hello and welcome back to thomas frank explains in this notion fundamentals lesson we are talking all about how to edit and format your text inside of notion you're gonna learn how to quickly apply formatting at the speed of thought using markdown and also use some of the other tricks notion provides for you such as their keyboard shortcuts their editing toolbar that comes up when you highlight text and you'll even learn some cool tricks you can use with notions slash command fittingly we're going to take the example page we created in the last lesson bring it over here and add some of these formatting tricks to it so we create a more full featured page so if you want to get the resources for this course including the example template that you can download and start editing go over to thomasjfrank.com fundamentals that is the home page for this course they're going to find written versions of every single lesson along with all those supplemental materials that you can start using to work alongside me with all that being said let's dive into the lesson [Music] okay so as you can see on the screen here we have quite a few different ways of formatting text in notion this isn't all of them but it is a good sampling here and as i mentioned in the intro you've got several different ways to achieve this formatting one of which is called markdown what is markdown i did put that here in the title well markdown as i'm going to explain in more detail in a second is a way to format text as you type in a notion it's really cool so for example i can start typing and i can bold text on the fly i can even italicize it i can make headers or i can even make bullet lists and the way that i can do this is by using markdown so what is markdown well as you can see here from this little demonstration markdown is a method for me to add little formatting syntax to my text which actually formats that text on the fly or at least it doesn't notion traditionally markdown was syntax that was added in plain text and then you run that plain text through either a script or some kind of preview window in a markdown editor to see your formatting i'll give you an example here by looking at a more traditional markdown editor called dellinger there are a lot of these out here dillinger is an interesting one we can look at and you can find it over at dillinger.io if you're curious but this is what you usually see in a more traditional markdown editor you've got on the left here an editing window where we write all of our syntax in plain text and then over here we have a preview window where we actually see our formatting we see our headers we see our bolding we see our bullet lists all that good stuff i can't edit this so i have to do my editing over here and the purpose of this is twofold number one you can edit your text and add your formatting in literally any program notepad a code editor like adam a markdown editor like dillinger anything that can let you write plain text and save plain text markdown files is fair game for editing markdown files and then traditionally you would throw it through some sort of script or export from a markdown editor and you'd get your nice fancy formatting notion does things a little bit differently notion has a markdown editor but it's a what you see is what you get markdown editor or a wysiwyg editor so when i apply my formatting like if i want to make something italic like this it just instantly becomes italic and that's really nice one thing that's useful to know is that if you copy plain text that has markdown formatting so let's just copy all this text and you paste that into notion for the most part that formatting is going to be respected so if i just paste this here you're going to see that all the formatting is there we've got bolding we have a heading we have a block quote we have some list elements here so if you have markdown that you've written elsewhere you can paste it right into notion and you're going to see that formatting but what i want to show you how to do is actually write markdown syntax within notion so you get used to it and you can actually start formatting your text using it on the fly so the first thing that i want to show you is a reference page that i created so if you're on the thomasjfrank.com fundamentals homepage and you get over to this notion fundamentals course hub here in notion you can come to this writing system lesson page here and we've got a notion of markdown reference you're also going to see this markdown reference in the blog post version of this lesson but this one is here in notion and uh you can copy it into your own workspace if you want a reference of your own so these are all the different things that you can do in notion using markdown you can create different levels of headings using the pound key you can italicize text you can bold text add strikethroughs do pre-formatting and you can also use markdown formatting to create some different types of blocks we're going to talk about this more thoroughly in the next lesson about blocks but in notion you have text blocks but you also have other kinds of blocks so an unordered list that's a specific type of block an order list is a specific type of block i think it's called a numbered list here in notion to do's are blocks block quotes our blocks toggle blocks or blocks but instead of having to use the slash command and pick them for these types of blocks there is a very quick markdown shortcut that you can just type and create them so that's really nice but markdown is not the only option that you have there are also a few other ways to format text notion and we're going to cover those now so let's go over to this other formatting page where you're going to see i have a plain text version of this little article that i had written in dillinger before and if you want to start formatting things you don't have to use markdown there are quite a few other ways to do it for one you can simply use your typical keyboard shortcuts so for example if i highlight this text right here and i hit ctrl or command b i'm going to bold that text if i come over here to find yourself sleeping too late and hit control i that's going to be italicized if i want to come down here and for some reason i want to underline i can do control u and that text is going to be underlined so there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts we cannot go over all of them in this video because there are a lot so what i will let you know is that there is a learn the shortcuts page in the official notion documentation i'll have that linked in the written version of this video and there is a whole list of different keyboard shortcuts that you can start learning a lot of these are going to be very useful for navigating your workspace for example my favorite one is probably the control brackets for going back and forward throughout my workspace but there are also quite a few keyboard shortcuts for applying formatting to your text so that's useful to know you can also use this little edit toolbar that comes up when you highlight text so if i'm going to highlight this line i get this whole whole edit toolbar here and i can do quite a lot with this i can add comments i can add links but i can also apply formatting so if i want to bold this if i want to italicize it i can do all that i can even turn it into a code block or an equation but what i really want to do with this is turn it into a heading and just like with bullet lists and numbered list headings are their own type of blocks so i'm going to go over here and change this from text into heading one and i know earlier from pasting this in that this right here needs to be a heading two so we can go down here and turn this into a heading two so you can use that edit toolbar to do a lot of different formatting things that you could also do with keyboard shortcuts or markdown now one little trick that i didn't plan on showing in this video but i might as well is turning multiple blocks into something else so i know this water sunlight movement i want that to be a numbered list so if i highlight all these blocks you're going to see that all the blocks got selected not just the text then i can go to this little button here and i can turn these into a numbered list so that is a way to transform a block uh and the other way that you can start formatting text is by using the slash command now we're going to talk about this much more in detail in the next lesson but if you type slash and notion you get this menu where you can insert all kinds of different blocks it is probably the notion feature you're going to be using more than any other once you get used to it but what you can also do with the slash command is turn existing blocks into something else and there are a couple of different things you can do in terms of text formatting along these lines so up here i remember that this line right here was not supposed to be underlined but it was supposed to be a bullet list item so if i just click anywhere in this block and i type slash and then i start typing turn then i'm going to get this turn into menu i can also simply type slash and i can scroll way way way down and find it it's going to be right here but it's so much easier to just type slash turn and then i've got all these different options here so i can scroll to pick one i can use my arrow keys to arrow down or if i just keep typing like term bul for bulleted list i'm going to eventually highlight the one that i want and then i can just hit enter to turn that into a bulleted list so i could do that for all these if i want to and now i've got my bullet list i'm going to tab that one in and we are good to go another cool thing you can do with the slash command is add color or background color to a block so let's make this a little bit more stylish by typing red and you're going to see i get the color red as my first thing but if i type space b then it's going to assume i want the background and i've got all these different background options here so if i click that now i've formatted that with red so using what we know now let's go over to our sample page which we're going to call sample page stage 2 and start adding some formatting remember in the first lesson we had this very very simple text page but now we're going to want to actually add some few things so i know that a book title needs to be italicized so i can go ahead and add my asterisks on either side of that word and boom it is going to become italicized the sky above the port was the color of television that's a quote so if i just come to the beginning of this line and type a quote in space i'm going to turn that into a block quote i know i have a couple of other things here so matrix ghost in the shell cyberpunk 27 deus ex i'm going to go ahead and hit command i to italicize all those and coming down here we have read watch and consume widely i know that's actually a heading so i'm going to go ahead and do pound pound to create an h2 and break up my article a little bit and with this one why don't we just do type red b to give you a red background just because oh we've got arpanet down here well it doesn't really need pre-formatted text but i think it'll look cooler if i give it pre-formatted text maybe i also want to come up here and add another h2 at the top for introduction and a little preview from the next week's lesson but i'm gonna go ahead and put a table of contents there and look it finds all my headings and i can easily click and zoom to specific headings which is pretty sweet so we have now gone from a very simple text only page to a much more nicely formatted page where we can you know parse the text a little bit more easier it looks a bit more interesting and that's going to allow us to go into the next lesson to start adding multimedia elements and additional blocks all right so that's about going to do it for this lesson hopefully you found this helpful and hopefully all the markdown formatting tricks and the other tricks we talked about keyboard shortcuts everything in this lesson is going to help you get a little bit closer to being able to write and take notes and generally get content into notion at the speed of thought that's a really foundational concept here because if you want to make notion a second brain or build it into an all-in-one productivity system then you want to cut down as much as possible on the friction it takes to get things in to that system as always you can go over to thomasjfrank.com fundamentals which is the homepage for this free notion course and there you're going to be able to well number one get written versions of every single lesson as they release and this one may be especially helpful because it does have that markdown reference table in it you're also going to be able to get all the supplemental information and resources for this course there will be templates there'll be example pages it'll be reference pages within notion so check all those out and you'll have the opportunity to get on my notion tips email list where i'll let you know when new videos go live here on thomasfrick explains and also send you additional notion tips in the next lesson we are talking about blocks which is one of the other foundational features in notion you got pages and you got blocks so that is going to be one of the most important lessons in this course hopefully i will see you there as always if you have questions i'm on twitter tomfrankly ask me over there or ask me in the comment section down below and i'll do my best to answer them see you in the next lesson