- Hey, what's going on friends?
Thomas Frank here, and welcome back to Notion Fundamentals.
In this lesson, we are talking about creating links
to your Notion Pages within your workspace,
along with creating pages and sub-pages.
These are pretty related topics.
So I am mashing them together into one lesson.
This is part of Notion Fundamentals,
the free and completely open Notion Basics Course
here on YouTube and over on my website as well
at THOMASJFRANK.COM/FUNDAMENTALS.
If you have been following along so far,
you are probably aware that we are creating
an example project,
because this is a action-based, project-based course,
which is this Personal Dashboard here.
And in this video, we are gonna be taking
this Personal Dashboard that we left off with
in the last lesson on Page Layout.
And we are gonna be adding the links that you see
here on the actual template version
of the Personal Dashboard.
So just to give you a preview,
we are first gonna go over how
to create links to other pages.
And then we are gonna finish up this lesson
by telling you how to actually create new sub-pages
inside your workspace.
Before we get into creating links, though,
I do wanna show you what a sub-page really is.
So something that is unique in Notion,
or at least different than some
other note-taking apps out there like Evernote,
is that you can create basically an infinite number
of nested pages inside your workspace.
So if I come over here to this sidebar
that we have here in this Test Workspace,
I can open up this writing page and inside,
there is a Books Page and that's not just here
on the sidebar.
If I click this page, we actually see that Books is a block,
a page block that is sitting on the page.
And if I click into that,
then I have another page block sitting there
and we can sort of drill down
and create as many nested pages
as is necessary for our workspace.
Additionally, the sidebar is not the only way
to navigate our workspace because we can create links
from any page to any other page in many different ways.
And that's what we're gonna start doing right now.
So I'm gonna go over to this little Personal Dashboard
that we are working on,
and I'm gonna show you one of the first ways
to create a link here in Notion,
which is the Link to Page block.
So instead of these tasks here
that are just Checkbox blocks,
I wanna have an actual link to the views here
in this Ultimate Tasks copy that I've got here
in this sample workspaces specifically,
I wanna link to my Today view.
So there are a couple of different ways that I can do this.
And the first is to simply create a Link to Page block.
So I'm gonna come over to my dashboard here
and you can create this anywhere in your workspace,
but if you type these Slash character
to get that Slash Menu, and then just type Link,
you're gonna get this Link to Page option.
And if you click that, we are gonna get a search prompt
where we can actually search for whatever we want.
So I'm gonna search for that Today page,
and it's gonna come up and I'll click that.
And now I have a Link to Page block on this page.
Now, what is interesting about the Link to Page block,
specifically is that I'm going to get this link right here,
but just like I showed you over here
with these actual page blocks,
I'm going to get a link in my sidebar,
so something that I really like to do is
to create Personal Dashboards,
which I then favorite in the star up here.
So it's up in my Favorites bar.
And then I will create these links
to other places in my workspace,
which are then accessible
from the sidebar in my Favorites area.
That way I don't have to favorite tons of different pages.
I can just favorite one page and then twirl it open
anytime I wanna access all kinds of other stuff.
There is another way to create a Link to Page block
and that is simply by pasting the URL.
So I'm gonna go back to Ultimate Tasks here
and I'm going to grab my Tomorrow link.
So if we hit Control or Command L,
I'm going to copy the URL to my clipboard,
and then I'm gonna come back over to my Personal Dashboard.
And I'm just going to get my cursor on a new line.
And if I paste this URL,
it's gonna give me three different options,
Dismiss will literally just leave this URL on the page,
which I don't want.
Mention will create what's called an Inline Link.
We're gonna talk about that next.
And then Link to Page actually creates
that Link to Page block.
So you're gonna see in my sidebar,
I now have Today and Tomorrow.
To get Parody with our actual template here,
we also need Next 7 Days and Habit Tracker [DEMO].
And then we also need
the "Thomas Frank's Note-Taking System" [DEMO]
link in the Notes area,
so I'm gonna go ahead and create those right now
and speed the camera up.
Okay. So, now we have all of our link to page blocks
here on this Personal Dashboard.
And you'll see that all of these are now
in the sidebar as well,
which means they're easily accessible.
But there is another way to create links in Notion
and that's to create what are called Inline Links.
These are actually in line with a text
and they also do not show up in the sidebar here.
And the way to create those is number one,
if you were to just paste the URL here,
you could choose the Mention page option.
And you will notice if I go and delete this one,
just as a example, here,
that the page mentions are not shown in the sidebar.
So that's useful if you don't want
to clutter up your sidebar.
The other thing that these allow you to do though,
is to create links inside of lines of text,
or even inside texts that are in other types
of blocks like Checkboxes.
So, as an example, let's go and look
at a sample task here in Ultimate Tasks.
And I'm actually just gonna go into the Today view
and mentally make a note for Create Homepage.
So if we're here in the Personal Dashboard
and I've got a task that I want,
just done a check box here,
if I created a checkbox block, I could just say,
"Don't forget to,"
and then I want to link to that Create Homepage task,
which is actually a page itself in Notion
using an inline link.
And I can do that by typing double bracket.
So bracket bracket,
and that instantly gives me this little search box
for creating an inline page link.
And I'm gonna go for Create Homepage, click that.
And now I have an inline link and I can type text after it.
And if I click it,
then I get right to this page inside of Notion,
which is inside a database,
we are gonna be covering databases in the next lesson.
So don't let all these crazy properties here overwhelm you.
They are just database properties inside of a page.
One thing that I do wanna mention before we go back
to the dashboard is that when you create links
to pages inside your Notion workspace,
you also create what are called Backlinks.
So now that we have created this link
to create homepage, this page here,
you'll see that we have one backlink.
And if we click this,
we actually can see that we have
a backlink from our Personal Dashboard.
If you're coming from Roam Research or another tool
that is similar to Roam
you'll notice that the backlinking functionality
isn't quite as powerful as it is over in Roam
because you don't see exactly where the backlink is.
You just get a backlink to the page containing that link.
Still quite useful,
but not quite at the same level of functionality.
Additionally, if you come over to the Three-Dot Menu
in the corner and you hit Customize page,
one thing you can do is change the way
that backlinks are shown here.
So right now they're showing that pop over
like I showed you.
You can click Expanded and they're always
gonna be showing by default,
or you can even turn them off.
And they're completely hidden from display.
Going back over to our Personal Dashboard.
The Double Bracket command is not the only way
to make an inline link.
There are actually two other commands,
both the At symbol and the Plus symbol
will do roughly the same thing.
So if you type the At symbol,
you're going to get the same search prompt,
but it defaults to either mentioning a date,
a reminder, or a person.
So using the At symbol is primarily good
for those functions, however, if I do start typing
a page link, I'm going to get it just like I did
with the double bracket.
Additionally, you can do the exact same thing
with the Plus syntax,
I may need to get back into another line,
and you will see that with the Plus syntax,
I default to creating a new sub-page
or creating a new sub-page somewhere else,
which we're gonna go over in just a second,
but I also have the option of creating an inline link
to that Create Homepage task.
So you get multiple different options
for creating those inline links,
but I find the Double-Bracket method,
or simply pasting a Notion URL.
And choosing that Mention option
is the easiest way to do it.
To be thorough here,
there is one more linking option you have,
which is hyperlinks.
So with hyperlinks to web pages,
there's a few different things you can do.
And I'm gonna come down here to reference,
to actually show you this in action.
If I paste the URL to a webpage, I can dismiss,
I can also create a bookmark,
which is gonna create this little box like this,
or I can even embed the web page in my Notion workspace.
And it really kind of depends on whether
or not the webpage you're embedding supports this,
but most do.
And you'll see here that I have
a nice mobile-optimized view
of this page here on my website,
embedded directly in my Notion workspace,
which is pretty cool.
Last but not least, if you have some text,
you can actually highlight that text
and add a URL to it directly.
So let's type Notion Fundamentals here.
If I were to highlight this and bring up
a little context menu, I can hit Link,
and then I can paste that and link to the webpage,
getting myself a nice little hyperlink,
like I would get in WordPress
or some other blogging platform.
Now, so far, all we've done to this lesson
is link to existing pages in our Notion workspace,
but it's just as easy to create new pages
or sub-pages inside of our workspace as well.
So now let's go over creating those
and the different ways to do it.
The first way is using the sidebar.
And even the sidebar gives you several different options.
So the first one would be to click this little Plus button,
right next to the private area,
or if this was a Team workspace,
I would also have a Team Area up here
and I would be able to do the same thing.
And if I click that, it's gonna create a new top level page.
So we can just call that, "Top Level Page",
or I can click the Plus button next to any
of the existing pages at any level here
in the sidebar as well.
So let's just say I wanted to create
another chapter in this little book area, I could do that.
I could call it "Chapter 3" and now I have that page.
Let's give it a nice little book icon
and we'll open it as a page
and now you'll see it's sitting here in the sidebar as well.
Additionally, at the bottom of the Notion window,
I'm gonna have to actually change
the size of my Notion window, so you can see it.
There's a new page button right here.
And when you click this,
it's a little bit different
because you're gonna get a blank page,
but you will also see that it has a default destination
and you can actually click this menu here,
and you can change the destination of this page.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click Writing here,
and let's just call this "Blog Articles".
And now this page is created underneath
the Writing page and just like Books,
it is sitting here on the page as a page block.
Now, if we don't wanna use the sidebar,
we can also create pages very easily
on the actual content area.
So let me just make this sidebar a bit better of width.
I'm gonna go back to my Personal Dashboard
and let's just say that I wanna create a Goals page
in my dashboard.
So what I can first do is use the page block.
So if we type Slash and then type Page,
I'm gonna get that, and I can click here,
and I can create my page like I normally would.
Now just like the Link to Page block,
this page block is an actual block.
So it's going take up an entire line
within the column that we have it in.
And it's gonna show up in the sidebar.
We also have the ability to use the Inline syntax
to create sub-pages as well.
So maybe I didn't want this Goals page on its own line,
maybe I wanted instead to have a line of text,
like, "Don't forget your goals",
but I want Goals to actually be a new sub-page.
So that is where that Plus syntax,
we'd went over a little bit earlier comes in.
If I hit Plus, and then I type Goals,
I'm going to get a sub-page that is actually
on a line of existing text.
I can click either Sub-page
or I can click New Goals page in,
and this is gonna create a sub-page somewhere else.
So first I'll do this one,
and unlike Inline links to other pages,
we are still going to get this link
in the sidebar because it does live on this page.
So it's pretty much just like a actual page block,
except for it can be in line on an existing line of text.
If I go in here, it's gonna be pretty much exactly
the same as an existing page.
The only thing to know is
if you've seen me do tricks before,
where I turn a page block into something else,
So for example, let's do Page here.
Let's just call this "Cool Stuff"
and list out some cool stuff.
And if I come back, I can actually turn this page block
into something like a Toggle list
and get the page's content inside that.
If you create an inline sub-page like this,
you're not gonna be able to do the same thing
because the block that it exists within
on this page is actually a text block.
So if you wanna do tricks like that,
just make sure you use an actual page block.
If you don't care and you wanna do something more Wiki style
where you're just creating page links inside of text,
then you can go and use that Sub-page Inline syntax.
So lastly, let's talk about the other option
when creating sub-pages,
which is creating the sub-page in a different location.
So if I were to use the Plus syntax once again,
and let's just say, I wanna create a page called,
"Someday" for tasks that I wanna do someday,
but I don't think this should exist here.
I want it to exist somewhere else.
If I click New Someday page in,
I'm gonna get once again, that search menu here,
and I'm gonna pick Ultimate Tasks for Notion.
And what this creates for me is an inline link
to a new sub-page that exists somewhere else.
So again, because this is an inline link,
I do not have it linked in my sidebar here.
And if I click it and navigate to it,
I've got a Someday page that is,
if you look at the breadcrumbs up here inside
of Ultimate Tasks for Notion and it's probably gonna be
at the very, very bottom.
And if we open up the Toggle, it is linked here.
So when we create that new sub-page in option,
it does become an actual page block
and to prove that, let's just create a List item,
come back here and go ahead and turn it into a Toggle list.
So that's a breakdown of pretty much every way
that you can create links and also sub-pages
inside of your Notion workspace.
Going back to our Personal Dashboard,
we pretty much replicated the exact template
that we created in that whole template video.
So in the next video here in Notion Fundamentals,
we're going be creating these linked databases
and finishing this project up.
As with every other lesson in Notion fundamentals,
this lesson has a written companion,
which is a great reference if you ever forget anything,
and you can find all of those lessons,
all the written versions, video versions,
and example files over at THOMASJFRANK.COM/FUNDAMENTALS.
That is the home and hub page for this entire course.
And also on that page, you'll have the option
of signing up for my Notion tips newsletter as well.
If you wanna get notified via email and be the first
to know about new tutorials
and also a new templates that I'm working on,
you're definitely gonna wanna get on that email list.
And when you do, I'll also send you a link
to all of my current free templates,
so you can check those out and play around
with them in your workspace.
As always, you can ask me questions
in the comment section down below or on Twitter.
I am Tom Frankly over there and I do tend
to respond quite a bit faster.
If you did enjoy this video, if you learned something new,
hitting that like button for the algorithm
is appreciated as always.
And if you wanna take your knowledge further,
I've got more videos on this channel,
like this one right here
on "Building that Personal Dashboard Template"
from scratch, start to finish.
You can check that out
or "Building a Habit Tracker Template".
So check those two out if you are curious,
and I will see you in the next one.
(upbeat music)