What Makes Notion So Flexible?

For those new to Notion, this article is about understanding a little bit about the three or four major building-blocks of the software. The reason Notion is so powerful is because of this design approach by its developers that allows us, as end users, a great deal of creative and problem-solving flexibility.

This article is about what the Notion BLOCKS, PAGES and DATABASES are, how they are designed to work together, and how you can use this knowledge to build things you like to use using Notion.

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Article Contents

We're going to look at the following 3 building blocks in Notion, starting from the bottom up:

1. BLOCKS
2. PAGES, and
3. DATABASES

We will wrap things up with a short section on the Sidebar, other layout features and make a brief mention of Notion's API ability to extend Notion even further.

What follows is a lot of useful detail. But in so many ways, the diagram above encapsulates the core of how Notion can serve your needs.

1. From the Bottom Up: BLOCKS

Let's start from the smallest element of Notion: the BLOCK.

Think of Notion as a bottomless bin of building blocks. Build whatever you want, however you want! Every page you create in Notion will be composed of many "blocks," in the same way a LEGO castle is composed of many LEGO bricks

Notion describes BLOCKS as LEGO bricks (above). Like LEGO bricks, BLOCKS come in a variety of shapes. There are dozens of unique BLOCK types in Notion. When you type the "/" key, Notion opens a pop-up menu with all the different blocks that are available. Typing "/" in combination with other letters can be used as a block-creation short-cut if you know what you want to make.

But not to worry, there are only about 6 different major classifications (or types) of BLOCKS in Notion. In no particular order these types are:

• Text blocks, including bulleted lists, section headers, toggle blocks and "callout" blocks. Know that the text attributes such as font, size and color are quite limited.
• Database blocks. We will discuss these in more detail below, but for now, understand that a Notion BLOCK can display a view of a Notion DATABASE. It can do this in several ways, so stay tuned!
• Images & Media. Like a web page, you can embed digital images right into your Notion pages using an image BLOCK. Not limited to just 2D images, the media types can also be sound files, video files or other types of 3rd party files such as Word documents.
• Embedded blocks. Taking the Images & Media functionality a step further, you can embed information that lives outside of Notion in embedded types of BLOCKS. This includes other web pages, but may also include charts and forms from 3rd party SaaS services. At its simplest, hyperlinks to other sources anywhere online (including to other Notion PAGES) can load those sources into your web browser, but many types of embeds are truly embedded into a specific page and layout in your Notion environment.
• Equations and Code, which although related to text, allow some additional flexibility in rendering different fonts, colors and text-alignment. I tend to use these less for their purpose and more for an inline style element if and when more choices could be effective for text.
• Buttons. These allow you to customize some basic (but multi-step) automated commands that run when a user clicks your button. These can open a record, open a record template or just navigate somewhere. I love buttons in Notion.

2. PAGES: Records in Disguise!

PAGES are equally as flexible as BLOCKS in Notion - just in different ways.

PAGE Basics

At its most basic, you can think about a PAGE as simply a container for any and every kind of BLOCK Notion has to offer. You get to assemble whatever BLOCKS you wish on any PAGE you wish. One simple use of a PAGE is to think of it as a page in a notebook filled with notes (or empty!).

You can also think about a PAGE as a webpage that's part of a website where each PAGE has different content.

PAGES are Multimodal - they are also Records (in Disguise)

In the same way that light behaves as both a particle and a wave in physics, PAGES are both individual notes/documents/webpages AND they are DATABASE records.

What?

A PAGE in Notion (that Notion also sometimes refers to as a Document) is another basic building block in Notion. Let's see how they can be both a note/document/webpage and a DATABASE record.

The PAGE as a Note

The name Notion connotes, among other things, the idea of taking notes. This is why Notion is one of the competitors to Evernote and OneNote and other applications like Obsidian.

Notes are discrete and often contain a single atomic idea, like an old fashioned index card for a research paper. OR, notes might be a long journal essay you're writing. Or a quick copy and paste of an image that's meaningful to you. Maybe your notes are what you manage to scribble down during meetings at work.

Because notes can be so many different things to so many different people who may be using different conceptual approaches to journaling, note-taking or personal knowledge management #pkm, the developers of Notion chose to make the note PAGE a blank canvas. Onto this canvas you add BLOCKS to your heart's content.

The PAGE as a Webpage

Because your notes are contained in a digital system (the Notion application environment), the note very much resembles a page on a website. Like a website, your Notion can link your notes together as different PAGES within your Notion environment. In fact, your Notion environment is flexible enough to model multiple websites with multiple webpages each, to extend the analogy. In fact, as part of the basic, free services, Notion allows you to directly publish all or some or one of your Notion PAGES directly to the Internet. But even if you never publish a singe Notion PAGE, they all are still operating as separate HTML webpages in your local Notion set up. Wild.

Nested PAGES

The Notion PAGE isn't just a webpage - it's also can act as a folder. What that means is that you can nest one PAGE inside of another PAGE in a parent-child fashion. The sub-pages are still PAGES. In fact, a parent PAGE can contain multiple child PAGES under it. And a sub-page can contain one or more additional child PAGES. And on and on ad infinitum.

The PAGE as a DATABASE Record

Here's where things start resembling quantum physics. Ready?

At the same time that a PAGE can be a stand alone note or document, it can also be a record in a Notion DATABASE. In fact, every Notion DATABASE's record is a PAGE. (However, before we go on, it is possible to have one or more free-standing PAGES that are NOT part of a DATABASE.)

When you create a DATABASE in Notion, the records you add to that DATABASE are PAGES. They are PAGES that can also have additional metadata attributes (that Notion calls PROPERTIES). The PROPERTIES any particular page will have are the ones you've created in the DATABASE it belongs to.

Therefore, each PAGE that's a record has (and can display or hide) its PROPERTIES as well as its content.

PROPERTIES versus CONTENT

Before we switch over to a discussion of DATABASES more fully, it's important to highlight the Property/Content distinction in Notion. When we are looking at a PAGE that's a record within a DATABASE, that PAGE will have both Properties and Content.

Remember this: that a DATABASE record (a PAGE) will have metadata attributes. These are the columns or PROPERTIES of that DATABASE. Each PAGE under a given DATABASE will have the same PROPERTIES as every other PAGE under that DATABASE.

Now, what's critical to also know is that the value of a given PROPERTY of a given record can be different from PAGE to PAGE or record to record of the same DATABASE. Think about Excel: a column in Excel is analogous to the PROPERTY in Notion. Each record in a column will be of the same data type (for example, a date) but each date's value may be different from row-to-row.

• A PAGE belonging to a different DATABASE as a record in that other DATABASE will have different PROPERTIES from a PAGE in the original DATABASE.

The added twist is that when you open a DATABASE record in Notion, you are opening a PAGE! Therefore, the PAGE can have Content as well as Properties.

• That is to say, that every PAGE in a DATABASE can have a wildly unique look and feel made up of all the things we discussed above in PAGES and
• Every PAGE will have a uniform set of PROPERTIES, but each PAGE's PROPERTIES may be set to unique values.

3. DATABASES

Are you ready to tackle DATABASES? I hope so, as these are what impressed me into switching to Notion and investing time in learning it. DATABASES are at the heart of Notion's power and flexibility.

We discussed how the records within a Notion DATABASE are always PAGES above. We also touched on the fact that a DATABASE wouldn't be much of a DATABASE if it didn't store any data--and that Notion's DATABASE stores data as PROPERTIES of the DATABASE. But what are PROPERTIES?

PROPERTIES

The easiest way to think about a Notion DATABASE is to imagine one as a single table in Excel (and actually, the default view in Notion is the Table view too). When you create a new DATABASE in Notion, it will open as a table-grid that looks a lot like Excel.

• Each row (or record) is a PAGE that you can open and
• Each column is a PROPERTY that tracks some kind of metadata that you assign to it.

A PROPERTY is a column in the DATABASE

• Each PROPERTY can only be of ONE datatype.

A datatype simply means whether the column stores a number or a bunch of letters (known as a string or text). There are several other datatypes besides numbers. Like Excel there are dates. There are formulas. You can store hyperlinks as URLs. The point is that you cannot store a number as a date or text and expect it to behave like a date or text. Once you assign the PROPERTY's datatype, it doesn't change (although it can certainly be blank).

The Relation PROPERTY - a Special Property

One datatype in Notion is the Relation property. A Relation PROPERTY turns a flat, two-dimensional table into a relational database in Notion. The Relation PROPERTY allows you to create a relationship between two (or more) different tables (DATABASES) in Notion.

One example of this is contained in the built-in templates for Projects and Tasks in a project management context. In this example Projects and Tasks are two discrete and different DATABASE tables in Notion that track different (but related) things. Projects and Tasks have been connected - or related - using a Relation PROPERTY. In fact, by doing this, a project manager can look at all the tasks that have been assigned to a particular project, which are different from all the tasks that are assigned to a different project.

This is known as a one-to-many relationship where one Project (record) can have many Tasks (records from a different table).

DATABASE Views

A Table in Notion is just one View of the underlying data that Notion saves to the DATABASE. You can store more data than actually gets displayed in any view (although I'd recommend always keeping one view as "All" that does not hide any PROPERTIES or records).

You can create an unlimited number of different views into a single DATABASE in Notion.

You can sort and filter a table to display a tailored set of data in one context and different one in another.

In this way, Notion can behave like Excel tables. Unlike Excel, Notion stores the underlying data behind the scenes and not on the grid itself, and this leads to the ability to customize how you use your data. For example, you could display a quick list of tasks that are not started on your home page to help keep you focused, and a set of completed tasks in your archives that you can look at if you want to feel a sense of accomplishment.

In addition to filtering and sorting, one of the blow-my-socks away features that Notion can do at the click of a mouse is provide different built-in views that extend the functionality beyond the spreadsheet/table. (Microsoft has done a similar thing recently with Lists in SharePoint.)

Sub-items

Sub items are relatively easy to create in a Notion database. Let's say you have a financial database and you want to see both larger, aggregated budget categories like "Home" as well as the elements belonging to that category like "Mortgage" and "Insurance", you can create the elements as sub-items of the bigger category.

Notion allows you to click to show/hide the sub-items if you enable them, and you can always create static views that flatten all sub-items into separate records (which is what they are).

Under the hood, sub-items are a kind of Relation look-up where the table the sub-item (or child record) is looking up to find its parent is the same table. Notion is basically creating this parent/child relationship column for you when you turn on sub-items.

Built-in Notion Views

• Table: the default view. Looks like an Excel grid or a SharePoint List.
• List: use a list to get a stripped-down view of the data in your DATABASE. Lists typically only have between 1-3 PROPERTIES displayed and can be much easier to read, especially on a mobile phone.
• Board: The board view allows you to sort your records into columns based on a "Select" PROPERTY. Board view models a Kanban board and is useful in standup meetings or Agile project management - or anywhere where you want to see your data sorted by a category. Each record is displayed as a data card and you can control what gets displayed on the cards.
• Gallery: Like a Board view, the Gallery uses data cards instead of rows to display the records, but unlike the Board that uses vertical columns to sort the cards, the Gallery just displays them as a grid. However, you can use grouping with this view to segregate the cards by row (instead of column).
• Calendar: When you have date-driven data such as project tasks or if you're purpose is to use Notion to book a resource like a particular conference room or make appointments on a calendar, this view organizes your data by date onto a calendar grid.
• Timeline: One of the most intriguing views in Notion. Also for date (and time!) data, the timeline view is particularly good at showing dependencies and sequences of events. Notion includes the ability to identify dependencies as a kind of parent/child Relationship to the same DATABASE (similar to sub-items above). You can use the Timeline to create a GANTT chart. Slick.

DATABASE Templates

Remember how a DATABASE records are also PAGES? One of the most powerful features of Notion is its ability to create Templates from within a DATABASE that acts like a data entry Form for you or your users.

The DATABASE template allows you to build exactly what a user creating a new record within that DATABASE will see (or have to fill in).

The Template/Form is just another PAGE in disguise, one that typically displays a tailored and smaller set of PROPERTIES from the DATABASE in an order that makes sense for the data entry context.

A DATABASE can have an unlimited number of Templates, but realistically you don't want more than 2-3. In fact, in most cases, it's only the default Template that you might want to alter.

When you use a Template in connection with a filtered DATABASE View, the template will automatically fill in PROPERTIES that are constrained by the filter. For example, if you have a particular DATABASE View that is filtered to show only Active records, then the Template will automatically set the status PROPERTY to "Active" when the record is created. No need for the user to tick that box.

• Don't forget that the Template is also a PAGE!

That means you can also customize the Content of your record/PAGE. Some DATABASE PROPERTIES can be brought right into the PAGE. For example, if you have a Relation PROPERTY, you can create an inline-DATABASE view right on the PAGE. That PAGE can then automatically display the data that's filtered to the right record on the related table. Amazing.

You can use Templates in connection with the Button BLOCKs to allow a user to bring up a new record for customized data-entry on the fly. Boom.

Other Bits of Notion in the Object Model

That concludes our tour through the three main elements of building with Notion: (1) BLOCKS, (2) PAGES and (3) DATABASES. What's left?

The Sidebar

The Sidebar is your built-in navigation component in Notion. It allows you to see your PAGES. A best practice is to keep your Sidebar simple and clean by nesting PAGES in an organized and logical fashion. I use Tiago Forte's PARA method where four of my top-level pages correspond to Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive. But I also have a dashboard called "Personal Home" and another called "Finance Dashboard" that I keep at the top-level where they're accessible.

The Sidebar is collapsible so it can take up less real estate. It also allows access to areas of your environment such as Teamspaces versus Private. If you favorite a PAGE you visit/use often, it will appear in the top-level Favorites section.

Updates and reminders appear in the Sidebar. So does access to the Notion Templates Gallery (note* this is a different kind of Template from the one we discussed above in DATABASE Templates!).

Notion's API

Do API's scare you? They don't need to! In fact, the embedded BLOCK type makes use of pre-configured Notion APIs with popular 3rd party software. All you have to do is provide your credentials to your 3rd party software to Notion and provide the right Notion DATABASE or PAGE to the 3rd party software and the rest takes care of itself.

An API stands for Application Programmer Interface. An interface is a pre-defined set of the types of data that can be exchanged by two different softwares and may also include triggers that open/close the door to allow the data to pass back and forth.

Notion has been developed to be used extensively with existing 3rd party software. It helps with adoption and use and extends Notion's capabilities far beyond what the native app can do by itself.

One flaw that Notion has is that its PAGES have no build in ability to draw or create custom shapes or diagrams. Therefore, the API is used to bring in things like Figma designs, Forms that work directly with your Notion DATABASES that allow for customer portals, charts from 3rd party vendors that can take data from your Notion, manipulate and transform it and then embed the visualization back on your PAGE in Notion.

What will you do with Notion?

We'd love to hear what you do, actually! Please join our LinkedIn Notion user group Got a Foggy Notion. It's free and a great networking experience!