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Notion.io is my new favorite
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Posted by nathanb
Sep 4, 2019 at 05:00 PM
>xtabber wrote:
>Notion just got a very unfavorable review in PC Magazine:
>
>https://www.pcmag.com/review/370368/notion
>
I thought maybe I reacted too harshly about the summary so I skimmed the article. Turns out I wasn’t harsh enough….
>Notion instead uses collapsible dropdowns. In the image below, for example, you can see there’s a page called Reading List, a subsection called Media, and then subpages for Articles, Podcasts, Essay Resources, and so forth. Effectively, you could have three panels: Reading List > Media > Articles. I expected that clicking on Media would show a preview of all the subpages it contains. But no. You can’t even select Media. If you try, Notion automatically selects the subpage directly below it instead.
She couldn’t select ‘Media’ because that’s a database, not a page, and what she is calling ‘subpages’ under ‘media’ are custom views of that database. In her screenshot, the views have little dot icons instead of big page icons to make this even more clear. She doesn’t even have a basic understanding of the difference between Notion databases and stand-alone pages, which honestly isn’t that hard to understand after glancing at a few templates or spend 3 minutes in the ‘getting started’ material.
>Other options for your page are tables, boards (like kanban boards), lists, calendars, and galleries. Jeez Louise, those sound a whole lot like templates.
Again, those aren’t options for pages, those are custom view options for databases, which you can embed inline into pages. The irony is those templates exist to make these distinctions clear yet she keeps complaining about too many templates as she continues to showcase ignorance of Notion’s basic capabilities.
>Maybe a quarter of the options shouldn’t be among all those choices at all. They should be text that you can format. Who scrolls through a list of content types to make a bullet list? That ought to be a format you can choose from a formatting bar. But that’s not how Notion does it.
So Notion created a really slick /slash/ interface which lets you instantly transform content types without leaving the keyboard, which is a great alternative to menu options and truly one of it’s uniquely great features… and she would prefer to grab the mouse and hunt through a ribbon. Who scrolls through a list of content types to make a bullet list? Nobody after like the 2nd time they’ve scrolled and selected that. We are hitting slash-b and creating a bullet list instantly without breaking flow.
>Notion continues to be pushy as you create content. Select a table, for example, and you automatically get a three-by-three table with headers filled in. You can add more columns and rows, and you can change the headers, but it’s endlessly frustrating that you can’t do that from the get-go. You must first consider the table Notion thinks you should use. By the time I reached this point in making a note, I felt so distracted that I didn’t remember what I came to do.
My gosh, again with conflating a real honest inline database view when she apparently just wanted to create a simple 2d grid…which itself is one of Notion’s best features. So she ignores Notion’s awesome drag and drop content-into-rows/columns function which is showcased to anyone who first opens the software…and tries to replicate Evernote’s WORKAROUND to that by attempting ‘insert table’ and being annoyed that she’s presented with a default database instead of a grid. Wow, this is painful to read, yet like a car accident, I can’t look away….
>A critical aspect of note-taking apps is being able to customize your views. In Evernote, for example, you can choose to see a card view (helpful when you have images), expanded card view, snippet view, side view list, or top view list. The view you choose should match the way you look for and assess information. I work almost exclusively in sidelist view, for example, because it shows me more previews than another other option and lets me easily see the date on each note. The qualities of that particular view best meet my needs when I’m trying to find the notes that I need. Notion doesn’t have any options at all. You can’t change how your notes or pages appear in preview. You get a sidebar with text and optional icons, and that’s it. Through and through, Notion has no sense of giving the user agency.
Holy….crap…. “Notion doesn’t have any options at all”.... is her conclusion about something with infinite mixed-content dashboarding capability because it doesn’t have a preview pane column beside the navigation tree. You can even emulate page previews in Notion by using a database gallery view….among dozens of other ways to view and arrange content. Well, I guess if what you are going for is exactly Evernote, then Notion isn’t a good option.
The bizarre thing is there ARE real negatives to Notion, I was fully expending her to talk about the laggy mobile app performance which is a real problem. But she ignores real negatives while describing the strongest features as deficiencies. If this was a blog post I wouldn’t care but PC Mag implies a basic level of competence….
Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 4, 2019 at 07:01 PM
I thought that part of the review was fair actually. The lack of simple/basic tables in Notion is one of the points that gets brought up again and again on social media. Multi-column layouts with a small number of columns are easy (at least on the desktop Notion; they’re not shown as columns on mobile), and embedding a tabular database into a Notion page is easy. But if you just want a simple word processor-style table rather than an embedded tabular database, there’s no support for that. It’s powerful but overkill.
nathanb wrote:
>
>My gosh, again with conflating a real honest inline database view when
>she apparently just wanted to create a simple 2d grid…which itself is
>one of Notion’s best features. So she ignores Notion’s awesome drag and
>drop content-into-rows/columns function which is showcased to anyone who
>first opens the software…and tries to replicate Evernote’s WORKAROUND
>to that by attempting ‘insert table’ and being annoyed that she’s
>presented with a default database instead of a grid. Wow, this is
>painful to read, yet like a car accident, I can’t look away….
Posted by nathanb
Sep 4, 2019 at 11:28 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
I thought that part of the review was fair actually. The lack of
>simple/basic tables in Notion is one of the points that gets brought up
>again and again on social media. Multi-column layouts with a small
>number of columns are easy (at least on the desktop Notion; they’re not
>shown as columns on mobile), and embedding a tabular database into a
>Notion page is easy. But if you just want a simple word processor-style
>table rather than an embedded tabular database, there’s no support for
>that. It’s powerful but overkill.
>
>nathanb wrote:
>
You are right and this is one of my personal gripes with Notion, that I wish it could do simple grid tables as OneNote’s tables as a separate feature than it’s databases. Though that’s probably more about my habits, as Notion’s ability to create column and row content areas on a page is functionally more similar to simple tables than its databases are. It’s absolutely a valid distinction to make and people can argue if a database/simple-table approach fits better for them. But they first need to realize that tables and databases are fundamentally different.
She might as well have compared Solidworks to Paint on the basis of cropping a photo.
Posted by rafael costacurta
Jan 21, 2020 at 10:32 PM
For all the Notion lovers out there, a nerdy interview with Marie Poulin, a heavy user of the plataform
https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-run-your-life-inside-of-notion
Posted by Simon
Jan 25, 2020 at 09:31 AM
rafael costacurta wrote:
For all the Notion lovers out there, a nerdy interview with Marie
>Poulin, a heavy user of the plataform
>
>https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-run-your-life-inside-of-notion
>
>
Very interesting reading; thanks for the link. I’ve come across a couple of blogs now where people are using Notion as their complete management/knowledge system, which is rather impressive. It’s also rather tempting!
Anyone have any comment on Notion as your complete management system? I’d like to know how it scales over time and especially if maintaining the system becomes increasingly complex. I like the fact that all the data is mobile.