. Attachments that will include your images, your PDF documents, and any other files. Why an attachment folder? Like we said before, it's always good practice to add an attachment folder to a vault. As stated before, you're simply going to add a new folder and name it Attachments. You're then going to basically right click on the folder and just select Set as attachment folder. Now the reason this is good practice is because if you do not add an attachment folder, whenever you add an attachment to your notes, it'll be added as a separate notes or attachment to your vault. And this can lead to your vault getting littered with attachments, which will obviously create a very messy environment and just cause difficulty in finding what you need to find. Whereas if you add an attachment folder to your environment, every attachment that you add will automatically be added to the attachment folder. And this will basically meet in your work environment, allowing you to find things easier, to know where all of your attachments are at all times, and just to have a better experience with Obsidian. 17. Incorporating Hyperlinks (URL's) in Obsidian: Now let's move on to adding URLs into your notes. In order to connect your notes to outside sources such as websites, articles, and other online content, you can basically use hyperlinks or URLs as a tool. You can build a network of connected information and basically increase the depth of your knowledge or your notes by including URLs into your notes. Let's quickly take a look at the benefit of using hyperlink URL's. The first benefit is that it provides quick access to external resources. What I mean by this is by adding URLs, you can quickly navigate to external resources such as websites and articles directly from your notes. This basically saves you time and effort in searching for the information. The next advantage would be it enhances your research and your referencing. Because your Ls enable you to basically site or reference specific web pages and sources, it allows you to ensure that you've got accurate and reliable information in your notes. This is especially valuable especially when you're conducting research or if you're writing academic papers. The next advantage links to our previous one, in which it basically provides you with dynamic content updates. And what we mean by this is basically your website content may updates itself dynamically. Which means if you have a link or hyperlink in your note to this online content such as maybe news articles or websites, you can basically access the most up to date versions of what you've linked to your notes. Lastly, it allows for seamless cross referencing. What this basically means is your URL's will allow you to create connections between different nodes with obsidian. And this basically will create a web of interconnected knowledge as we spoke about in previous lectures. Now let's quickly dive into the process of actually adding a URL into your notes in Obsidian. And there's a few simple ways to achieve this method. One is to use an inline URL. What we're going to do is we'll open a note where you want to include your URL. Next, we're simply going to type or paste the full URL directly into the notes. For this example, we're going to use Google. We'll type www.google.com and there we go. You've got your link, click on it, you'll see basically this will take us to Google. Method number two is to use descriptive text, hyper links. You can do this very simply by opening a note and selecting the text that you want to actually hyper link. You're then going to use the keyboard shortcut either control K or command K, which will basically open a link dialog box. Then in your dialog box, you can either enter or paste your URL that you want to link to. Alternatively, you can also use the shortcuts. If you're not highlighting a word that you want to hyperlink to, you can just click control K or command K. This will then set up the template for your link, and then you just have to enter your title as well as your link. Once this is complete, you can click Okay or Enter, and this will create your hyperlink. In our case, we're going to stick with our Google example if we click control. In my case, because I'm using Windows, I'm just going to type in Google and then link it to www.google.com When I click Enter, there's your hyperlink. Lastly, method three is basically to use your markdown style URL. This is very simple, It's exactly what we said. Nana, you're basically going to open your notes and you're going to start with your square brackets in which you're going to type in what your descriptive text is. You're going to then use your normal brackets with the URL. Click Enter, and there you have it. You'll see that method two is basically just a faster method, and it uses shortcuts to achieve the same result. For method three, the markdown style, basically we can do exactly what we did in the last one. As an example, we'll use Google www.google.com And there you have it. Lastly, before we end this lecture, I'd like to just note that videos and online photos can also be embedded into your notes. This is done by simply copying the embedded link straight to your notes. We do not have to create a link such as the one created above, but rather just copy and paste the link straight into your notes and a. 18. Table Creation and Organization in Obsidian: Now we can look at creating tables. There are one or two methods in order to create a table that you can use. Our first method is going to be using vertical bars and hyphens. Vertical bars will represent a separate column, while hyphens represent or define a column header. Once your table is created, then you can use your normal editing syntax method. Two would be to use a plug in, such as the table editor plug in, which provides a graphic interface that allows you to create and edit tables. Our third method, which we're going to use today, which has been covered in other videos in the course, is to use some AI or some program that will create a table for you. Please just remember that if you are working with sensitive information, be very careful who you share your information with. But in this example, we're not working with any specific information that's sensitive. So we're going to use chat GPT to basically create a table for us. Our prompt is simply going to say that we'd like Chat GPT to create a table for Obsidian. But there's three headings, car one, car two, and car three. And lists the color of each of the cars below as green, red, and blue. Chat GPT will then spit out the code. We can just say simply copy code and paste it straight into Obsidian. And there you have it, you'll see that we have our table. Just remember guys, there are a lot of tools out there which can simplify or speed up your workflow. But once again, it's just dependent on what information you're working with, whether it's sensitive information or not. So just be very careful. 19. Incorporating Code Snippets in Your Obsidian Notes: Let's take a look at adding code. If you're a programmer or work in the technical sector, adding code snippets to your notes might be quite helpful. So you can record and store individual parts of your code using code snippets which expand the scope of your notes and basically serve as a convenient resource to use later. In saying this, there are two ways in which you can add your code to Obsidian. The first method is inline code. To do this, you're going to open your note where you want to include your code and you're going to surround your code snippet with backticks. As an example, we're going to use our prints hello. And we're going to put that with backticks. And you'll see that when you're fit it with backticks, it'll highlight as code. Our second method is basically to open a code block. And to format a code block, you're going to surround your code with triple back ticks and then you're going to indent your code four times. And you'll see it will basically look like a call out, but it'll be a code block itself. If you're using a specific syntax and you'd like to highlight your code block, you can basically do this by adding the language code after the first set of backticks. Adding the syntax will then allow you to copy the code by clicking on the syntax symbol. And you'll see the syntax symbol as you write the code. For example, if we're sticking with our print hello, and we'd like to say that this is Python. We can simply do our triple back tick with y followed by print hello with our backticks again. Once we click out of that, you'll see that it's created lit code block and you'll see that it actually states PY stating it is a Python script or snippet. You can then click on that to copy the code and you can paste it where you need it. You'll see that I have added your supported formats. In case you do want to add your language code, click on that link and it'll take you to a page where you can see exactly what language is supported and what the shorthand for that language will be. 20. Creating Effective Callouts to Highlight Important Information in Obsidian: A bad. Now, one of my favorite advanced editing techniques, which is going to be your call out, What exactly is a call out? A call out is a visual element that basically helps you emphasize specific information within your notes. It makes it stand out in your notes. They are often used to highlight key concepts, quotes, or important reminders. And basically, by using callouts, you can make certain that content stands out, captures your attention, and creates visual cues that basically aid in comprehension and retention. Once again, Obsidian offers various community plug ins that will enhance the functionality of call outs. Some popular plug ins include advanced call out Plug In, which provides advanced styling options and additional call out styles. And the admonition Plug in, which allows you to also create call out with different styles and customize their appearance. For this lecture, we're going to use a stand call out without using a plug in. So we can use the call out to include additional information. As we said, to just break that flow of the notes. To create a call out, we're basically going to add a greater than symbol with your square bracket and an exclamation mark with info. This is going to be added to our first line of our block quotes, where info is the type of identifier. Your type of identifier will determine how your call out looks and feels. What's really nice, if you're looking for additional call outs, you can take a look at the link page that I've put here. It'll basically give you a list of supported call outs whereby you can then just copy and edit the call out as need be. For example, we're going to use the info call out and we're just going to put Obsidian is amazing. And then once you type that, you'll see your call out is in blue. And you can see how nicely it stands out within your nose. 21. Creating Visual Aids Diagrams and Flowcharts with AI in Obsidian: All right, let's look at diagrams. In order to create a diagram in Obsidian, you will use what we call Mermaid syntax. Mermaid is a simple syntax for creating diagrams in markdown documents, including Obsidian. With Mermaid, you can create flow charts, sequence diagrams, Gan charts, and a whole bunch of different other charts using a simple set of text base commands. The basic syntax for mermaid is straightforward and easy to learn. It uses keywords and symbols to represent different elements. But we won't be going through the syntax of mermaid specifically in this course. There are multiple tools you can use. And these include a range of community plug ins such as Obsidian Grapht Plug in, which will allow you to create mind maps, concept maps, and grapht maps using obsidian. And also the diagrams plug in, which provides additional diagramming features and support. For this example, We're not going to be typing out our code, but if you'd like to type out the code in Mermaid, just remember to start with your three back ticks followed by the word mermaid. Then your code. And then you need closes off with three backticks again. Once again, for ease of use, I'm going to be using AI to generate the code for us. In this case we're going to be using Google Bard. How prompt we're going to be using is going to be create the code for a diagram that will be added to Obsidian. I want the graph to have a main box called Courses. This will be linked to three separate boxes named Productivity Course, Obsidian Course, and Resume Course. Once we've got our code, I'd just like to point out that you'll see our three back ticks followed by Mermaid, because that's good we're going to be writing in. You'll then see that we've got our graft code. What's just interesting to note here is that you'll see that, for instance, we've got courses, and then we've got a square bracket courses again, followed by an arrow stating Productivity course with a square bracket Productivity Course. Now within that square bracket is going to be your title. If we take those square brackets away, you'll see that you will still have a graft, but the spacing between productivity and courses will not be. So your square bracket just ensures that we've got the correct title for our graph. Now that we click okay, we can basically go from edit mode, reading mode, and you'll actually see the graph there. That's exactly how we insert a diagram into Obsidian. There are, like I said, multiple ways to do this depends on what you're going to be using it for and how much time you have. If you would like to use AI to do this, please remember that you should be very careful with what you do with sensitive information. In our case, this is not sensitive information, hence why I was using AI. But please once again, be careful who you share your sensitive information. 22. Integrating Mathematical Equations into Your Obsidian Notes: Looking at mathematics, you can simply add a math expression to your notes using Math Jack and the Latex notation. Math Jack is a library that allows you to include mathematical equations and symbols into your notes using latex syntax. Latex is basically the markup language that's used for scientific documents. And it provides a very flexible and powerful way to basically typeset complex mathematical equations, or expressions, and formulas into your notes. As this is a beginner course, we're not going to dive into creating the code, but rather we're going to use chat GBT once again to write the code for us. This is a theme that you're going to see, especially with time consuming activities in the course. You're going to see this over and over again where we're going to use AI to assist us in basically creating the code we need based off of our needs that we can then just copy and paste straight into our notes. Let's take a look at a very basic example. I've basically just prompted chat GPT and said using math Jack create code needed for Obsidian to show AB divided by CD equals AD minus BC. You'll see that it's taken that code and it has given us the code specifically. All we're going to do is copy and paste that code straight into our GTP. And that's going to show you our mathematical formula as you can see there. Additionally, Obsidian also offers various tools and resources that will basically assist you as well with working with mathematics in your notes. If you are using this just for mathematics, you can use Math Editors. And when you're looking at math editors, you can consider using dedicated math editors, such as Math Type or Overleaf, to basically create your complex mathematical expressions that can easily be integrated into Obsidian notes. Secondly, you can use math libraries such as Math Jack, which will basically provide you with additional functionalities and rendering options for mathematical notations. In short, Obsidian can handle mathematical formulas and you can integrate these into your notes if you would like, you can use AI to assist you in creating the code for your mathematical formulas. But once again, this is going to be complete personal preference. 23. Best Practices for Efficient and Effective Note taking in Obsidian: In the section, we're going to cover three additional topics. The first topic is going to be your multiple cursors. Then we're going to cover comments in Obsidian. Lastly, we're going to cover how to add a footnote to your notes. Let's jump in starting with the multiple cursor. If you've written out a note that you now need to edit in bulk, you can edit this using a multiple cursor. To add the multiple cursor, all you need to do is hold Alt and then click. And then you'll see that this will allow you to add multiple cursors to multiple lines. Looking at the example, we have three lines. If we would like to edit all three lines, all we're going to do is we're going to hold Alt and click. And you'll see as we go along that multiple cursors are added. Then if we want to delete, for instance the lines, we can then delete. And you'll see as we delete, because there's multiple cursors, it will apply to all of the lines that we've got multiple cursors on. Moving on to comments. Comments can be very useful if you are writing very complex notes or if you want to just add something to come back to or maybe just an explanation as to why you put a specific note down. To do this, you simply add double percentage signs to your comment and end it off with double percentage signs. For example, if you wanted to add a comment to this note, we simply will hit our double percentage signs and then we'll type our comment in. Let's just type comment in Obsidian. And we'll close this with double percentage signs. And there you have it. You'll see that your comment is grade out. But it's quite nice. Like I said, if you do want to put a comment down to explain something, or if you want to add something at a later stage, looking at footnotes, this is a great tool, especially if you're going to be writing academic notes. Or if you just want to reference or cite a specific thing in your notes. We can do this very easily. The first thing we're going to do is place a cursor in the desired location where you want that footnote to be. You're then going to type in your double square brackets. In your double square brackets, you're going to put the carrot symbol. Then you need to add a unique identifier. Generally, you'll use a number, but you can use a keyword as well. You're going to click Enter, then you're actually going to add the footnote to your notes. This can be done obviously at the bottom of your notes or wherever you would like it to. You're going to do the exact same thing. You're going to open your square brackets. You're going to put your carrot symbol in with your identifier. You're going to end this off of a colon. What's nice about this is Obsidian will automatically generate a number superscript for your footnotes and it will link it to the corresponding content in your footnote section. You're going to then obviously want to put a description as to what your footnote actually means. Lastly, to view your footnotes in obsidian, you can either navigate to the end of your notes or you can create a dedicated section at the end where you collect all your footnotes. And this basically will allow the readers to access the additional information or references. 24. Essential Obsidian Core Plugins Optimizing Your Workflow: We're now going to go through core plug ins. Core plug ins basically give us additional functionality with Obsidian. I suggest that you play around with some of these core plug ins and see what works for you and what doesn't. You don't have to enable all the core plug ins. You don't have to enable any of them actually. But at a minimum, I would suggest keeping the core plug ins as is when you start with Obsidian and then start to play around and see what works for you and what doesn't. Let's jump into it. Let's start with the audio recorder. The audio recorder allows you to record and save audio recordings directly into Obsidian or into your notes in Obsidian. Once the plugin has been enabled, you'll see a microphone icon on the left hand side and simply clicking this will start the recording. And clicking it once again will stop the recording. This recording then will be added directly into your notes if we look at it. If we're going do just a test, I don't have a microphone plugged in right now, but for this example, we can still use what we've got. If I click on the microphone button. And let's say we were going to say Obsidian Disparate and we stop the recording. You'll see that that recording has been inserted into our notes. Next we have our back links plug in with the back links plug in. This will basically allow you to see all the back links in your active notes. Just remember that a back link for your note is a link from another note to that note. The next plug in we have is our Bookmarks plug in. So our Bookmarks plug in is simply a plug in that allows you to quickly save and access information or locations within your notes. The best way to think about this is exactly as you would think about it in a browser. If you're on an internet browser and you'd like to bookmark a specific page, you can simply then click on the bookmark and it'll take you to that page. This is the exact same thing with the obsidian. If you navigate to the bookmark section, you'll see on the top left hand side, you can create a bookmark. If we click on that bookmark, you can simply see that it will have a path to your bookmark. You can then give your bookmark a title if you'd like to create a bookmark group, you can add it to that specific group that you've created. To add a bookmark group, simply click on the new bookmark group icon next to the create bookmark. Once we've done this, you can simply just rename the group, and there you have it. This plug in works extremely well, as it basically enhances your productivity. And it stops the need to actually manually search for what you're looking for. If you have a note or specific information that you would like to come back to at a later stage, you can simply bookmark it. And then you can simply click on the bookmark and it'll take you directly to where you want to go. We then have the canvas plug in. Now the canvas plug in is a very interesting plug in because the canvas plug in is basically a tool for visualizing your notes. What it will do is it lays out your notes and other resources on a canvas. You can simply think of this as a visual representation of your notes, which will allow you to also organize and connect ideas in a very different dynamic way. Once the canvas plug in has been enabled, you'll see the icon once again to the left. Once we click on the canvas icon, you'll see that it takes us to a new canvas that it creates. We can then rename the canvas we can basically drag from below or double click and you've got three icons at the bottom. You can drag to add a, you can basically drag to add a card from the vault. And you can also drag to add media from the vault. For instance, if we were to drag a note from the vault and we decided we'll put our footnotes example. And we'll also want our course outline. We'll see it creates two blocks. Obviously, these notes are empty right now. But it does create two blocks. And this is quite a nice way to visualize your notes to see if there's maybe other linkages that you haven't seen. Or just visualized concepts that may be quite complex that you want a little bit more ease. Or if you just want to ponder over your notes or a specific concept itself. The next plug in will be the command palette. Just remember the shortcut is either going to be control or command plus P. This basically gives you access to your commands in Obsidian directly from your keyboard. It lets you run specific commands. Let's say you have enabled the slide plug in. You can obviously then use the command palette to access a slide or to start running your slides. Just remember, if you have enabled the plug in, you'll also be able to access this command palette using the forward slash, but we'll get to that in a bit. Next, we'll move on to Daily Notes. Once we've enabled this, you'll see once again an icon to the left hand side. And that's going to be your open today's daily notes. The great thing about this is daily notes will open a note based on today's date. If you don't have one, it'll basically create a note with today's date. This is great if you're going to be using it for journals or maybe to do lists, daily logs. Things that you would discover on a day to day basis. The next plug in is going to be our File explorer. This plug in lets you manage your files and your folders in your vault. Moving on, we've got our file recovery. Now, File recovery helps you recover work in the case of losing the data, in case you may have unintentionally done something and you've lost that data. It will help you to recover this by regularly or saving snapshots of your notes. What Obsidian does do to avoid taking up too much space in your system? It will only keep snapshots for a certain number of days and then it deletes it. Now one thing to note that if you've moved your vault recently, you may need to move your vault back to its original location where it was when it was taking the snapshots in order to recover those files. Our next plug in is going to be the format converter plug in. And our format converter plug in lets you convert mark down from other applications to your Obsidian format. Now the format converter convert your entire vault base on your settings. Just remember that before enabling this or before using this to back up your notes, just as a safety precaution, the next plug in is going to be our graph view. If you are not sure of what your graph view does, please take a look at the previous sections where we covered our graph view. But this basically enables you to use your graft view to basically visualize your relationships between different nodes. Remember, when looking at your graph view, nodes that have lines between them have some sort of linkage. While nodes that are called orphans, and those are basically, they don't have any reference to any other nodes. We then have our note composer plug in. And that allows you to merge two notes or obstract parts of notes into a specific new notes. Moving on, we have our outgoing links plug in. And this will basically show you the links from the active note at a glance, as well as potential links to be made. It's very similar to your back links plug in, which instead shows you incoming links to your active notes. Next we have the outline plug in, which is quite a nice plug in, specifically if you use quite a few headings in your notes. Because what this does is it will list out your headings in the active note. If you have quite a complex note, but you've got headings throughout the note, it's a very easy way to jump to a specific point in your note very quickly. This can be accessed if we expand our right column, you'll see that we actually have an outline section once we've enabled to plug in, if we're taking a look at a note and let's say we create a quick heading, so we're going to create a heading called Obsidian. And then once that heading is created, you'll see it will appear in your outline section. Looking at the page preview, plug in the page preview plug in will allow you to preview a page. When you hover your cursor over the actual link, it stops the need for actually navigating to that page. Basically, we'll give you a quick snapshot of the actual note that you have the link to. Just remember to do this, you're going to have to hold control command and then hover over the link to see the page preview. The next plug in we're going to take a look at is your published plug in. Your published plugin allows you to publish your notes and create website or digital publication from your vault itself. Now sadly, this is a paid service in Obsidian. You are going to have to pay for this feature. But in light of this, I did want to cover this plug in in case any of you do have a website or blog or something along those lines where you're going to be writing out your notes and want to publish it to an online platform. You can then obviously pay for the service. You can then set it up to publish directly from Obsidian to your website for your blog. Sadly, I won't be able to actually demonstrate this for you guys because I don't have the actual paid service. I don't use this for publishing my notes to a website or an online platform. But there is quite a bit of content out there. In case you are looking to published notes, you can take a look. There's plenty of resources out there to help you along the way. Next we have the quick switcher. Remember the shortcut for this is either going to be control or command plus o. And your quick switcher, as covered in a previous topic, will allow you to search and open notes from your keyboard. Moving on, we have a random note. Now, random note is quite a fun plug in. What this plug in does is it will basically open a random note in your vault. This is really nice if you have quite a dense vault, If you've got quite a few notes, maybe you've been using obsidian for quite some time. It's quite nice because it allows you to rediscover notes. You might be able to find something new insights or maybe new links to current notes that you're working on with random notes going on. We've got our search plug in, our search plug in. We have also covered this in a previous section. But just remember, the search plug in will allow you the functionality to basically search through all your notes. It provides that advanced search functionality which will basically allow you to quickly locate specific information or references. Whatever you're looking for, that's where you're going to be using your search plug in. Now going on to my favorite of the plug ins which is going to be your slash commands. If you guys are familiar with platforms such as notion, you'll know that you can basically use a slash command. And this is going to bring up your commands palette. Just like we spoke about earlier. It's a quick way just to bring this up, especially if you are typing notes at quite a pace. It's quite a nice plug in just to have at hand. We then have our slides plug in. Now our slides plug in will allow you to create presentations from your notes. This is one of the plug ins that I wouldn't recommend if you are looking to create a professional slide. If you are doing a presentation for instance, I think it is still far better to use a dedicated application to create a presentation. But if you're using it as a creative tool to maybe gain some more insight, look at the flow of your notes, it is quite helpful. But once again, I don't use this one personally. That often going on, we've got our sync plug in. Now our sync plug in is just a powerful tool that enables us to basically synchronize your notes across multiple devices or platforms. It allows you to access or work on your obsidian volts from any. This basically does a link up with cloud services such as Dropbox or our cloud to obviously securely sync your files in the background. With this, you can effortlessly switch between devices and continue your not taking journey as you go along without any interruptions. If you are one of those people that like to take notes while you're traveling to work on a bus or on a train, or if you would like to just have Obsidian available at all times. This is quite a nice plug in to enable Moving on to the tags. Plug in your tags will basically list all your tags within your vaults with the tag name. If you are looking for where to find this, it'll be on the right hand side, top, right. You'll see we have covered it's your hash tags. You've got a little hash symbol, It'll say tags. And it'll list out all of your tags within your vaults. The next thing we're going to take a look at is our templates. Now our templates basically allow us to insert a predefined snippet of text into an active notes. Now this is a great feature because it allows you to create note templates that you can quickly create within new notes that contain predefined structures and content. This is specifically helpful, especially if you are creating notes frequently that are very similar to each other. Such as maybe meeting notes or project plans, maybe research papers. It's quite simple to create a template. To create a template, we simply are going to ensure obviously that template plug in is active. Then what we're going to do is I highly suggest creating a template folder, which we're going to do here. If we create a new template folder and we just name that template, then we're actually going to create the template. I'm going to name this template course. Let's say that every time I structure, of course I want a specific template. That's what we're going to build out. We're just going to put maybe topic 12.3 as an example. Then if you would like a date, you can add a double parenthesis with the name date within it. If you would like a time stamp, you can also add your double parentheses, time. And what will happen is when you insert a template to a specific notes, you'll see that it will automatically then enter in the date and the time. Once your template is actually active, you can then drag that to your template folder. Then we're going to go back to our settings. Now if we go back to our settings, you'll see you've got a core plug in section at the bottom now. And you'll see it actually says templates. What we simply need to do here is where it says template folder location, you're going to select the actual folder, your template folder that we created. Because this is basically going to show bid and where to look when looking for a specific template. You'll see it will also contain your date, format, and time format. If you'd like to change that, you can. But I'm happy with the standard date and time format. We can then close this. Now let's create a new note, and we're going to name this note. Let's name it Resume for our resume course. Then we're going to simply open our command palette. Obviously, I've got the slash plug in active, I'm just going to say slash. We're going to type in the template. You'll see it will say insert template. Now, because we only have one template, it's going to basically insert the one that it's got in the folder. If we click Insert, there we go. So there you'll see that it's inserted our template. You'll see it's got out dates, it's got out time, and it's got whatever we had in our template already listed out. Once again, this is a really, really nice feature to use. Specifically if you are using a very similar format Over and over again, it will save you a lot of time and obviously increase productivity as well. All right, moving on to our last three plug ins. We then have our unique note creator, the unique note creator plug in. We'll let you create notes with a time based name. For example, if you're creating a note and you're creating it at a specific time on a specific date, your unique note creator will then name the note with the date and the time. If there is already a note with the same name, it will then obviously create a new note using the next available timestamp. If you are someone that wants to organize your notes based off of the dates and the time, it's a great feature to use as well. Moving on, we have our word count, and this simply just displays the number of words and characters in active notes. You can find this at the bottom of the right status bar, where you'll see your back links, your words and characters. Quite a nice feature to enable as well. Then lastly, we have our workspace. Now our work space plug in will allow you to manage and switch between different application layouts depending on the task at hand. Once again, if you have specific tasks that you're using Obsidian four, let's say you're using it either for journaling, reading, writing, or whatever the case may be. You can create specific work space templates as well, if I can call it that, not to be confused with the template plug in itself. But you can create a unique workspace that you can load up whenever you're working in a specific task. Like I said, such as journaling, reading, writing, whatever the case may be with that, that's going to be your core plug ins. Once again, a lot of these plug ins may be useful to you or they may not be useful to you. Play around with them, see what you like, see what makes your life easier and makes you more productive and take it from there. 25. Exploring Third Party Community Plugins in Obsidian: So now we're going to jump into third party community plug ins. But before we start this, I'd like to just ask if there is any specific third party community plug ins that you guys would like me to cover. Please send me a direct message with the name of the plug in that you'd actually like me to do a video on. The reason I ask is in the section you'll see we will cover five common community plug ins that people generally use. But sadly, as everyone's needs are completely different, everyone is going to need different community plug ins or everyone will be installing different community plugins. I won't be able to go through every single community plug in in depth, else we'll have a 30 or 40, 50 hour course, if not more. If there is anything specific, please directly message me and I'll try to make a video on it and add it to the course. With that said, we're going to jump into our first community plug in, which is going to be data view. Dynamic data management is actually made possible within your notes because of data view. Basically, it provides a query language for data filtering, sorting, grouping, and basically aggregation. And it allows you to create structured data tables using markdown or a syntax called W, A, M, L basically. This allows you to effectively organize your information, analyze it, and visualize it. And it also allows you to have the ability to generate reports, monitor progress, and basically derive different insights from your data. As you can see, we have listed what you can do with it, which is create custom views, generate tables and lists, perform aggregations and calculations. Fly filters and groups utilize templating capabilities and integration with Markdown. Next we're going to go through Obsidian. Get the Obsidian Git basically incorporates Git or enables you to basically track and manage changes in your notes using Git repositories. So if you are a programmer or have any programming knowledge, you might be aware of Gets because Get is used quite often in this industry. But Get is a very popular version of control systems that basically facilitates teamwork, version tracking, and file updates. I think the big one here is the collaboration and version tracking that get can add. But once again, it depends on if you're going to be using gets on a consistent basis. We've also listed here what you can do with it, which is obviously initializing Git repositories, tracking changes, commitments and push changes, branching and merging conflict resolution and Aserial repository management. Moving on, we have the Templar Community plug in the template community. Plug in basically allows for insertion of variables, functions, and scripts within templates. It goes beyond the normal static note templates by allowing you to create dynamic templates for your notes. Basically, this allows you to generate dynamic material and then automate tedious operations and alter the format and organization of your notes based on your actual templates itself. What makes it different is the actual capacity to automate and personalize your note generation workflow, which will obviously save you guys effort. This is basically the main advantage of using Templtor. Obviously we have covered the core template plug in, but if you're looking for something a little bit more, you can use Templtor. Generally what you can do with it, once again, is just to create your templates, customize template variables, generate content input data, automate content creation, and then obviously your flexible output formats as well. Next we're going to move on to the calendar community. Plug in guys, I'm going to keep this extremely short and sweet. The calendar plug In basically enhances the capability and functionality of Obsidian by integrating a calendar feature with Obsidian, just like you would with any other calendar application. This basically can be used to create events, view and navigate your calendar. Link events to notes, set reminders and notifications, customize your filters with events and obviously sync with external calendars as well. Lastly, we're going to cover your advanced tables community Plug in. What this does is it basically improves obsidian table capabilities and gives you sophisticated features such as the ability to build dynamic interactive tables inside your nose. Additional features include your sorting, filtering and formula computations. And this basically helps with effectively handling and analyzing data. Once again, what we can do with this community plug in is merge and spit cells. Sort and filter data, apply formulas, customized styling and formatting, export and import tables. And obviously the response of table redesign as well. So this plug in really does enhance the table capabilities with Obsidian. And it offers a little bit more of a fluid effective caabular experience, whether you're managing datasets or managing project processes, or even producing data driven reports. With that, that's going to be the overview of our five common community plug ins. Please guys, remember that there is a lot of content out there when it comes to plug ins. As once again, everyone's need for specific plug ins will differ. There's plenty of videos that specialize on specific plug ins that will cater to your needs. But once again, please just remember, be very, very careful as to what plug ins you're using and what plugins you're installing. 26. Leveraging Community Support Workspace Expand Your Obsidian Knowledge: In our last module, we're going to take a look at the community that surrounds obsidian. When I say this, what I'm meaning is two main things we're going to take a look at, which is community themes, and also the obsidian community in terms of help and support. To begin with, let's take a look at Obsidian Community themes. Now the community themes are pre made visuals and there are themes that can be applied to obsidian, which will change the way the interface actually looks. These themes are made by the Obsidian community and distributed amongst members or users. What they'll do is they'll basically change the type, faces, colors, or maybe the overall design, to give obsidian a new look and a new feel. One thing that is extremely important is that community themes are made by members of the community. And they are not endorsed by Obsidian in any official capacity. Even though there are a lot of risk free themes out there, it's a really good idea to take a look and analyze the code, look for any potential security issues. And if you're not sure, rather stick to the basic obsidian theme. In order to use a community theme, the first thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to download the community theme, which can either be done on a third party website or through the community theme section in Obsidian. You'll also see if you navigate to the settings panel and go to appearances under Themes, you can actually take a look. If you click on Manage, you'll be able to actually take a look at the community themes that are available. We'll then be able to choose one and apply it to Obsidian guys. Once again, please just remember, and like I said before, be very careful what you're installing, because these are made by the community. Now moving on to the actual obsidian community and the support, the obsidian community is a thriving, and it's a friendly ecosystem of people that basically gather to exchange information and concepts about obsidian. This includes various things such as people working together or asking for assistance and forms or discords. The advantage of interacting with the community are numerous. It gives you a wealth of knowledge because there are many people on the forums or maybe on the discord that have quite a bit of knowledge. When it comes to obsidian, it allows you to expand your knowledge, maybe find new workflows by interacting with the community. It gives you a chance to learn more complex or sophisticated features, or ways in which to use obsidian itself. Secondly, the community does offer a setting for teamwork and support amongst its members itself. It's quite nice because you can use it as a networking tool whereby there's many people on the platform that are also looking to grow and develop in terms of their personal development and knowledge base around obsidian. This collaborative setting encourages learning and development. It allows users to basically improve their obsidian experience. Also, obviously, if you do experience problems or if you're looking to do something specific and you don't know how to, it's a nice platform to go on and get the help that you need. So I really encourage you guys to use the community platform. If you go to the Obsidian website, you'll see on the top right hand side the community link. If you click on that, you'll find a page that's got the discord. It's got forums and it's also got a made by community section with a whole bunch of different forums, blogs that will help you along the way. 27. Final Thoughts: So we've covered a lot of ground and I want to take a moment to summarize what we've learned throughout this journey. But first, I'd like to express my gratitude and thanks to each and every one of you for joining me on this course. Your commitment to learning and improving your note taking skills is truly inspirational. During this course, we delved into the fundamentals of obsidian, Mastering the art of organized thinking. We started with the basics, understanding the interface, creating and linking notes, and exploring powerful features such as tags and search capabilities. We then went on to the advanced sections where we explored advanced editing techniques. And this included various types of content like images, URL's, code table, and diagrams to your notes. We also delved into note linkages. We then advance to more complex techniques such as plug ins to enhance your productivity. Customizing obsidian workspace with themes and leveraging the power of the community to further enrich your knowledge of note taking. As we conclude this course, I want to emphasize the significance of taking control of your knowledge and organizing your thoughts effectively. Remember, obsidian empowers you to transcend the limitations of traditional note taking methods. And it allows you to capture your ideas, connect concepts, and unlock your creative potential. Once again, thank you for embarking on this journey with me. Your dedication and enthusiasm have made this course truly a fulfilling experience. Remember that learning is a lifelong process and I encourage you to continue honing in your skills with no taking. I wish you all the best for future endeavors. Keep organizing your thoughts, embracing new knowledge, and never stop pursuing your passions. Once again, thank you for being part of this course and if you like the course, please check out my course on time management titled Time Management Stream Proven Time Management Techniques, whereby we cover topics such as defining your definite chief aim, creating realistic, obtainable goals. Breaking these goals down, creating a measurement method for yourself and achieving what you want to achieve.