hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel today's video i'm
passing over to mickey mellon who is going to dive into rome research latest updates of october 2020.
it's going to be an exciting overview of what's new inside of rome giving you all that you need
to know now if you want to check out mickey's channel he has a fantastic channel that dives
both into notion and rome and you'll be able to check out tons of well library videos that
you'll be able to jump in so please do make sure to subscribe a huge thanks to mickey for bringing
this round up here to keep productive here on with the video hi there my name is mickey mellon uh
francesco's invited me to share a bit more about what's going on with rome research each month so
we'll dive into that if you're interested in more rome research info and ideas and ways i've used
the product you can check out my channel in the description below so most of the changes this
month are fairly subtle the rome team seems to be working more to manage growth and smooth out the
product but they've made some great changes this month related to block references and block embeds
so if you're not familiar with what a block embed is or block reference here's a quick example to
start every bullet in rome is a block you can deal with full pages with you know referring to other
pages but you can also do a lot at an individual block level with these three blocks i have here
or any block anywhere in my database so for example i know deep inside of here i have a block
all about smart goals so i could reference that block just with two parentheses and start typing
smart goals and it will pull in a reference to that block smart gold from georgia dorian
i can actually click on it jump over to that block and i'll see on the side here this one
showing how many times i've referenced it and if i click it i can see where i've referenced it
and this can be great as you have quotes from books and research papers and stuff where you
can refer to one another and quickly see the references at a block level certainly
the linked references for the page are huge and a killer feature of rome but the block level stuff
is very powerful too another way you can do it though is this just referred over to it we can
actually embed that full block in the page so if i do slash block embed and then type smart goals
it will actually pull in that full block with all of its sub bullets and all the sub sub bullets and
everything in here um live on the page any change i'm making here will change it elsewhere and this
of course is great uh because you don't want to talk about smart goals in three different
places then if you change your mind about how to describe one of them you have to go change
it three places you just pull it in one place and make a change so if i decide in the future
attainable or assignable i want to change the wording of that and actually i see a little typo
here now i can just fix that and it fixes it in the original block and everywhere else that block
happens to be embedded so that's super valuable there so a couple changes they made to that one
is myself a little more room down here you can now have inline block references so it used to be if i
did a reference like this one here the first smart goals if i did that that was a line by itself
now i can have multiple ones on the same line so for example um here are my three blocks to discuss
say block actually first block second block and third block now when i click out of it
those three references are all in line together they don't necessarily have to be their own line
and of course you get the references off to the side here i think it's pretty rare you
would refer to a block on the same page but it could happen but typically you'll see where these
were referenced deeper in the system what's cool though is now i can invent here and say
some thoughts on those blocks and you give your thoughts on how those relate together or what the
situation is and later if i go back to first block i can click on that and say oh i tied it in with
the other two and had some thoughts on that and it all pulls together very nicely so the inline
block references are nice the bigger thing they've done that's kind of more of an edge case but it's
really very powerful is they've really improved some of the block embeds and how that works
so again the full embed where you see the smart goals from george dorian one of the issues is
this bullet right here my fingers on is a bullet for the reference for the block embed it's not
the bullet of the smart goals it's the bullet of the container of the smart goals um so if i want
to actually deal with the smart goals themselves now i can hover and embeds i can see ah here's
the actual bullet related to smart goals and this is the bullet that i'm containing it in
this is getting to be kind of an edge case but if you use this stuff this is very powerful because
it got real messy before so here's a bit about how that could work if i go in here and do an embed of
first block okay it's sitting there and again i can see if i'm dealing with the bullet you
know this actual bullet a first block in here or the bullet containing it but where it's even
better is if i go in and say underneath it i want to embed third block um so blocking bed
third block so it's the same kind of thing now it gets again it gets a little messier still
but i can see the bullet containing it or the bolt for first block or the bullet containing third or
the bullet for third so they've exposed it a bit more if you really have some of these complex
setups this is a life saver because it makes it so much easier to deal with specific instances
and where you're dealing with the block versus the container certainly deeper than a lot of us go but
great to see them slowly refining the usability of this stuff because i think as people use rome
more they start using these features a bit more which is nice then the last main change they made
this month is now you can multi-select blocks we can like select both of these
and again you see as i select them you can see it blue selected down here because it's a live embed
of that but if i right click now there's two new things in here there's replace with i can replace
all of the highlighted blocks with text or alias or other things and there's also cycle to do state
so if you not use to do's in rome they're pretty powerful where you can hit control or command
enter or right click on it and make it to do which is a check box and you can check it off and then
if you want you can get rid of it so controller command enter will cycle through those phases and
now you can also do that by highlighting multiple selections so i can right click and say cycle to
do state and what that will do is just take it to the next step so for first block it will add a
check box and for this other one that already has one it will take to the next step which is to
check it off so if we do that and say cycle to do state you'll see now the first one has one
and the second one is checked off and i can then highlight again
and if i do just control or command enter you kind of see how it walks through and again
you can see the places they're referenced it pulls in those check boxes everywhere again showing a
bit more the power of the block references and blocking beds how that works and i know this
is an area that connor and his team are working hard on because they use it to such a depth and
they really want people to use it to that depth so some subtle changes but if you use those sort of
features i think it'll be great but what i'm most excited about is just the inline references i do
a lot of block references in my my graph doing multiple online can be great not only to clean
it up to put them all in one place but again so when you have the re the references coming back
you'll see those references to all those in one place a good way just to summarize more thoughts
and get things together so hope you found this helpful and we'll see you again next month thanks
you