- Well, hello there.
My name is Thomas Frank,
and welcome back to Notion fundamentals.
This is the free and open
Notion beginners course here on YouTube.
And in this lesson,
we are talking about how to create
complex multi-column layouts inside of your pages in Notion.
You've probably seen plenty of examples of these
if you've seen other people sharing their dashboards,
or if you've used my templates in the past.
Like my habit tracking template
or my personal dashboard template, which we actually did a
full build guide video for just last week,
I'll have that link in the description down below
and whether or not you wanna make
full huge templates like this inside of Notion,
or you just want to put two columns of text
next to each other so you can cross reference them.
It's very easy to create multiple columns inside of Notion.
So this is gonna be a pretty quick lesson.
I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it.
I'm gonna show you a couple of different limitations
and also a couple of different advanced tricks.
As always, you can go over to
thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals to get all the example files,
written versions of lessons in this course,
and every other video inside this course as well.
It is your one-stop shop for learning the basics of Notion,
and then jumping off into more advanced stuff if you want.
So with all that being said, let's dive into the lesson.
(curious music)
So if you were around for the last lesson
on the basics of blocks, you'll probably remember
that this personal dashboard template
is the example project that we're gonna be going through
for the rest of Notion fundamentals.
And in building this, with all of its databases,
linked to databases, synced blocks, all kinds of stuff.
We are going to be learning the ins and outs
of basically every component and every feature
inside of Notion.
And if you will remember, one little side note here,
I have the sidebar hidden,
but if you can just hover over this little hamburger thing
and click it, you can actually keep it pinned here.
If you remember last time,
what we came up with was this single column, much more,
I guess, simplified version of a dashboard.
So what we're gonna start doing, is dragging columns around
to create our multi-column layout,
which again, looks like this.
And when you wanna create two different columns
inside of Notion, gonna hide this really quick,
all you need to do is grab one of your blocks,
with this little six dot block menu here
and drag it until you see a horizontal blue line
next to another block.
I can do it on the right,
and I can also do it here on the left.
So I want tasks to be on the left,
and I'm gonna go ahead and drag that on the right.
Note that if I drag it and drop it here
with this horizontal line, it's gonna go underneath tasks,
but that's not quite what I want.
I want to drag it and I want to drop it here.
And boom, I've just given myself a two column layout.
Now, what I also want to do is go ahead
and make this a full width page
and full width pages are gonna be especially useful
for you when you are creating multi-column layouts,
especially if your actual Notion window is narrower
than what I have on the screen right now,
if you have a smaller monitor say.
So, now we have two columns,
but we have all of these things kind of underneath
the tasks heading here and there in a single column.
So what I want to do is get the notes
underneath the notes column.
So one thing you can do inside Notion
is instead of individually dragging
all of these blocks underneath,
you can simply click and drag to select multiple blocks
and then go ahead and drag those.
And you'll see that now that I've dragged it close enough
underneath this notes heading,
I have a half width horizontal bar here.
If I drag it just a little bit lower,
it's gonna be full width and it would be
a single full width column
like we have with basically everything else here.
So I wanna make sure that I have that half width
horizontal line here, and I'll go ahead and drop those.
And now I have my notes column here on the right,
and I'm gonna do the same thing with my tasks.
I'm gonna drag them.
I'm gonna drop them underneath tasks.
So that in a nutshell is how you create multi-column layouts
inside of Notion.
So I'm gonna go ahead and fast forward right now
and to create the rest of my columns.
And now to finish up this layout,
I'm gonna go ahead and grab this picture of Bruce Lee,
and I'm gonna drag him all the way to the right.
So he is to the right of all of these columns here.
Now I'm gonna grab my quote,
drag and drop that underneath him.
And now we have essentially something very similar
to the multi-column layout that we have
in the template version of the dashboard.
Now, one of the things that you can do,
is resize these columns on the fly.
Notice they are gonna resize themselves
if I start dragging the window in,
they're gonna get smaller.
And if you happen to use Notion on your phone,
you're almost always gonna get a single column layout.
And here the desktop version, if I keep resizing this
on the desktop and the browser app,
these columns are gonna retain their layout
to the point where it's really hard to actually see
what's going on here.
However, if you're using Notion on your phone,
this isn't, what's going to happen.
All of these different blocks you've laid out
in a multi-column layout are gonna stack themselves
into one column.
And the order of the blocks inside that column
is going to be determined by the left to right order
of each row inside your original multi-column layout.
So keep that in mind when you're designing
your dashboards here,
think about how they're gonna look on your phone as well.
And I will note that this is also why I create this little
quick links toggle with our table of contents block here,
is because on your phone,
you're not gonna be able to see all this stuff at a glance.
So you want to have this table of contents,
which will link to all of your different headings,
which means that on your phone,
you can simply open the little toggle,
tap one of those heading links and zoom down to it.
Instead of scrolling for days to find what you want.
Now, one significant limitation
about dragging blocks around to create multi-column layouts
is inline databases.
And we haven't really talked about databases too much here
in Notion fundamentals,
but I do have a sample database prepared here.
So one little thing that I'll mention here is
if you have a block that it's already within
a column like this,
and you want it to be a full width block,
you can simply drag it down until that little
horizontal line is now taking up the whole screen.
And I'm gonna go out and just paste this little
table that I've made here onto the screen.
And one thing that you're gonna notice if I create,
say a heading, so we'll just call this "Tasks 2".
If I want this to be to the left or right
of this H2 to block here,
I can't drag it and drop it.
This has been a limitation with inline databases,
no matter what the view is, board view, calendar view,
table view here,
has been a limitation with these inline databases
for a very, very long time.
And the opposite does not work either.
I can't drag this heading
to left or right of the inline database.
So there are two different tricks
for getting your databases into multi-column layouts.
First, you can come over here to the three dot menu
in the inline database, and you can turn it into a page.
So now it is simply a little page link block,
and I can go ahead and move it to the right of tasks.
And then I can turn it back into an inline database.
So that works really well.
Or what you can do is simply create a dummy block.
So I'm just gonna create a text blocks called dummy
and use that to form your multi-column layout first,
and then drag your inline table underneath the dummy block,
then delete the dummy block
and you get basically the exact same result.
The next thing I want to share with you,
it's actually brand new.
And I'm really glad that I waited until now
to do my multi-column layout lesson,
because just recently Notion now released the ability
to copy and paste multi-column layouts.
This was something you could not do before,
in the past if I would have copied these three blocks
and pasted them, they would have all been
in a single column layout, but now if I copy them
and I come down to a brand new line and I paste them,
that new multi-column layout is retained
and the same is true if I create a page,
just call this "Hello" and do it within the page.
I now retain my multi-column layout, which is really cool.
Additionally, you can now paste your multi-column layouts
inside of toggles, which is really cool.
So let's create a little toggle and do the exact same thing.
So this unlocks a lot of power and eliminates the need for
a lot of really annoying workarounds
when it comes to making multi-column layouts
inside of Notion.
So for example, what if I wanted two different columns
underneath this column right here?
So I want a column right here and a column right here.
Well, in the past,
I would have had to go through a very complex workaround.
You can go look at that video if you're curious about,
and it still does work,
but now we don't necessarily have to,
because we can simply take this toggle into which we've
pasted these multiple columns,
and we can drag it underneath our column here.
And now we gain a nested column layout.
And if we go ahead and turn this toggle into say
a heading too, just something that doesn't contain
other blocks, we can then delete it.
And we gain our nested columns
underneath this middle column here.
Now there are some limitations to this
copying and pasting functionality.
For example, I have three columns here,
then one column, then three columns.
If I copy all of this content
and I try to paste it,
let's go back into this whole "Hello" page,
make it full width and I try to paste it down here.
Now, let's give ourselves a full width column.
It's not gonna work because I've tried to paste a layout
that includes a bunch of different numbers of columns.
For whatever reason that does not work.
So maybe we'll see that updated in the future.
Right now, it is a bit of a limitation
and additionally, if I create a toggle within
one of these columns,
so if I create a toggle inside of a multi-column layout,
even if I just select these three,
not this entire layer here but just these three right here
and try to paste it like we did just recently,
it's not gonna work.
If the toggle exists on a line within the Notion layout
that already has multiple columns,
trying to paste multiple columns inside side of it
just kicks them out and kicks them onto the
nearest full line.
Now I could grab just this one
and easily paste it in there no problem.
But if I want to paste everything inside of this toggle,
I need the toggle to be on its own line first.
Then I can grab them.
I can paste them in and then I could move my toggle
into a multiple column area.
I could turn it into a heading
and I could get rid of it.
So keep that in mind when you are designing your layouts.
And that is about going to do it
for this lesson here in Notion fundamentals.
As always,
you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals,
which I talked about in the beginning of this video
to get all of the different example files,
written versions of every lesson inside of this course
and a hub page where you can easily access
all the other lessons.
So if you want to go reference the block lesson,
if you want to go reference the text entry lesson,
it's all there, and it's gonna be continually updated
as I make the videos inside this course.
Also on that page, you're gonna find that email signup box,
if you would like to join my Notion tips newsletter,
you'll be the first to know when I release new content
and new free Notion templates.
One that I'm working on right now
is a massive update to my ultimate note taking system.
This is gonna be much better than one I released last year.
And if you're on that Notion tips newsletter,
you're gonna be the first to know about it
and the first to be able to duplicate it
into your own system and start using it.
So sign up to that list if you are curious,
otherwise check those resources out
and ask questions down in the comments below
or over on Twitter, I'm @tomfrankly over there.
I'm very responsive on Twitter.
And if you've got questions,
I would love to try to answer them for you.
Hopefully you found this video helpful.
I will see ya in the next one.
(energetic music)