Notion.io is my new favorite

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 5, 2020 at 02:54 PM

Following Notion’s expansion of the terms of its “free” user policy, I’ve been having a bit of a play.

And yes, it’s an awesome app. Almost ridiculously powerful, but also very easy to use. That’s quite an achievement.

I’m thinking of using it as a writing platform. The investigation continues.

Posted by satis
Aug 29, 2020 at 11:22 PM

Any follow-up on Notion for outlining and writing? I don’t need its project management features, just wondering about how it fares for outlines and writing and output. Did it get keyboard commands for indented and outdented nodes yet?

Posted by steveylang
Nov 17, 2021 at 07:36 PM

Simple tables have been added to Notion, here’s a good overview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_uo9sUvVGA

I just started trying Notion out, it is incredibly powerful and flexible which necessitates a learning curve. But the interface seems really great, so once you learn the basics many things seem possible.

Thomas Frank’s YT channel has a great set of introductory tutorial videos, he also has made a bunch of templates including a pretty deep task/project manager.

nathanb wrote:

>
>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 steveylang
Nov 24, 2021 at 07:57 PM

Notion is turning out to be pretty amazing for my use- deep, versatile, and a ton of resources online (templates, Youtube tutorials, etc.) I guess this forum is Outliner Software.com, but on a general level we are really talking about hierarchies (and types) of information, and Notion lets you work in so many ways.

Pages of pages, databases of pages, pages of databases, toggles, columns, etc. all give me a lot of freedom to structurally and visually organize information the way I want. You have to be careful to not spend too much time just working on the app itself (rather than your content), but once I have an idea for something it’s usually not hard to implement. Also, you can create templates for everything, so once you make some building blocks they are easily repeatable.

Not only are there are a lot of building blocks at your disposal, but everything is very malleable and can be changed on the fly. Folding text or other objects with toggles, converting selected text into a subpage and vice versa, turning pages into database items and vice versa, organizing info into columns, all is very easy to do. With the new API it also didn’t take me long to find/adapt some iOS Shortcuts for either typing or recording (with or without transcription) new Inbox items without going into the app, as well as forwarding emails into Notion.

It took the free personal account for me to be able to figure this all out, there’s no way I could have learned this only playing around with say a 50 item limit.

I still am not sure what happens as I add more and more information into Notion, but I don’t think it should be inherently more unmanageable than other apps.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 26, 2021 at 09:22 AM

I do like Notion – very much – but you’ve hit the nail on the head: always beware of an app where you may end up spending more time playing with the ingenious possibilities offered by the app than actually managing your information in it!

So after some playing with Notion, I have reluctantly abandoned it.

steveylang wrote:
Notion is turning out to be pretty amazing for my use- deep, versatile,
>and a ton of resources online (templates, Youtube tutorials, etc.) I
>guess this forum is Outliner Software.com, but on a general level we are
>really talking about hierarchies (and types) of information, and Notion
>lets you work in so many ways.
> >Pages of pages, databases of pages, pages of databases, toggles,
>columns, etc. all give me a lot of freedom to structurally and visually
>organize information the way I want. You have to be careful to not spend
>too much time just working on the app itself (rather than your content),
>but once I have an idea for something it’s usually not hard to
>implement. Also, you can create templates for everything, so once you
>make some building blocks they are easily repeatable.
> >Not only are there are a lot of building blocks at your disposal, but
>everything is very malleable and can be changed on the fly. Folding text
>or other objects with toggles, converting selected text into a subpage
>and vice versa, turning pages into database items and vice versa,
>organizing info into columns, all is very easy to do. With the new API
>it also didn’t take me long to find/adapt some iOS Shortcuts for either
>typing or recording (with or without transcription) new Inbox items
>without going into the app, as well as forwarding emails into Notion.
> >It took the free personal account for me to be able to figure this all
>out, there’s no way I could have learned this only playing around with
>say a 50 item limit.
> >I still am not sure what happens as I add more and more information into
>Notion, but I don’t think it should be inherently more unmanageable than
>other apps.
>

Pages: ‹ First < 5 6 7 8 9 10 >

Back to topic list