Notion Series

How to Use Notion: Day Four

Everything you need to know to get started

Screenshot from Notion

Welcome back to the fourth installment of my How to Use Notion course. So far, we downloaded and installed the software, took a brief tour and learned about working with blocks. Here are links to the first three articles in the series.

If you haven’t signed up yet, here is my affiliate link, which will give you a $10 credit and me a $5 credit against future use. Note that nothing we do in this course will require a paid subscription. In fact, my Notion set up is only using 75 of my 1000 free blocks and it contains a lot of data.

To be honest, that’s all you need to know to get started and you can go a long way with no further knowledge. But today we will do a dive into one of the most useful features of Notion, databases. If you have used Airtable , then you are familiar with how databases work in Notion. Both products have similar implementations, and the basic concepts are almost identical. If you have any experience with databases on any platform, then the concept will be familiar, but the execution is a bit different. If you are familiar with spreadsheets, you should be right at home, but Notion databases offer a lot more.

For the database purists out there, you will excuse me for using the terms database and tables interchangeably. I know they are not the same thing, but Notion uses it that way in their documentation, so I will follow suit.

I have been working on a database to track my articles on Medium, so that is what we will build in this tutorial.

So log in and let’s get started.

You may have left some blocks in place from the last lesson, but we will create our tables on new pages, so click the New page icon. For this example, we will Title the page Medium Articles, then click the Table icon under Database.

Screenshot from Notion

We want this to be a full-page table rather than inline. We will create inline views of it in the next chapter. When you click on Table, a blank table appears with the default values. Each column is a property of the table. In traditional database terms, these would be field names. A Notion table will always have a name property that is of type Title. You can’t change or delete this field, but you can change the name of the field. Click on the field to get a drop-down window of options.

Screenshot from Notion

We will change the name of the field to Title and leave the rest alone. My table has many columns, but for this example, we need to just change the other two given to you. We will add more columns later when we get to relations.

The next field is Tags, which is a Multi-Select type and is useful for anyone accustomed to using tags for searches. For this tutorial, we will change the name to Creation Date and the type to Date. Click on the column name as before and change the name, then hover over the Property Type field to get another pop-up.

Screenshot from Notion

Click on the Date type in the pop-up window. In the same way, change the Files field name to Status and make the type, Select.

Congratulations! You have created your first table in Notion. Build whatever type table you have a need for similarly and add some data to it. In our example, we will create a second table called Publications.

I will switch to my live data for the rest of this article. As shown in the screenshot, create a second table the same way you made the Articles table and add the fields and field types shown below. Note that now I am using the Tags field, which is a multi-select, while Type is a single select. These kinds of fields are handy for repetitive data, so you don’t have to type it in more than once.

Add some data as shown, or play with your own tables. Next, we will add a relationship. For those of you that have a fear of relationships, I apologize, but not only are they great in life but are invaluable in databases.

Screenshot from Notion

Now, head back over to the articles database and create a new field called Publication. We will use this field to designate what, if any, publication has produced our articles. But instead of typing it in or using a Select field, we will build a relationship to tie it back into the Publications table. So, in the Property Type, scroll most of the way to the bottom and select Relation.

Screenshot from Notion

You will then get a pop-up telling you to Create a relation to another database. Click in the Select a Database box and another pop-up appears with all of your tables, in this case, just two. Choose Publications.

Now, in the articles table, if you click on the Publications field, a pop-up will appear showing you all the fields in the Publication Database. Select the Publication you want and it will appear for your article.

Screenshot from Notion

You may wonder, why go to all that trouble; why not just enter the name of the Publication into the Articles table? There are two reasons for this. First, there is a concept in database management called normalization. What this means is that you never want to have repeating data in two tables. It’s not only a waste of space (this goes back to the days when storage was at a premium), but it’s difficult to maintain. When the data changes, you need to remember to change it in more than one place. With the relationship, you only change it in the Publication table.

The other reason is that this relationship is much more functional than just saving time and space. It’s a two-way relationship you can leverage to display and calculate other fields as we will see next.

Notion automatically created the first of these fields. When you create the relationship from Articles back to Publications, Notion creates a field in the Publications table showing what articles have used that publication. So, doing nothing else, in the Publication table, I have a list of what articles are in each publication, like so.

Screenshot from Notion

Next, by using a Rollup property type, I can have the table count the number of articles in each publication for me. To do this, I added another field in the Publications table and called it Count. In the Property Type, I selected Rollup. This is a particular type of field used to count, add, or otherwise “roll-up” another field.

Then, when I clicked on a blank field, I told it to point to the Related to Articles field, use the Property of Title, which is the contents of that field, and then selected Count values as the calculation.

Screenshot from Notion

Again, you may wonder, why go to that trouble. After all, counting to four isn’t that difficult.

Screenshot from Notion

Easy for you to say.

But actually, there is another reason to calculate that column. I can then use that calculation in another calculation, and so on. Using the same methods used in the Relation field and the Rollup fields above, I created a field in Publications to grab the Total Revenue field back in Articles. This is a number I enter manually at the end of each month. Then I made a field called Average Per Article, which is of type Function. Using the Total Revenue Relationship field and the Count Rollup field, I created a simple division function that gives me a running total of how much I have made per article for each publication. The number of relationships and the complexity of the calculations are only limited by your imagination. There are many good articles explaining these functions.

I know this sounds complicated, but if you walk through the steps above, it will become very easy. Tables, and especially related tables, give Notion a lot of power you can harness once you get the hang of it.

Whether you use relationships, the other factor that gives tables so much power and flexibility in Notion is the use of Views… and we cover that in the next chapter.

I hope this helps, and as always, let me know if you have any questions.

And stay tuned for Day Five.