Updated Notion Tutorial For Beginners (Fall 2022)

It's time for a back to basics Notion tutorial. Whether you're brand new to Notion or you're a casual user trying to learn about some updates, this Notion beginner's guide is for you.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

All right, welcome to the tutorial portion of this video. The first thing that you're gonna wanna do if you've never started a Notion workspace before, is to go to the website Notion.so/signup. And there, you can create your username and password and create your first workspace.

What you're looking at right now is what pops out if you choose a personal workspace instead of a team workspace. And also keep in mind that I have it set to dark mode 'cause that's easier on my eyes, but you can also switch it to light mode which I will show you later.

So as you can see by this prompt right here, Notion actually populates your sidebar with some templates for you to help you get started. We're not gonna be going over those today, so I'm gonna hit Clear Templates and they're gonna disappear. All you're left with is this Getting Started document.

I highly recommend going over this on your own time when you start your Notion workspace, but we are gonna go ahead and dive into my tutorial for today.

First, let's go over the sidebar, which is this over here. This little arrow can minimize it and if you hover back over it, you can maximize it again. If it's minimized and you take your mouse over to the side, it pops out and when you move your mouse, it disappears. So having it open or not permanently depends on what you're trying to do inside your Notion workspace. For today's purposes, I'm just gonna go ahead and leave it open so it's easier for you to see.

The sidebar is how you navigate and organize your Notion workspace at the highest level. And while we're here, this top most part is the name of the workspace. I'm gonna click on it right now and you can see all of the other workspaces that I personally have access to inside of Notion. But today, we're just gonna be living in this brand new one, so I can do the demo for you.

The search bar is great if you're trying to find something inside your Notion. It's basically like Google Search, but inside your Notion workspace. Comes in handy a lot. And as you can see, you can filter your search results as well to make it easier to find what you're looking for.

The updates part is basically your notifications inside Notion. So if you are working by yourself and you have a personal Notion workspace, you won't see mentions collaborating with a team. But if you did have a team workspace, this is where those mentions would show up. When you're working by yourself, most of these are going to be date-based reminders. So for example, if you set a due date reminder for a task, this is where it's gonna pop up.

The Settings and Members button is pretty self-explanatory. It's where you can manage your account. It's where you can add members, either who are guests or permanent teammates. You can set your notification settings. And here, like I promised earlier, this is where the appearance is. So if I switched it to light, this is what Notion looks like. But because I am sensitive to too much brightness on my computer, I'm gonna switch it back to dark.

And then this is also the place where you would manage your billing and your subscription if you want to use one of the paid Notion plans instead of the free plan. I personally run my business on the free plan. You don't really need the paid ones unless you're on a large team, in my opinion.

Now this templates button is great because it brings up, essentially, all of the templates that are already built into Notion. So if you are looking for design templates, student templates, engineering templates, et cetera, ones that Notion, the company, has incorporated into their product, you can find them here. If you are looking for like Thomas Frank templates or if I have templates in the future, they will not live here. You will access those through that creator's website and then duplicate it into your Notion.

Then import is pretty self-explanatory if you're trying to import data from other apps or from a spreadsheet. This is one of the ways in which you can do that, but only one of the ways. There are many other ways to import information into Notion. So I've actually personally never used this button to import information, but it's there.

And then pretty self-explanatory is the trash. Any pages or databases that you delete end up here.

All right, now we're gonna go over what I consider one of the most important distinctions in Notion. And that is the distinction between pages, databases, blocks, and linked databases. So let's start by creating a page and go from there.

So if you go over into your sidebar, you will see this little button, Add A Page. That's what we're gonna click. It has created a new item in the sidebar called Untitled. And over here in the body of the app is this thing that looks untitled with a blinking cursor. As is, this is a page. It could become a dashboard with a lot of different kinds of information inside of it, including linked databases.

You will see, however, that down here are some database options. If we were to click table, for example, this untitled page would become a database and it would be a database forevermore. That won't make sense to you until we have some examples. So I'm gonna go ahead and make this a database and then create another page. So I'm just typing in where the cursor was blinking to name the database and I'm gonna click Table. And now you can see after I clicked table, the format of what we're looking at changed drastically. Right?

Now we're gonna go back over here and click Add A Page. And this one we're gonna name demo page. Now instead of clicking any of these, you can either click empty with icon empty or click outside of all of this. And you can see how all of those options disappear. And now we have a blinking cursor and the text that says "Type '/' for commands." This is a page because I can add a lot of stuff to it using what are called blocks. So where my cursor is currently blinking, that is considered a block. If I move my mouse over it and hover my mouse there, you'll see these icons to the left appear. There's a plus sign and there's a pair of vertical dots. If I click on the vertical dots, you'll see some options come up. We can delete the block. We can duplicate the block. We can turn the block into different types of formatting, which I'll go over shortly. And you can even turn a block into a page, which we'll also talk about shortly.

But to get started, let's add some stuff to this demo page. So to make things easy, I'm gonna use the slash commands like the grayed out text suggests. So I'm going to hit the slash, which is the same as the question mark on a QWERTY keyboard. And then all of these options come up. So let's start by adding a heading. This is a heading. And now I'm gonna hit Enter on my keyboard and another block appears. I'm gonna hit the slash command again, let's try a bulleted list. This is a bulleted list. I'm gonna hit Enter again. And because I was in a bulleted list, it automatically gives me another bullet to grow the list. But if I didn't want that for any reason, I just wanted to go back to normal text, all I have to do is hit Enter again and the dot disappears and it goes back to a plain blank text block.

So now that we have these three elements, the first thing I wanna show you is that you can move them around because, unlike paragraphs in a Word document like in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you can really easily click and drag around blocks of information inside Notion. So again, I'm gonna hover my mouse over this text and I'm gonna click and hold these vertical dots. And then I can drag, while I'm still holding my mouse down, and move the text where I want it. Same thing goes for the heading. Same thing goes for the bulleted list. It's really easy to drag things around. And as you'll notice, there's this huge gap between this heading block and this plain text block. And that is because headings automatically create vertical empty space above them to help distinguish large blocks of text. It's really nice. And there are three different heading styles in decreasing size.

The other thing you can do in Notion is create columns. So if I were to click and drag this heading column to the left of this bulleted column, they're now in two separate columns. And if I wanted yet a third column, I could track this one all the way over to the right.

Now this brings up something that as a side note, it's really important to know. If you go up here to the far upper right of your Notion workspace and click these three dots, there are a number of options here. You can change the default font. And I also know it's possible to force Notion to use an entirely different font than these three. For example, the dyslexic font (Open Dyslexic) is something that one of my clients has used in their Notion and it is fantastic. What I wanna point out here though is this full width toggle. If I click this on, I want you to pay attention to what happens to the columns. They get farther apart. So when you're not at full width, it just creates a more narrow space in your workspace to have information. And when you click on full width, it takes up the full width of your screen, essentially. So depending on visually what you need to be most successful to understand your information and to manipulate it in ways that work for you and your brain, understanding how easy it is to switch from the narrow width to the full width can be really helpful.

This is a page. We have added multiple blocks to this page. And before we leave here real quick, I just want to highlight all the different kinds of blocks you can have. So you can have a text block. You can have a page, which is, essentially, a piece of text that is clickable that opens a page. So you can have pages nested within pages. You can have a to-do list. These are the three headings I was referring to. You can add a simple table, which is really handy when you don't need the robust, like, calculating and database skill of a full database. A simple table's great. Bulleted list, numbered list, a toggled list, and that means it's collapsible. So when the point of the arrow is pointing to the right, it's collapsed. And when it's pointing down, it's open. You can have a quote. And this is a nice way to highlight quotes in your text.

A divider, these are really nice. Here I'm just gonna go ahead and add one quick and see how it adds this wonderful long, thin divider. And if I were to click and drag it into one of the columns, it would automatically size itself to the column.

Other options are a link to an existing page. A callout is a great way to, again, visually distinguish information. And then, you can mention a person, you can mention a page, you can have a date reminder, you can have an emoji, an inline equation. I don't know anything about using Notion for mathematics, but it exists.

And then down here, you can even add a database right into a page. We're gonna get into more of this later. Particularly, with the linked database.

And then you can add media such as images, a web bookmark, video, audio, code, a file that you upload from your computer. And then there are native integrations with other apps. So Google Drive, Twitter of all things, GitHub, Google Maps. I love Whimsical personally. But you can see that there are a lot of integrations built into Notion at this point in time.

And then there are advanced blocks down here. But really, in your day to day life, you're mostly gonna be living with these main ones up here. But I just wanted to highlight the options available to you.

Now before we digress from what a page is, so we can see what a database is. I wanna really quick highlight how to change the width of columns. So I'm just moving my mouse and it's hovering over the in-between area, between two columns, and you'll see this vertical bar appears. If I click and drag on that bar, I can change the width of a column. And as you'll see, it's kind of snapping every centimeter or two so you don't have infinite adjustability, but it does snap to pretty convenient widths. And that's how you change the size of columns.

Now as I have said before, this is a page. A page is something that can include lots of different blocks, all of the blocks we just went over. Now if we go back here and we go to our demo database, this is not a page because it is only and ever will be a database.

So let's go ahead and look at what a database inside Notion is. We're gonna click this button, New Database. Ta-dah! We have now finished making a database. Ooh, that's gonna be confusing. So let me really quick explain what just happened. So I'm gonna add a page again, second demo database, and we're gonna hit Table again. And it brought up what will make more sense to you later in this video. But essentially, this feels like a a database browser, kinda like your web browser and how you have multiple tabs open at a time. That's how databases now function in Notion.

And this is actually one of the reasons why I wanted to film this tutorial because enough has changed in Notion that I wanted to highlight some of those changes, 'cause they're amazing, but they can be really confusing if you're not used to the new user interface about them.

So this opened, which is basically like an empty browser ready to be filled with tabs of different databases or different views of the same database. And over here, to actually turn this page into a new database, I click this New Database button. And then it finishes turning it into a table. So let's go back to this original database, which I basically did the same thing with. And because we had selected a table, it created a very simple table with three empty entries in it.

A database is, essentially, a really fancy schmancy spreadsheet, except it doesn't necessarily have the same computational power as an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet, for example. It does have a lot of computational power, but it isn't a one-to-one comparison.

Let me give you a quick tour of what we're looking at here. So this that says Table, that is a tab. So I was referring to this as like a web browser with tabs of databases. This thing that says Table, that's one tab. If I were to click this plus button, we would create another tab and I'll get there. Down here, we have this view of the database and if we wanna look at it vertically, so this property is called name. This property is called tags. And then you can add infinite properties.

What is great about Notion is the sheer number of types of properties you can add. I clicked the plus button and over here, you can see all the different types of properties you can have. You can have a text property, a number property, a select property (which basically means it's a dropdown, and you can only ever have one thing selected; Whereas a multi-select is also a dropdown, but you can have more than one thing selected for that entry in your database). The status property, which essentially means not started, in progress, done, is what it spits out for you, but you can customize that to meet your needs. A date property, a person property if you're working with a team, files and media if you actually need to attach a file to a database entry, checkbox, URL (and those become clickable, very handy), Email, phone number, a formula.

So like in Google Sheets or Excel, you can have complex formulas, but they don't have to be mathematical. They can also be formatting based. It's very handy.

A relation, and this is if you wanna make two different databases talk to each other. So for example, for my assistant, I have a to-do list database and a time sheet database. And when they put in their entry for time on a given day, they can actually attach it to the task they were working on. It's very fancy.

A roll up is taking advantage of that relation between two databases and spitting out other information from the related database. So let's say for example, my assistant is working on a task associated with a particular project. Instead of having more than one relation in their time sheet, where they had to manually go in and be like, this is the task I was working on and then this is the project I was working on because of what that task is attached to, we could have the project be a roll up. So all they have to do is select which task they were working on in their time sheet and then it would automatically, in the roll up property, say what project is associated with that task.

Created time is automatic and it is retroactive. So if you were to go ahead and add a created time property later on after having a database for ages, it would just tell you when each instance was created. It's very nifty and similar with created by, last edited time, last edited by.

Databases also have multiple ways of viewing the database. So this is the table view. Let's go ahead and add a view. So I click that plus button up here, so see another tab appeared. And we can have a table like we had before, a board, a timeline, a calendar, a list. And basically, a list feels very much like a table, just without all of the lines dividing the information. And then a gallery if you're exclusively really wanting visual representation of your database.

So let's go ahead and make one of each. And let's name this board so you can see how over here the name changed. Let's add a timeline. Call it a timeline. Let's add a calendar, call it calendar, so on and so forth. Last one, gallery. So in this one database, we now have a table, a board, timeline, calendar, a list, and a gallery. I'm gonna go ahead and name this demo entry.

And let's, ooh, this is fun. So when we added the calendar view, because there had not already been a date property in the database, it went ahead and added it for us because you can't have a calendar view with no dates in your entries. Let's put today's date.

Now we can go and look. This same entry is now going to appear in each one of these views. because these tabs are the same database, just with the information presented differently.

So one of the reasons why I enjoy Notion so much for myself and many of my clients use it is because of how customizable the view is of what you're looking at. Because often, when you are neurodivergent or you struggle with brain fog and overwhelm, how information is presented to you can mean the difference between understanding what you're looking at and being completely confused and overwhelmed. So that's one of the reasons why I love Notion so much. It's not the only tool that can provide that, but it scratches that itch really fantastically for a lot of my neurospicy clients and myself. It is the only tool I have used consistently for multiple years. I think I've been using it for four years straight now.

So this is a database. We have the name of the database up here and we've essentially got the database information. Now let's go back to the table. If I were to click down here, you see all of this empty space right now? You might think you can add blocks down here, but you can't because this is a database only and it will only ever be a database. No blinking cursor is appearing anywhere.

But back to our demo page, you can click multiple columns and the cursor comes up. This is a page because we can add blocks to it. This is a database because we cannot add blocks to it. That distinction was so confusing to me when I first started using Notion, which is why I'm harping on it so much right now because it can be so helpful to understand.

And now this is where the power of Notion comes in. Like I said just a moment ago, being able to customize what you're looking at is profound. And we're gonna go look at that really quick. So if I go back to this demo page, I'm gonna click down here. We're gonna hit the slash like we were doing earlier and we're going to type in, you don't have to scroll and click these options. You can start typing in the name of the kind of block that you want. That's really helpful. So I'm gonna type in L-I-N-K-E and look. The very top one, linked view of a database. That is what we want. I'm gonna hit Enter, but you could also just move your mouse over it and click it. And now, you can see we have that same kind of web browser available for tabs interface, but it is inside of a page.

If I were to click down here, you can see I get the blinking cursor again. And then this changed because we haven't added any data to it. So we're gonna click here, select a data source, and it's now gonna go back to looking like it was when I first added the linked database. And because we have built two different databases, the demo database and the second demo database, we can now draw in information from those databases into this page. So let's go ahead and click the demo database.

This is what has become so amazing. I forget when these features came out, but the ability to really easily pull in the same views that you have built in other databases into a page, so magical. So let's say we wanted to look at the calendar view here on this page. I just hit the calendar view, then I can hit the X up here. And now we have the calendar view of the demo database here in this demo page. So I could look at it here, but I see no other information. But I have now pulled it into here and we have that same demo entry in here. I'm gonna show you how this works both ways. So we are in the demo page. I have linked the demo database. We're gonna hit the demo entry. We're gonna add a tag to it. I don't know why the word "bark" is coming to me right now, so, "bark." If we were to go back to the demo database and open the demo entry, it says "bark." So it's just one database with lots of different views. And this is the original right here, but we have now pulled it into this page. And this is how you can build dashboards for yourself.

Essentially, a Notion dashboard is simply a page with blocks added, blocks that you find helpful. So that way, you can be looking at all of the information you need for a particular context. So for example, and I may show this a little bit later, I have a content planning dashboard inside my Notion workspace that pulls in multiple databases and simple formulas to help make my decision making easy when I'm planning future videos.

Now there is one other aspect of a linked database that is magical. So we have these tabs here, I'm gonna hit this plus. And remember, we are in the demo page and this is a block and it is a linked database. It is showing the demo database. You can see that little arrow, that's what tells us that it is linking to an original database source and just showing us the information from that.

I'm gonna click this plus button and now I can select from the other database we have. Second database table. And remember over here, we go to that second database. I never added anything. So second demo entry. I go back to the demo page and see we added the table from the second demo database. Here's the second demo entry.

So calendar from the demo database, table from the second demo database. This is magical.

Before, you weren't able to do this. A linked database could only be from a specific database and you could not pull information from multiple databases. We would do very mangled confusing things in order to get the dashboards that we wanted, but now it's so much easier because of this particular thing.

All right, let's do a quick review before we go on to just a few more details and I'll maybe show you some stuff from my personal Notion as well. So we have the sidebar over here. We have the body of the page or the database that you're working in. And then we have this handy dandy button up here. I didn't go over this star, but what's really great is you can have favorited pages that show up in your sidebar. So I want you to watch over here in the sidebar when I click on this star. Ready? Go. And now you can see there are two different sections in the sidebar. There's a favorites and then there's private. If you're in a team workspace, you will also have a team section. I forget what it's actually called, but essentially, a section for pages that are collaborative. And then you will also have a private section that nobody else can have access to. It's very handy for separating your personal information inside Notion, even if you're working in a collaborative workspace.

So it can be really handy to have just a few pages starred that you're working in a lot at any given time. And it just makes it really easy to find them, 'cause they then pop up in this favorite section up here.

So we talked about the sidebar. We talked about these up here. If you want me to talk about sharing in Notion, I'm happy to do that, but that feels a little bit more advanced. And this I want to be a beginner tutorial. And then we talked about the difference between a page and a database. And essentially, a page can have infinite blocks in it. And blocks are just these little building blocks inside Notion. That's a block. A page can have as many blocks as you want in any assortment that you want. Whereas a database, they look the same over here. The demo page and the demo database, they look the same, but a page can have infinite blocks. Whereas, a database is only a database. And if I were to switch back to the table view and were to click down here, I can't add blocks here. And then the last thing we covered is how you can have a linked database block inside of a page. And just a quick reminder, how we did that is you get your blinking cursor going. You can either click the plus button to bring up this menu or you can click slash on your keyboard and either scroll and click or start typing what you want. So in this case, it's a linked database. So I'm gonna type in L-I-N-K-E and then linked view of database. That's what we were doing. Hit Enter or click it with your mouse. And then you get this linked database block.

And as you can see, if you hover over the upper left hand corner of that block, you get the plus and the vertical dots again and you can click and move things around. Now there is an unfortunate detail where you cannot use a linked database block to create a column. Let's say we have this linked database block and this linked database block. I cannot click and drag on the dots and move it to the left of the bottom linked database block and create another column. I can't do that. It's only letting me put it below. It's annoying, but there is a workaround. If you already have columns created like we do up here, you can click and drag one into a column. So you simply, if you want to have linked database blocks in a column format, you just need to make sure to create the columns first and then click and drag those linked database blocks into the respective column that you choose.

All right, so we have gone over the bare bones, the building blocks, if you were, of Notion. Let's look and see what that makes possible for you. And I'm going to give you a small tour of some of my personal Notion workspace. All right, welcome to my content planning dashboard inside of Notion. This is a page that has many blocks in it. So we've got some callout blocks over here, 'cause those help visually differentiate information. And then we have a linked database over here. And this is my ideas database. And then down here, we have a linked database to my actual content calendar.

So what happens when I am ready to plan out my next batch of videos is I come here and I look at the ideas that I have and I decide which ideas I wanna work on. And then I plan my next four to eight videos. So as you can see, here's a little bit of a teaser for what's coming up. Here's this video. In two weeks, I'm doing a spoonie gift guide. Two weeks after that, I'm doing a deep dive into the mindset behind time blocking. And then to finish off the year, a day in the life of a chronically ill business owner, yours truly.

So this is what I was talking about earlier. The ability to create personalized dashboards that present the information to you that you need in order to make decisions and to actually do your work instead of simply do task management is incredibly powerful.

All right, so that was the broad strokes. How to use Notion as an absolute beginner. If you are interested in me doing a deeper dive into databases themselves and what use cases are great for databases, I'm happy to do that. Just let me know down in the comments. Now back to full screen Cassie.

There you have it. An updated beginner Notion tutorial to help you get started or update your existing skills.

Earlier I mentioned that I'm a coach for neurodivergent spoonies. The primary way I work with clients is through my signature course, The Action Navigator. It's packed to the brim with tools and techniques for mastering your time, getting organized, and offering yourself radical compassion as a neurospicy spoonie. If that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, use this link to learn more.

Check out this post next to discover my planner system advice for neurodivergent spoonies.

And if you like this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back in two weeks with another video. See you then, bye!