Notion Fundamentals: How to Create and Edit Pages

- Hello and welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains.

In this Notion fundamentals video, we are going to talk about Notion's page feature.

It's one of the most basic foundational features in Notion, but understanding how pages work is key to understanding all of the more complex features in Notion.

So specifically, we're going to be building this example page right here, which I've also made available as a template, if you go over to thomasjfrank.

com/fundamentals which is the hub page of this entire free Notion fundamentals course.

What we're going to do here is start from a completely blank page and work our way towards building this example page here.

Along the way, you're going to learn how to create pages, how to navigate around them in your workspace, and how to edit them and customize them just a little bit.

We're going to keep things intentionally simple here and then build upon what you've learned in this lesson in future lessons in this course so you can work up to the more advanced layouts and pages that you've probably seen other YouTubers or even me using.

So with all that said, let's dive into the lesson.

(upbeat music) Okay, so here we are looking at a completely blank page in Notion.

This is probably not what you've seen if you've watched other YouTube content on Notion.

You've probably seen much more complex page layouts like this and you're seeing people like, maybe even me, going through all of these pages at a breakneck speed and you're not quite sure what to do.

This is where we're going to slow things down and break things down to the absolute basics.

Starting with this first question.

What is a page in Notion?

Well, this giant crazy dashboard we're looking at here is a page in Notion.

If I click this database row here and open this up, this is also a page in Notion.

And this blank page is a page in Notion, along with this example page which we are going to be creating in this lesson.

So a page in Notion is really a canvas.

You can kind of create whatever you want on it.

And crucially, canvases or pages in Notion are also used to navigate around your workspace.

If you'll notice here, I've got this page, which I'm just calling page stage one.

And if you look at the bottom, we have a link to page stage two.

If I go over here to my navigation and I twirl into here, I see page stage two as well.

This is kind of fundamentally different from a more traditional note taking apps like Evernote, where you have very separate content areas and navigation areas.

In Notion, your page actually defines your navigation structure, because pages that live within other pages are just little blocks here.

If I click this, I see the next page.

Another question that I've received is, what's the difference between a page and a database?

So we're going to go over that really quickly here.

Pages exist within databases or outside of them.

They kind of have three different positions.

They can either be top level pages within your workspace, so this page stage one is an example of that, it's a top level page.

They can exist within other pages.

So this page stage two exists within page stage one and you can see that from the breadcrumbs here.

Or pages can exist within a database.

So if I go here, I've got two pages, database page one and page two.

I can click open and now I'm seeing a page.

You can tell if a page exists within a database because it's going to have properties here.

In this case, the only property in this database is the tags property, so that's what I'm seeing here, and that corresponds to this property right here.

We're going to go over databases much more detail in the database lesson later on in the course.

I just wanted to clear that up.

So let's talk about how to start creating pages.

We're going to create this example page here which is very simple, it's a single column of text.

It's got a couple of other things going on here, it's got an icon and it's got a header.

We're going to go from a completely blank page and get to this stage in this lesson and then we're going to build upon what we learn here to start making more and more complicated things.

Culminating at least for this example in a page, it's very similar, but has a lot more blocks.

And from what you learn here, you're going to be able to start creating and understanding more complex layouts like this, which are a lot more useful in many cases.

So let's start with a completely blank page and I'm going to go ahead and delete this one so you can see exactly how to create a new page.

You can do it from this ad page area right here.

You can click new page down here.

There are all kinds of different ways to do this as well.

So I'm just going to click open this page up here and now we have a brand new page.

Let's call this sample page.

The most interesting page title ever created by human beings.

We have a few different options here.

So what we're going to do is go with empty, but I do want to go through these options just so you know what they are.

We have a templates option right here and this is where you can actually import a ton of different templates that Notion has built for you.

So if you want, you can start implementing these in your workspace and use them, or you can also use them just as learning tools.

So go through these if you're curious.

There is also an import tool.

So if you want to import content from Evernote or Asana or from CSV, you can do that as well or you can make databases.

Again, we're going to talk about databases later so hold your horses if you're curious about those.

For now, we're going to click empty.

So the first thing I'm going to do is just paste in the text that I had from earlier.

You could paste in text, you can type things like, wooh, I'm typing cool stuff, whazow.

That's how you spell whazow, right?

And now we've got a page.

We can also delete this block because I don't want typing cool stuff whazow in my coolest script here.

So this is kind of the simplest version of a page that you'll have in Notion, just the title and some text.

Right now, we're going to start gussying up the page with some other things to make it look like this.

And you're going to learn about page features in the process.

So the first thing we're going to do is add an icon.

If I click add icon, again, it's going to grab random emoji from the standard list of emoji that every computer system has.

I've got some other options though.

I can link to one from the internet, or I can upload one on my own.

And I'm going to do that, so I can make it more fun.

Let's go with my pixel llama, and there he is, the handsome little devil.

And you'll notice when we add an icon to a page, it shows up at the top of the page.

It also shows up here in the breadcrumbs and it also shows up here in the navigation.

So that's pretty cool.

We can also add a cover.

So I'm going to go ahead and do that and what covers come in, and it's kind of the same deal as with icons, you get a random one that is assigned and then you can change it and reposition it.

So when you hit change, you've got a bunch of different default options, some colors, some gradients, some random photos that they have included.

You can also choose from a bunch of photos from Unsplash, which is this huge database of completely free to use photos on the internet.

I use them all the time in blog posts.

Or we can link and upload our own stuff.

So I'm going to once again do that.

And now that we've got it here, I'm going to go ahead and reposition it to make it a little bit more nicely positioned, a bit more aesthetic.

And now our page is starting to look quite a bit like this one over here, except you'll notice that the font is actually different here and the text is smaller.

So if you want to change your font or your font size, you can go up to the three dot menu here, and you've got a few options.

We've got a serif font, which is very old-timey looking, good for novelly things, I suppose, a monospaced, if you like code, or your default.

So we can change this to serif and we can also change our texts to small, which is good for very text-heavy pages.

We do also have the option to make this page full-width, which if I do this on a single column of text, isn't super useful.

These lines are a bit too long for comfortable reading, but it does create a flexible layout.

If I collapse the sidebar here, you'll see that it flexes outward and then compresses back in which is very good for multi column layouts that we're going to talk about later on in the course.

So I'm going to go ahead and turn that full-width off here.

And then the last two things we'll go over here are comments and backlinks.

So on pages, I can actually add comments (typing sound) and that's a comment that is added to the entire page.

You can also add comments to blocks, or to even selections of texts which we'll go over in later videos, but this is a comment on the page.

We can also add backlinks to pages.

So if I link to this page from anywhere else in my workspace, it's going to create a backlink.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit Control L and then go over to, let's just say our database page one and paste this.

And when I do this I have a few options, dismiss, mentioned or link to page.

We'll go over exactly what these mean in future videos, but I'm just going to hit mention for now and create a link.

And if I click that link, we go right back to where we were, but now we see that we have one backlink.

If I click this, we see that now database page one is linking to this page.

I have a few different customization options for how these areas are displayed as well.

So if I go to customized page for backlinks, I can show them in a pop over like I just did, or I can expand them, or I can completely turn them off.

And with page comments, I can expand them or I can turn them off.

So if you want to a really clean page, turn everything off here.

Or if you want to see stuff, go ahead and make sure everything is expanded.

To wrap this lesson up, I do want to go over a little bit about navigation within your workspace as it pertains to pages.

So let's first twirl open this template page that we used as a sort of example here and go into it.

And if I open these up, we can see that we've got multiple pages nested within this page.

Just as the universe works on a turtles all the way down principle, with the earth resting on the back of one giant turtle, you can make as many nested pages within Notion as you want.

So page three exists within page two, and page two exists within page one.

You can make this nice hierarchical setups.

And when you're at a specific location in your workspace, you're going to see these breadcrumbs up here.

So you can easily tell where you are in your workspace.

There is one useful thing to note here.

If I'm in a database and let's just create another page in here.

Now, you're going to see that we have the exact same thing going on with our breadcrumbs, Zangief cosplay ideas, database page one, database.

But if I twirl in to my database here in the sidebar, I'm not going to see these pages listed because in the sidebar, instead of listing pages within the database, you see the views of your database.

So if you're ever looking for a page, you're not going to find it that way.

You would want to go to the database itself and then either do some sorts, or do a search, or all kinds of stuff.

We're going to cover all of these concepts later on in the course.

But for now, we've got our example page built and we are pretty much done.

All right, so that is about going to do it for this lesson.

Once again, if you go over to thomasjfrank.

com/fundamentals, you're going to find the hub page for this entire free Notion fundamentals course.

There you're going to find written versions of all of the lessons as they are released and you're also going to find, number one, duplicatable versions of all the example templates we build in this course.

So if you want to duplicate them into your own Notion workspace, you'll be able to play with them, tweak them, change them.

And on that page, you also have the opportunity if you want to sign up for my Notion tips email lists to get even more tips along with notifications when I publish new videos here on Thomas Frank Explains.

In the next video, we're going to talk about Notions writing system, today hybrid markdown system.

We'll go over how to format text, to go over some of the tricks there.

So it's going to build upon what we learned here in this page lesson.

And fittingly, we're going to take the example a simple page we created here and make it just a bit more complex.

Over time, we're going to keep doing this.

We're going to keep doing projects so that you get something useful out of all of these lessons.

And you learn in an iterative process how to build more and more complex and useful layouts, and even systems within Notion.

So hopefully I will see you in that next video.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music)