so my notion tour did a little better than expected what the and a lot of you guys had some requests and questions and I get it notion can be a lot the same flexibility and customizability that makes it so powerful is what can also make it so daunting and overwhelming especially if you are a beginner but don't worry I'm here to help I know that a lot of you guys are students but even if you're not today is going to be a day to learn because in this video we have me Professor Sab and I'm going to take on the more lecture style teaching and you and I are going to go through the most fundamental the most basic parts of notion such that if you've never even heard of it before or you want to set it up for the first time you should by the end of this video be comfortable enough to be using it on your own and then there's me ta Sam and I'm going to be holding office hours where the lecture is more the theoretical side of things I'm going to show you how things like the functions and the databases look like in actual workspaces and at the very end we're really going to be doing office hours because you guys had some questions from my notion tour and I will be addressing them at the end of this video so thanks for coming to class today and let's get things started and learn how to use notion okay so now that we've downloaded my template and duplicated it onto a personal workspace this is what we're looking at before we get into the nitty-gritty about how all of this works we are going to start off by talking about what's around this screen starting off with the sidebar so to access the sidebar what you can do is that you can go to the top left corner where you can press these three lines and that should open up the sidebar on the top here is just a way to toggle between your different accounts or your different workspaces so this right here is the search bar and it allows you to search your entire workspace below that this is where we can find all of our settings and it has all your personal information and here are all of our different workspaces here is where you can create a team space this is really relevant if you're working collaboratively templates is a system where a notion gives you all of their different templates that you can duplicate but there's no need for those because you have mine now we've covered everything on the sidebar let's just go home real quick and let's take a look at what's on the top right so here the ellipses in the top right corner will bring out this box the most important things here that I find are ways to change style the font can be default it can be serif which is what I use or it could be mono if you want to change the text so that it's small text and full width which is what I recommend you can toggle the buttons here there are also a lot of other options here like adding things to favorites undoing importing and exporting perfect so now we've understand all the most important features on the sidebar and also whatever that is on the top right corner let's go into the tutorial okay so class is in session and I'm going to be teaching you all of the notion Basics so to access that here we are in the home tutorial and if you download my template which will be in the description below you will see that in our database over here our first one is the notion tutorial so let's go ahead and click that and this brings us to our notion tutorial so this is the page that I made so you guys can follow along with what I'm doing and also how have a reference to look back on everything that you learned in case you forget anything as Professor Sab what I wanted to do for you guys is that I wanted to create almost a workbook so not only will you learn how to use notion by watching this video you are going to learn by doing it with me starting off with blocks they are first separated into our basic blocks and our Advanced blocks and to use this tutorial you're just going to hover over whatever it is you want to open and click the open and that should open it inside Peak just for a little bit of landmarking here is our title we're learning about texts today over here next to this black bar is just a description of what the title is below it and this bullet point is a shortcut to create text and this is going to be our instructions that I want you guys to follow so when we're writing in plain text when you click a space it will automatically be there and we can just go ahead and start writing so I am writing in plain text perfect first one down guys so for this function over here if we start off in a bullet point for example and we want to switch it to text what we can do is highlight it and then press command option 0 and that's going to switch it to our text mode so a page is what we're in right now this page function allows us to embed a sub page within our current page so what we're trying to make is this sub page called new page and we can do that by pressing slash or page and then perfect that opens up a new sub page which we could call new page and as you can see we've perfectly replicated that nice next up is our to-do list and like the name suggests it's a way to track tasks with to-do lists okay so we're going to try and replicate this and I'm going to do that by pressing slash and typing out to do and we can click that over there or just press enter and then we can fill in our tasks and then as we can see here this one is indented which we could do by pressing tab and this is a way to Nest content that's great perfect okay headings there are three different kinds of headings and let's make a big medium and small heading I prefer doing the slash so if you just do slash one that brings us to the big heading oops not bug big slash two will bring us to medium and slash three will bring us to small next up is a table and this is just a simple table with rows and columns and we can recreate this by doing slash table pressing enter and we have that let's replicate this by naming the columns name and date lists we have bulleted lists numbered lists and toggled lists let's go through them in order bullet lists are what we've seen previously or what we can see right here it's just a simple bulleted list the way that I like to put it is just by pressing the minus or the dash sign and then space and that creates a bullet so we can press task one and if we press enter it automatically makes our next bullet point we can do the exact same thing with numbers but instead of clicking the dash we can just put in the numbers a period and space go ahead put task one press enter it automatically goes to the next number and that's task two and lastly is a toggle function which allows us to hide and show the contents Inside by pressing this toggle button so let's recreate this we're trying to make this open text and when we open this it shows the hidden text I like to do it by making this sign and a space we can make open text and press enter and write hidden text next let's look at some stylistic blocks that we can do we're looking at quotes dividers and call outs quotes are just a way to capture a quote it's what I have over here I like to just do slash quote and space Oh or an enter there we go and then let's type in what's in the workbook this is a quote after that are dividers which allows us to visually divide the blocks with this little Gray Line and we can make it right here by going slash div enter and then lastly we're going to create a call out which is what this boxes are Let's Go slash call out and even though slash call out is the function by the time you type in slash call this should pop up so you don't have to write down the full thing and enter and let's call it call out exception and then lastly in basic blocks we're going to learn how to link to page what we're trying to do here is create a link to the home tutorial so when we click home tutorial it brings us here so how we can do that is we can go slash link linked page and then it will give you some options of where you can link to let's do home tutorial and we just did basic blocks since you guys are so good at this and since this was so easy let's take it up a notch and move on to Advanced blocks so our first Advanced Vlog is going to be a table of contents this is going to show an outline of all of the headings that are in your page so for example if you have a really long page full of different headings and you're losing track of where everything is this is where a table of contents really shines so I've put in some headings over here as an example and we're going to try and make this table of contents and we can do that by going slash Toc table of contents and it automatically pops it up for you next up are buttons and buttons are a newer feature and they're so good this is a way to run custom automations a really good example for this is let's say that you have a little part in your workspace and you want to have repeating to-do lists so every day you have these daily tasks and they don't change let's remake this let's press slash button press enter here we're setting up what's going to happen when the button is clicked here we're going to click insert blocks and recreate our to-do list here as we've just learned we can make to-do lists like that and let's go ahead and type that in amazing and we can also name our button here this one is called daily tasks so let's call it daily tasks as well oh my days my typing and we can press done and we've created that button let's take a look at breadcrumbs which is going to allow us to show our current page location since notion can basically have infinite sub Pages sometimes it's really easy to get lost where you are in your infinite workspace breadcrumbs allow us to figure out where we are so let's recreate this breadcrumb to show this current page that we're in we could do that by pressing slash bread press enter and just like that we're there and not only does this show where we are it allows us to click it and it'll bring us to our previous Pages next up are synced blocks and this allows us to sync content across Pages this is already a made block if we click this we can paste it anywhere in our workspace by pressing paste and sync and if we make changes here like adding task three it makes the changes here as well let's go ahead and recreate the synced block if we press slash synced block you're gonna have to ignore all of this stuff over here which I don't really use and go to synced block and then we could type whatever we want in it go task two task three and lastly in our Advanced block let's take a look at columns so here we have two different columns this is a really good way to organize information so you can make use of this space better so there are two different ways to make columns the first way is to drag things around and let me show you how to do that here so if I have column one and column two what I can do is press this over here and you can see this blue line that appears if we drag it to the point where the Blue Line comes vertically here that creates two columns however if we want to make two sub columns within this column notion will not let us do that and this is where we have to use this Advanced function we can go ahead and do columns here and now we can make column 2.1 and column 2.2 all right so the last feature that we're going to talk about in terms of blocks is notion Ai and this is something that is relatively new it's just Notions embedded AI system it is very powerful in that you don't have to go to external sites like chat GPT for AI everything is run in-house the only problem is that it's ten dollars a month and from one broke student to another I can't afford that and so I don't expect you guys to do it anyway you can activate it by pressing space and then you can ask AI to do anything you can continue writing you can summarize so let's replicate this which is just an AI summary and we can do that by clicking summarize and that ladies and germs is it for the blocks we're doing so good yeah yeah so now that we're done talking about blocks let's talk about how we can edit and manipulate them let's start with editing and moving blog let's look at how we can select and deselect things okay I know there's a lot I was honestly having a hard time trying to decide what you need to know and what you don't but just give this a very quick read and I promise it'll make sense let's start off by manipulating this block what we can do is we can click on it and press command a and that's going to highlight the block that we are currently in here it says we can press space to open a selected image in full screen and we can we have this as an example so we can click this bad boy and press space and it opens and it opens up as a full page we can also do command shift click to highlight all of these boxes and then we can press backspace or delete to get rid of those blocks and command set to undo whatever you're doing so we've learned how to select and deselect now let's move things around let's go ahead and put these tasks in order so I'm going to go to this task one over here press command shift and my up arrow and that's going to put things in order yay another way to do this is we can go ahead and press this little thingy over here and move it until we see that blue line and that will also allow us to reorder if we wanted to move this entire page for example we could go slash move to click that and then it could move to a different page hyperlinking is just a way to add a link to a bit of text and notion so let's say that we wanted to hyperlink the best YouTube channel ever and there's obviously only one answer for that is this so we're going to copy this link we're going to go back to notion and what we can do is Select this text press command K and that'll give us this little box where we can paste our link and then lastly let's look at how to manipulate the style and the color of our texts and our blocks so the first way to make things bold is to put these little stars put your text and close it and I'll make it bold same thing with italicize and then for inline code you're going to press this button that's on the left side of the one on your keyboard and then I'm going to call this inline code oh just as a quick note if we are in inline code and you want to get out of it you're going to press shift enter and then lastly for strike through this is going to be the button also on the left side of your one strike through but if you don't want to go through all of those shortcuts what you can also do is just type your regular text you can highlight it and hover and there's all these options over here as well so do whatever's easier so if you want to change the color of our text we could do what we just did and highlight it there's going to be an option to change the color there or we can press slash the color that we want and it'll give us an option for making the text pink or the background pink let's do both so we're going to press pink and then we can call this pink text and now we want to say a pink background pink background and that's everything for editing the blocks I think we're halfway there okay next we're going to look at how we can navigate between the blocks let's open this one up and look at how we make new tabs and windows so once again I won't be going through all of this but this is all the functions on making new pages making new windows but let's follow this when it says to open a new tab so to create a new notion tab it's just command t and look at that we have a new tab if we want to quickly switch between Pages this is where you can find all that information let's take a look at our prompt go back to the previous page which we can do with Ctrl shift k so right now we're in switch between Pages Ctrl shift K we're back to new tabs and windows so we can easily switch between Pages by using these shortcuts and then lastly in navigation we can quickly toggle between light and dark mode by pressing command shift l how fun awesome so we've come to the big one I think the hardest part are databases but databases are really the bread and butter of notion if you're not using databases you're not using notion correctly so I'm going to show you kind of the fundamentals on how to use it all right let's look at databases so the very first step is actually making a database in the first place but what is a database it's basically just a way to store and organize other pages and they can either be inline or full page so inline means that you're going to have a table like this it's going to be in line with the page that you're in a full page database is going to be on a sub page so let me show you the difference to create a new database you can do slash database slash database here's an inline which will open up right here but if we did database full page it will open it as a separate page there are also ways to open databases based on views which we're going to talk about next but right now let's focus on slash database so let's recreate this inline table which we just did now we can name it to match what we have over here with inline table and congrats you just made your first database so now that we've made a database let's talk about all the different views so databases come in six different views which we're going to look through over here so I just made this class assignment tracker and it's going to look different depending on what view we choose this is a table view it just looks at things in rows and columns you can also change it to a board view which is really good for categorizing things or if you want to look at things as it progresses you can look at a timeline view and this is if you want to look at tasks based on chronology this is the calendar view which will show you all of your tasks related to the dates that it's assigned to the list view is very minimalistic it just shows your pages in a clear list and lastly is gallery view which I think is really good if you have any visual components that you want to add so let's take a look at our prompt try adding an assignment to the database below and look at how it appears in each view so let's add another assignment what do we have to do guys what do I have to do let's look at my actual homework that I'm neglecting for this I have to do my Anki so we're gonna do Anki what class is it related to let's say anatomy and it's going to be due tomorrow so we just added that and we can look at how it's added in the board how it's also in the timeline how it's in the calendar and those are all the views for sorting and function databases can be filtered to only show specific information that you want to see or it can be sorted or reordered based on whatever parameters you put so to find it you can find the filter and sort here in the top right corner of the databases so what is our task we want to filter the grocery list below to only show fruit let's start with that so to filter to only show fruit which is in this category we're going to click filter we're going to filter by category and it's going to open up here we said we only want to look at fruit so let's click fruit so let's say we're going to the grocery store we only want to look at the fruit that we want to buy it's the bananas and the apples to get rid of that category you can go back there and just uncheck it next we then want to sort the categories based on increasing alphabetically that doesn't make sense but we're going to alphabetize the categories then we can go to sort we can sort based on categories and ascending alphabetically and there you go what is that right A B C D give me a second ignore me let's if we were to sort it based on item ascending there we go I think this shows it better I don't know why it didn't work there so that is how to filter and to sort now let's take a look at the properties properties are all of the different columns that we have and we're going to remake this table so let's take a look at that so we learned that we can make a database by pressing slash database and we're going to make it inline let's copy this title project Oh my days Yang organizer so this are the default properties that come with the table we're going to keep name and we're going to delete tab for now we can delete it by right clicking on this header and pressing delete property delete and we can also resize each of the each of the columns by clicking this we made a name I'm just going to copy the first one Sab so let's make a number property let's press plus over here ignore all of this no more AI I can't afford it let's go to number the number format can be a number with commas percent it could be all of these different currencies but we're just going to stick with number and we're just going to show it as a number this will make more sense in a bit but we can copy this as one two three now let's make another number property but we're going to call it work progress work progress so we're going to keep it as a number but instead of showing it in this format we're going to show it as a bar as a completion bar and then we're going to keep all of this show number that's all good and then let's say I'm 78 done work and this will show up amazing it's just another way to visualize numbers okay so this is a select function and a select function allows us to pick from different options we're going to call this vibes and in order to add these options so let me show you what the different options are here it's good and bad what you can do is that you can go to edit property and add options here so good for example and then if you want to change the color you can do it here as well change it to Green but what we can also do is add options by just clicking into the box here and adding it like that My Vibes are good so we're going to click that next up is the status like the name suggests it's just the status of where you are in the project and this is automatically filled for you you can change it if you want I'm not going to and I'm going to change my status to done the due date can be done by going to date look at the format you can look at the time I'm just going to keep everything as it is and it opens up a little calendar and you can click when the due date is you can also do person now I'm just starting to type it because it gets quite long and this allows you to assign a task for example to a specific person which is really good if you're working in a team next we can look at check boxes and I'm going to call this completed and we can just check that if we are completed our task URL just allows you to link anything that might be relevant ah so that was quite a bit but those are all of the basic properties that you can put inside databases I hope that makes sense and I hope this is especially helpful when you're using my template and you want to add some properties of your own we've made it to the last part of databases and these are our Advanced properties so this is when things get kind of funky this is where notion gets kind of hard but please stay with me we're going to be talking about formulas and relations and roll ups formulas allow you to manipulate different properties as I said here it's kind of hard I'm not a coder by trade I'm a science girly I've LinkedIn resources here if you want a cheat sheet and some examples of what you can do with formulas but I'm teaching you literally the world's simplest formula I'm going to teach you how to subtract we have our debit card and our credit card we have our income and we're expenses let's say that we want to make a formula to show our current balance what we can do is create a formula and to create a formula it's just like any other property you're going to put the plus sign and you're going to scroll until you see formula but we already have it here so let's recreate this to create this formula we can just click into one of the empty boxes and this is our formulas tab to figure out the balance we need to subtract the expenses from the income so we can press income minus oh that's two minus expenses and it could be done and ta-da it'll do it automatically for us now I know like the proper programming people are rolling their eyes that this is the only formula that I'm teaching you guys but this is the beginner tutorial in my template all of the formulas are already set up so you don't have to touch anything but this is just an introduction to what a formula is and with these links up here hopefully you guys can teach yourself everything that the formulas have to offer and make something really crazy and automate whatever all right so the last part of the databases are going to be our relations and roll ups so this is how we create linked databases the Roll-Ups will help combine data in our databases based on relations and I hope I haven't lost you yet let me show you what this means here we have our expenses chart and here we have our budget chart here are all of our purchases that we made let's say we bought rent we bought rent we paid for we paid for red internet shirt and pants this right here is called a relation what this does is that it relates this expenses table to this budget table so you can see it over here so as we can see here we have the house and the clothes category in the expenses table that relates to the house and clothes rows that are in the budget table so the relation is going to connect the two the Roll Up is going to allow us to see a view from this table on this table so this roll up will just show the sum of all of the house expenses so 2580 that makes sense 30 plus 50 equals 80. and so we're taking information from this table and rolling it up on this table right now our tables are separate we have our expenses table and our budget table let's press the plus button let's scroll down to relation and we are going to relate it to your budget so that's that table over there and we can show it on our budget if we want to add relation and that shows this over here so what we can do is click this and we are going to click whatever we want to relate rent to which in this case is house same thing with internet with shirt that's part of clothes with pants that's part of clothes and you can see that those show up over here and now what we can do is roll up information about this so we're gonna press the plus button we're going to go to roll up okay so now we're gonna do a roll up we want to take the sums of everything in the house category here and show it over here let's click the roll up we're going to click the relation which is going to be your expenses and now we're going to look at what property do we want to roll up since we want the sum we're going to want the property of amount and if we just leave it at this it will show us all of the amounts that are related to house but no we want the sum so how are we going to change that we are going to click this we are going to this calculate button and we are going to click some hooray and we just did a roll up and that was databases guys that's the hardest part that was the hardest part and you did it you're basically a notion Pro now but I just have one more thing before we go to office hours and those are all of the embeds and the widgets first thing we're going to look at is how to embed media let's open that ah I know wall of text I'm so sorry but these are just all of the things that you can embed and to do that we can do slash embed and we can literally put a PDF by clicking the link we can upload it from our computer you can embed Google Docs a Spotify link a video a book the possibilities are endless and this is how you do it our last one is embedding widgets and widgets can be downloaded from external websites here are some of my favorite and you can use it to display information in a functional and in aesthetic way so I did have a lot of questions about doing things like embedding this calendar I got it from this website call called endify so let's click over there and that'll bring us here so this is my indify account it's completely free you just have to put in your email and to create a widget let's do it together we're going to create a new widget we're going to create the weather one I never name mine whatever and it's going to generate it for us we can choose the location which in my case is going to be Ottawa Oh my days Yang Ottawa awesome we can look at the units I'm so sorry to the Americans I don't get the imperial system we're going to stick with metric and you can show how many days that you want to show I just want to show one oh wait I lied I want to show zero and I can go to this clipboard over here I'm going to copy the link and then we're going to go back to notion and then slash embed enter paste that in there press enter and magically it's going to embed this widget and just like that my students we have completed our notion workbook I know it can seem overwhelming and I know it looks like there's a lot of it but once you get this honestly you're good to go you don't need any more tutorials after this unless I make another one then you will need that tutorial so that's it from Professor Saab I hope you feel like you've been properly equipped with all of the tools and the things that you need to get started on your own notion Journey I'm going to pass it over to tasab for any office hours and we're going to address some of the questions that we had about my notion template and welcome students to the final part of the video it is office hours some of you guys had some questions on how to use specific parts of my template and this is where we're going to be addressing them so let's start off in the home page some people had questions about how to add quick links so let's say I want very easy access to my journal from this home page what we can do is that we can jump to where that journal is we're going to go to self journal we're going to click this database over here we're going to copy link let's go back to where we were and under quick links I'm going to paste and put mention page and now we have a very quick link to our Journal just like that another question was how to add things to the database and let's look at the school to Do's as an example to create a new entry we're going to press new under here I'm just going to call it task 2 and press enter to exit the typing part we're going to skip this because this is just a formula and it's automatically calculated we can put the due date and let's say it's due today and it's automatically going to jump to the top of the list because it's sorted such that the things that our due students are in the top and do latest are in the bottom and we could tag it to whatever it is related to okay moving on to questions about the school template I had some questions on how to actually embed your Google calendar so this is how you do it you're going to go to the link that I have over here to indify and you're going to create a new widget I've made so many clearly we're going to Google Calendar and it's going to generate a widget for us here you're going to sign in with your Google account and just allow it access to your Google calendar and then you're going to see that it magically appears over here you are able to choose the specific calendar that you want to see I'm just going to have my lectures open and I just like to see it per day sorry I'm moving my head the camera is vlogging my screen and then perfect this is it these are all of the lectures that I have every day and then we're going to click this clipboard over here that's going to copy the link that we're going to embed here let me just get rid of this and then we're going to press slash embed enter paste that press enter and then you're going to see that our Google Calendar is magically going to load here so in our self board let's talk about the finances which is definitely one of the trickier page let me give a breakdown of how this works so this is our Balance Calculator and it's going to give an overview of our starting balance our total income expenses and the balance the balance is just the starting balance and the income minus the expense so this is our income table and this is where we can put in all of our sources of income how much it was and the date that we received it and this sum is what appears here in the total income let's leave the budget for now and move on to the expenses this is your master list of every time you make a purchase you're going to input it over here let's say we bought bubble tea under category that would go under food and drinks and this is a relation to this table the store it's not really relevant here when did I buy it let's say September 14th even though I know this is the August calendar and this is also sorted such that the most recent purchases come to the top and let's say it was eight dollars so that's how you add in new expenses so when I added in that new expenses that eight dollars under food and drinks was added over here to food and drinks under total spent just to show you the difference take a look at this number and how it affects this number let's say for some reason our bubble tea was a thousand dollars we can see that the change was made over here so this is how you input your new purchases all right so now we can take a look at the budget these are all of the categories of the different purchases that we make this is the budget that we set ourselves and right next to it is the total spent in each category this is a Formula that just subtracts total spent minus the budget so this is the amount that we have left allocated to this specific category and this is another formula that tells us if we're under budget we have a check mark if we're over budget we will have an alarm Bell and this is nothing because I haven't spent anything under health so let's take a look at what it would look like if we were over budget so let's say that our budget for food and drinks was actually 50 you'll see it becomes an alarm Bell and that we're 55.80 over alright and another question I had was about this habit tracker once again red Gregory how this works is that we have our habit analytics up here and our calendar with all of our daily half bits so I had some questions about how to change the daily habits maybe yours isn't the same as mine you can go to any of the cards here on the calendar and make the modifications here so let's say instead of meditating what you want to do is bike to work so you can click that click rename we're going to change this to bike to work press enter and those changes are going to be made everywhere as you can see here the only thing is that you are going to have to also update that under habit analytics so we're going to go to meditate switch that to bike to work press enter and we're going to edit the property make sure it's related to the correct one back to work and that's how you make those changes if you wanted to add a new habit it would be very similar we would go to one of these cards we would add a property under check box what's another habit water plants don't water your plants every day but let's say that was a daily habit and we could just enter that and I'm just going to move her up a bit and that's going to be a new habit and it's going to show up everywhere and then you can just press Plus we can go to roll up over here we're going to call it water plants the relation will be to daily habits the property is going to be water plants that we just made we're going to calculate it to show percent checked and we're going to show it as a bar right now it says zero because we haven't done it but let's go here and click that and we're going to see that it makes a difference there and that's how to add a new habit if we wanted to add new cards unfortunately you're going to have to do it manually you just want to make sure that you duplicate the ones that are on the same week just because this relates to the weekdays analytics and you want to make sure everything still syncs up so if I want to make a new one for today I can click right click this go to duplicate and I can drag that over down here and that concludes our video I hope that you guys found this useful and that it properly equipped you to use notion on your own I love notion I've been using it for years but it's taken me a really long time to understand all of the functions and how I can customize it to best suit my needs I hope with this video you've better understood the basics you've learned how to make databases and all of those things by yourself and you know how to use my template and customize it to Best Fit whatever you need it to do if you have any questions comments or if you have any ideas for future videos or tutorials please leave them down in the comments I'll love reading what you guys are up to and I honestly read your comments every morning and every night so write whatever you want down there but please keep it nice so as always thank you so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next one bye [Music]