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How to Use Notion: A

Beginner’s Guide
Marie Prokopets,
Co-founder of Nira

Notion is a tool that defies conventional

categorization.

Instead of being a tool for this purpose or

that, it’s a tool you can use for nearly
anything to do with manipulating digital
data. You can use it to write a simple text
document, create large, complex
knowledge bases, take notes from a
university lecture, or build interlocking
Kanbans to manage multiple engineering
projects.

In this post, all will become clear about how

this versatile tool works—for notes,
creating documents, tracking tasks and
projects, and much more.

What is Notion?

Notion describes itself as an “all-in-one

workspace.”

There are desktop apps for Mac and

Windows, but you can access and use
Notion through your browser too.

Notion has four membership types:

Pay monthly and the Personal plan is $5,

while the Team plan is $10.

Even the Team plan is significantly cheaper

than many competitors—Trello is $12.50 a
month per seat, with a restricted free
version; G Suite is $6 a month for the Basic
plan; Evernote Premium is $7.50 a month
and up. More important, Notion lets you
actually integrate nearly all the functionality
of these tools together.

It’s important to know going in that Notion

defies traditional categorization. Rather
than being several tools bundled together,
it’s really one big, endlessly customizable
digital space that has readymade templates
to make it easier to create documents, plan
work, track and manage projects, create
knowledge bases and structure notes and
clippings.

There’s no really clear demarcation

between these areas of functionality.

On the other hand, that very great flexibility

means it’s initially less intuitive than more
standard app bundles.

It’s confusing at first to find, for instance,

that Notion will let you create a database in
the middle of a document. Unlike a
spreadsheet, it’s a true database in which
every cell is its own Notion page. You can
put whatever you want in those pages,
including project management tools,
calendars, content of all types, and even
other databases.

Maybe the best thing to do is start at the

beginning.

Blocks, pages, and templates:

The key to understanding Notion

Notion is based on blocks. A block can be a

paragraph of text or an image. It can also
be a calendar or Kanban chart. There are
more than 50 types of blocks available in
Notion and more are constantly being
added.

What’s important about Notion is that all its

functionality is available anywhere. Want a
Kanban chart? It’s a block. You can just
drop it straight into a document. Want a
calendar? What about a to-do list with
checkboxes? Maybe call out a team
member, make a comment, or build a table?
Yes, all of the above. But they barely
scratch the surface of what Notion can do.

In Notion, pages are like new documents,

except that they can be an instance of
anything you like.

Here, I’m opening a new page and checking

out the templates on offer. How about a
CRM?

You can just open this in a new Page inside

Notion, then use it. Each card can contain
anything Notion can do: embedded audio
and video (so you can save whole sales
calls), documents and sales collateral,
notes, images…

Or suppose you want to create a

knowledge base:

[IEngineeringWiki
Usethistemplate

FPersonalCRM
RoommateSpace
&SimpleBudget
§Syllabus

AClassroomHome
[LessonPlans
*CourseSchedule
ClassDirectory

•Engineering
©Adddiscussion
(1)To-Do

EngineeringWiki #Roadmap
BEngineeringWiki
Docs
Allthingsengineering:processes,bestpractices,setupguides,andmore!
MeetingNotes
Guides&Processes Codebase
Humanresources
-GettingStarted VCodeReviews
~Marketing
EngineeringGuidelines §React
BrandAssets
DevelopmentLifecycle IBackend
AMeetingNotes
HowtoDeploy §EngineeringDirectory
7Fulltemplategallery
§lIsefulCommands

Open the template in Engineering in Notion,

then fill it in.

How is Notion able to do all this?

Notion’s function-agnosticism is a
consequence of its inception as a codeless
app builder. A page on Notion is actually a
web app. And the blocks are really
readymade blocks of code (don’t like them?
You can drop your own code in too) that let
you determine the functionality of that app.

People are still using Notion for this. There’s

a website, Notion Pages, dedicated to
offering custom Notion templates for
everything from bullet journals through
employee handbooks to curriculum
managers.

Look around and you’ll find guides to doing

everything from API documentation to
setting up a Notion homepage.

And if you still can’t find what you’re looking

for, both Notion and the wider Notion
community will be happy to show you how
to build it yourself.

For now, we’re going to focus on using

Notion for its core functions: Docs, Notes,
Projects, Tasks, and Wikis.

Once again: these aren’t five separate apps.

They’re five different ways to use Notion.

Let’s dive in.

How to use Notion for documents

Notion’s default blank page is easy to use

for composing documents.

Once you’ve begun a page this way, you

can add images, format text, add tables,
and change blocks around by clicking and
dragging.

Adding images to your Notion document

Images can be added to Notion documents

through the block menu. Open a new block,
scroll down to Images in the Media section
of the block menu and select it:

You can upload an image, embed one using

a link or choose one from Unsplash, a free
image repository, directly from the block
menu.

Formatting text in your Notion document

Text formatting in Notion documents works

from the block menu too. Open a new block
and at the top of the menu, you’ll see
header options:

You only get plain text and h1 through h3 in

the block menu. If you want anything
further, you can use standard keyboard
shortcuts—to an extent. (Ctrl/Cmnd+I for
italic and Ctrl/Cmnd+B for bold both work,
but Ctrl/Cmnd+U for underline doesn’t and
neither do the standard shortcuts for
strikethrough text, superscript, and
subscript.)

Adding tables in your Notion document

Tables can be added in Notion and then

filled in. Or you can drop tables from other
Notion documents into the one you’re
working on.

You’ll find tables in the block menu:

Unlike in solely text-oriented tools like

Google Docs or Microsoft Word, Notion
tables come packed with a lot of
functionality. The downside is, you may not
want or need it if you really just want to
present basic information to the reader.

Here’s a dummy Notion table, opened with

the default settings from the block menu:

Those headers—Name, Tags, Files—make

sense if you want to use this as the index
for a database. But if you want to compare
three different kinds of car based on speed
and fuel consumption, this is way more
power than you need. You really just want
boxes to put text in.

When you’re in that position you can click

on the column headers and change their
labels. You’ll also get a menu that lets you
change the type of information stored in
that column.

Set all your columns for Text and you can

display basic information in the way you
would in Docs or Word.

Moving blocks around in your Notion

document

When you want to move text in your Docs

or Word document, you copy or cut the text
you want to move, then paste it where you
want it.

Notion is simpler. To move a paragraph, just

pick it up by the “handle”—the square next
to the plus symbol at the side of each block
—and drag and drop it.

Here you can see me dragging a block

down the page. The blue line indicates
where that block will land if I drop it, and
the block itself is still visible, just greyed
out.

Comments, reminders, and mentions

Notion lets you make comments on the text

and mention/call out other users. The catch
is you can’t call out non-Notion users, so to
get the best from this everyone needs an
account.

Mentioning a person will make Notion ping

them on your behalf with the mention—a
process familiar from other collaborative
document-creation tools.

Comments are found, not in the standard

block menu, but by clicking on the block
itself.

You can also set reminders, including times

as well as dates. Notion will ping you in the
desktop app if it’s open, and will also email
you, text you, and send you a desktop push
notification if you have those options
enabled.

How to use Notion Notes

Notion can also be used as a note-taking

app. There’s a browser extension that’s
advertised as a Web Clipper, but is actually
a route into the whole Notion world.

You can get it for Chrome here, and for

Firefox here.

Once installed, Notion Web Clipper lives in

your browser’s bookmarks bar. Open it from
there, and it will save the page you’re on to
your Notion workspace. It will also give you
the chance to open the page in Notion
direct from the extension window in your
browser.

When you do that you can immediately

access the saved version of the page you
were on, and Notion automatically converts
it into a Notion document, in which you can
add and edit text and other content,
mention people, set reminders, move text
and images around, and more.

But you can also use Notion for making

class, book, or meeting notes. These notes
can be shared with others, so long as they
have Notion accounts too. And full-
powered Notion accounts are available free
if you have an academic email address (it
doesn’t have to be a .edu address).

Here’s how to do it.

Open Notion and start a new Page. In the

Page menu, go to “Templates” and open the
Education menu. There, you’ll find “Class
Notes” as a template. Select that and this
page will work as a central repository for all
your notes, or all your notes in a given
subject.

hThere’s a “Meeting Notes” template in the

Marketer’s home workspace too. You’re
welcome.)

The template comes with enough content

to start you off using it, including dummy
supporting materials and dummy note
pages accessible from the template.

There’s a checklist to let you monitor

whether you’ve reviewed each page or not,
and you can add reminders, scheduling,
and checklists to individual notes pages or
to the master notes list.

Click through to the dummy notes on

Kandinsky—you have to hover over the title
until an “open as page” option appears, as
clicking on the title lets you change it but
not access the page—and you can see an
example of how to use Notion specifically
to arrange notes.

At the top is a table of contents for the

current page. Under it are subheadings.
Here, you can see simple reminders of the
basics of the subject. Further down this
page is a list of links to supporting articles.

If you want to arrange your notes differently

—if you’re studying a subject that requires
you to take extensive, complex notes,
rather than these simple reminders—you
can use toggle lists to organize them.