"As unique as your personality, as complex as your business needs."
This is what Ivan Zhao, the CEO of Notion, said at the Make With Notion conference last week when describing Notion's resemblance to Legos.
And it is how your Notion systems should be: as unique as your personality and as complex as your needs.
Today, Notion has over 100M users, including monks in Thailand, teams at Fortune 100 companies like Toyota, and small/medium business owners like you.
Zhao and his team have been building Notion for the last decade. And, every time they roll out an update, they improve our quality of life, empower us to do more with less effort, or enable us to eliminate another tool from our tech stack.
At last week's conference, Notion announced a series of new features. Here are the highlights...
Notion Forms
Now, you can add a form view to a database and share it publicly or only with team members in your workspace. The submitted answers will be added to the related database.
Farewell, Tally Forms. You were such a brilliant tool up until this point. But I doubt I'll ever need you again.
Custom Layouts
We all have at least one database with too many properties, and they have all been packed together —until now.
The custom layouts feature allows you to organise database properties. You can:
- pin up to 4 properties under the page title,
- highlight important properties in separate groups,
- add "sections" to the main property group to categorise your data,
- and hide properties in a collapsible side panel.
A huge QoL update that makes digesting information way easier.
Custom Emojis
If you want to spruce up your workspace with branded icons, this one is for you. Now, you can add custom emojis once and use them over and over again as page/callout icons, and insert them on your Notion pages. Every team member in your workspace gets access to them as well!
Note: You can control who can add custom icons in Settings.
Automations
Native Notion automations also got a massive revamp.
- You can use automations to notify people via Gmail when changes happen in the selected database, such as status updates or form submissions.
- Automations now support formulas, which means we can automate complex actions with the help of formulas.
Formula automation is a subject that deserves a deep dive. I'll write about it on LinkedIn in the coming months.
Custom URLs
You know that Notion page links are long, containing letters and numbers that don't make sense to our logical brains. But now, you can edit the public page URLs (aka slugs) to make them easy to remember.
You can access this feature via the Share menu on pages. Just note that the custom links can only contain hyphen (-) and lowercase alphanumerical characters.
Notion AI
Notion AI is a great assistant that can access everything in your workspace and answer your questions. Now, it can do more:
- Search across your connected apps, such as Slack and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides.
- Analyse attachments
- Write better when you mention a reference page in your prompt, e.g. your brand's tone of voice guide.
A new app added to the Notion-verse
Notion helped us optimise our schedules with the Notion Calendar, which brings events from multiple calendars and databases together. I, personally, never looked back since. And now, they're about to revolutionise our inboxes.
Notion Mail will allow us to customise our inbox with views, like databases! I currently don't have access to this (I missed the beta deadline —what a shame!), but I'm on the waitlist and will write a deep dive about it when I get access. Oh, I'm so excited!
Join the waitlist for Notion Mail.
Marketplace
Notion's official template gallery is becoming a fully functioning marketplace where creators can collect payments, email addresses, and customer reviews. It also offers some essential features that other marketplaces do not (and probably can not) offer, like access locking to protect intellectual property to prevent unfair distribution and refunds within two weeks of the purchase, resulting in the template's removal from the workspace. These last two features especially show how much Notion values its creator community.
If you're a template creator, get ready to say goodbye to Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Etsy, and third-party template galleries. Notion Marketplace is the only platform on which you would want your products to be available.
Looking for a new template? You can access the Marketplace from your workspace. See the "Templates" link at the bottom of your sidebar.
Enough updates? Go and play with the new features, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
We'll explore some of these new features in the upcoming Notion in Motion workshop. Join the waitlist to be the first to know and get a juicy early-bird discount at launch. I'll share more information next month.
In the meantime, if you need any adjustments in your Notion workspace, you can book a Power Hour with me.
Until next time,
Merve