- Well, hello there.
And welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains.
In this video, you're gonna learn
some advanced multi column layout tricks in Notion.
You're gonna learn how to create nested columns.
You're gonna learn how to create columns inside
of Toggle blocks, Template blocks,
and even the brand new Synced block,
which just came out and is currently in Limited Beta.
By default, creating columns in these ways
nested and inside these special block types
seems impossible.
If you grab a block and try to drag it next to a block
like you normally would to create multiple columns,
it's not gonna work.
So, a lot of people think you just can't create
multi column layouts inside these special block types.
But in fact, you can,
it is possible as long as you know the trick to it.
And I'm gonna teach you that trick in this video.
So buckle up,
get your popcorn or whatever you eat while you're watching,
lengthy software tutorials on YouTube and let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
All right, so let's start this off by defining
what nested columns are.
Here I've got a sample page
and you can see I've got two main columns.
This one right here with all the text,
and then this picture right here.
And if I move this,
I can change the size in these columns.
But underneath this column here,
I actually have two nested columns,
one for this embedded video,
and then one for these couple of paragraphs of text,
and this looks great.
And it seems like you should be able
to create it very easily.
But when you're creating a page like this,
like this copy here,
if I've got my embedded video and I try to drag it
to the side of one of these columns,
I can do this and get a third column,
but I can't create a nested column.
But there's a simple trick that you can use,
which will allow you to get these nested columns
and which will allow you to do other things
such as creating columns within Toggle blocks,
Template blocks and Synced blocks.
In fact, here in this example page,
I have a Template block containing a Synced block,
which contains a Toggle block.
And inside that Toggle block,
we have multiple columns and there's even nested columns
with a copy of this.
So, it's possible to do all of this even combined.
And if I click this template button,
I'm gonna get myself a Synced block with a Toggle block
containing multiple columns.
So what's the trick?
Let's go back to our example page and I will show you.
It's very, very easy actually.
All you do is create a page, call it whatever you want.
It doesn't actually have to be called whatever you want.
And then you put your content inside that page first.
So let's copy this content here, dragging into the page,
go into the page.
And from here, we can set up our columns
because now we have the ability to drag and drop
as we normally would.
So I'm gonna go ahead and take this.
I'm gonna take it to the side of this paragraph here.
I might bring this one up as well.
And that's the layout I had in the finished version
of this example.
Now, all I have to do is go back
and then right click or hit the six block icon here,
choose turn into and turn it into something else.
If I just wanna do nested columns,
then gonna choose to turn it into a heading
or a to do list, basically something
that's not going to nest under something else.
So if we do a heading, the title of that page
is going to become the heading,
which I can then delete if I want.
And what I'm left with is that multi-column layout
we had within the page,
nested under wherever I had the page.
So as long as the page is already put underneath
an existing column on your parent page,
once you turn that into something else
that brings all the content from that page
to the page that you're on, that you're working on,
it's gonna stay multi column,
even if it's nested columns.
And the exact same principle applies to Toggle blocks,
Synced blocks and Template blocks.
So if I undo here,
say I want multiple columns within a Toggle block,
all I would need to do is choose to turn this
into a Toggle block.
And once I untoggle it,
you're gonna see those columns in there.
Or I can undo that and I can first create a Toggle block.
I can drag that page into the Toggle block,
and then I can do the exact same thing I did before.
Turn it into a heading one.
It doesn't have to be a heading one.
It just needs to be a type of block
where these blocks, the Text blocks, the Video block
becomes separated from the title here.
So I can go ahead and delete that.
And I get my nested Toggle block.
And with Synced blocks,
it is basically the exact same thing.
In fact, with Synced blocks,
I can go ahead and turn this into a Synced block first,
which is just gonna wrap the page with a brand new
Synced block, which you can see with this red outline here.
And then I can go ahead and use my turn into trick.
Let's just use a to-do list this time.
Here you can see,
I get the page title turned into a to do,
but if I go ahead and delete that
the rest of the content is there.
And just to be thorough, let's go back one more time,
create ourselves a Template block or template button.
Drag the page here, turn it into something else.
Delete that heading and boom.
I've got my multi column layout inside my Template block.
From there, I can create as many of these copies as I want,
all multi column, all nested under this existing column.
Now, one thing you're gonna notice
is that if you wanna copy and paste in multi column layout,
once you do so you're actually gonna lose those columns.
So if I paste this content here,
you'll see that my multiple column layout
has become a single column layout.
And this is not a quirk of nested columns.
It's a quirk of multi-column layouts and Notion in general.
If I copy all of this content
and I come down here to paste it, I'm gonna lose it.
So this means you sometimes need to plan ahead.
And one thing that I often do is if I know
I'm creating a multi-column layout
that I may wanna use again,
I copy the page that I've created
before turning the original page into multiple columns.
So if I go here, I've got this exact layout
that I've created.
Another cool thing to know is that if you turn this,
let's go ahead and mess this over here.
If you turn this into a Text block,
you actually get this wrapper where all of these blocks
are still nested underneath the Text block.
So I can go ahead and I can move these.
I can edit them,
but they're not really on this page on their own.
They're still nested underneath this Text block here,
which means I can move it around,
but I can also duplicate it.
So if I wanted to, I could maybe create a toggle,
which is just a storage area for this converted Text block,
or maybe the page.
And I've got it there.
So if I make a mistake while I'm creating this,
or if I want to make a copy later on,
I've got it hidden in this toggle.
And the layout is preserved when I create a duplicate.
All right, last thing we're gonna cover here is,
as you can see, multi column inline databases.
This is another frustration that a lot of people run into
with Notion, which is that when you have an inline database,
unlike pretty much any other kind of block,
you can't grab this and move it to the side
of another database.
In fact, you can't move it to the side of anything.
If I create a heading here
and try to move this to the side of the heading,
it also doesn't work and vice versa.
If I wanna move the heading to the side
of the inline database, that doesn't work either.
So when I first started using Notion, I thought,
hey, it's impossible to make a multi-column layout
using inline databases,
but actually the fix is pretty simple.
All you need to do is create a multi column layout
using a different type of block first.
So I'm just gonna create one out of headings.
And then we can just drag these multi column databases
underneath the other blocks
that had formed our multi-column layout.
From there, we can easily delete these blocks
and our columns remain.
So, that is pretty much everything I know
about advanced multi column layouts in Notion.
You now know how to do multi-column layouts
with inline databases, how to do nested columns,
had to nest columns inside of Toggle blocks,
Template blocks, Synced blocks,
and hopefully by using and combining these features,
you're going to be able to make your own workspace
in your next build, even more close to what you had
in your imagination before you started building it.
So hopefully you found this helpful.
As always, you can go over to www.thomasjfrank.com/notion
to see all of my Notion tutorials,
www.thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals in particular,
if you're looking for my beginners series,
all about the basics of Notion.
I'll have that link in the description down below,
along with the link to my templates area,
where among other templates,
you can get my brand new habit tracker,
which was actually the inspiration for this tutorial.
Because I use nested columns inside
of a template button in this build.
And a lot of people were pretty surprised
that you could actually do that.
So check those resources out.
If you're curious, let me know what your questions
are over on Twitter.
I'm @Tomfrankly there, feel free to follow me
for more Notion tips or leave a question
in the comment section down below,
and I'll try to answer it as best as I can.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
(upbeat music)