You can also move pages around between workspaces this way.
That’s great if you’re writing something and still figuring out the structure, but it’s also great if you’re making notes on a complex subject and realize halfway through that the structure should be different. You can move around paragraphs, images, embedded sub-pages, videos, and anything else in your page by just clicking and dragging.
You can add, alter, and remove list items with ease, so you can insert relevant material into a list that already exists with a couple of clicks without having to restructure anything. This feature doesn’t exist in other note-taking apps, like OneNote or Evernote, and it’s fantastically useful for taking notes on a subject where your understanding is still evolving. It’s one of the ways Notion lets you actually turn your own notes into a usable resource. They turn a page into a high-level overview of your subject, but give you instant access to more detail when you need it. For taking notes on complex subjects like university lectures or complex, interlocking technological tools, these are invaluable. Toggle lists create lists of headings that give you a drop-down when you click on them. Notion started life as a codeless app builder, and while you can get great value out of it as a note-taking app, one of its biggest advantages is that it can also be whatever you want it to be, including an all-in-one productivity solution that’s tough to beat. If this seems like it might be a bit overpowered for a simple note-taking app, it is. You can create tools that might otherwise be standalone apps inside Notion using blocks like Checkbox, or integrate Kanban and calendar functionality into a page. You can use blocks to format as you write a simple page of text, choosing heading and paragraph styles as you create the block or you can reformat blocks after creation.īlocks also allow you to create completely new functionality inside Notion. New text can be written and formatted on the fly, and structured lists can be created. Web pages can be clipped directly from the web, as can videos, images and sections of text. There are over fifty types of block, and more are constantly being added. Think of them as containers in a website, if that helps-or paragraphs in a page if you’ve written more text than HTML.Įither way, the two most distinguishing features of Notion are its basis in these blocks, and their adaptability. Notion is built around blocks-sections or chunks of content. The web clipping function is accessed from the extensions bar in Chrome and Firefox. Once it’s in there, you can do anything with it that you can do with your own notes: you can move it around inside your workstation, copy parts, re-order it, reformat it, tag it, and more. Notion lets you simply pick up a whole web page and drop it inside your Notion workspace. Here’s a quick view of the basic features. Hastily-made, unstructured notes are a poor aid to memory, understanding and creation.
It’s this ability to create structured notes that sets Notion apart from other note-taking apps immediately. Notion lets you rapidly create structured, flexible content which you can then change, restructure, share, duplicate, and basically do nearly anything you can think of with. It’s highly structured, intuitive to use once you get familiar with the basic way it’s organized, and it’s rapidly growing in popularity. Notion is a note-taking and web-clipping app-among other things, which we’ll get into later. I’m going to explain why, but first, I need to introduce you to Notion if you haven’t encountered it before.
We think that for making, organizing, sharing, and using your notes, there’s no better tool around today than Notion. Whether you use Word or Docs, Pages or something else, they’re seldom ideal for creating the interlinking bodies of smaller text pieces that we need for notes.Īnd whether you’re working on your first degree or your first book, putting lectures together yourself or working on complex engineering problems, you’re going to need your notes a lot. Most of us quickly outgrow taking notes in our main word processing tool.