Notion just added one of Excel's best features

Every single morning, I wake up to about 133,000 text messages, DMs, even the odd candygram. All from people who are fans of both Notion and Excel. And they are all asking me to please use my secret notion phone to contact their executive team and ask them, would you please just add just a few features from Excel into Notion, like say conditional formatting. And I dutifully did not answer those DMs and did not do what they asked. But it seems that Notion has answered their prayers anyway because Notion recently added conditional formatting into their product. Now, if you're not sure what conditional formatting is, allow me to show you this in Google Sheets, which is basically Excel. I know I've made somebody mad by saying that, but in this little budget modeler that I've created here, I've got this little cell down here that estimates the percentage of my gross income that I am investing each month. Really nice thing to know. And if I go up here and just sort of delete my 401k out of my life, now it is red and it's making me feel guilty about my financial decisions. That's pretty much the purpose of conditional formatting and spreadsheets. They exist to be read and to make you feel guilty. And now we can feel the same feelings of guilt and inadequacy in Notion as well. Let me show you how exactly you can do that. So we're going to go over to Notion. And here you can see we've got a view of our business expenses. And if we click over to this tab now, we've got some of those active business expenses, the ones that are steadily draining our bank account, highlighted in green. How do you use this feature? Good thing you asked. Let's go ahead and keep the guilt train running because we have a task manager view here. Uh what if in this view of tasks that are due today, we wanted to see the tasks that were overdue and have those kind of visually separated from the ones that are actually due today. I know most people who use a task manager that has a today view like this often fill it with tasks that are due in the past, not actually today. Well, if we go to this little settings icon here, we got this brand new conditional color submen waiting for us. If we click into that, we can click new color setting. And then, just as if we were creating a database filter in this view, we're going to pick a database property from this database to base our rule on. So we'll pick our do date type property here. And we're going to say where do is before and you've probably seen this again while creating a filter. Uh is before. We'll say end date not start date because that is a uh do this is kind of like a do view. We're going to go into select. We're going to click this little bar here to access our dynamic values. And we'll click today. So we're going to say where do is before today. We are going to make the page background and green is not going to do it for us. We're going to make the page background red. So this now really screams you have screwed up. Please go and do this stuff that was supposed to be done at a earlier time. So that is conditional color in a nutshell. And I want to show you a couple more examples of how you can use it with different property types. So over here we've got a view of my recipe tracker inside of my copy of Ultimate Brain. This is a lot of the recipes that my wife and I cook on a regular basis. And as we can see right here, this is all of the recipes in the book. But wouldn't it be cool if I could actually make my favorite recipes just stand out a little bit more? Well, once again, we'll click settings right here. We're going to click conditional color. And something you'll notice is that we have access to conditional color even though this is a gallery style view. Now, if you're an Excel nut like I am, you probably are used to conditional color really just being something that you apply to cells. So, you might expect it to be only available in table views. But the beautiful thing about notion is that it can render data in multiple different layouts. We've got board, we've got gallery, we've got table, we got all kinds of stuff. And conditional color is actually supported in almost every layout type inside of notion. But here inside of this gallery view, we've got it. So let's go into conditional color once again. We're going to click new color setting. And this time we'll choose the favorite property. Now, because the favorite property is a checkbox property or basically like a boolean property, true or false only, the only options we have are is and is not and checked or unchecked. So, we're going to say where favorite is checked, we're going to go ahead and make the card background oh, yellow cuz yellow feels like kind of like a star highlighted color to me. So, just like that, we have made these favorite recipes just really stand out amongst all the recipes in our book. And if you think about it, conditional color here is sort of like the opposite of database filters. And what it actually does, we create rules. And where filters actually filter out pages that don't meet the rules and just get them out of the view entirely, conditional color just kind of highlights the pages that do meet those rules. Here's one more really cool example and an idea for you if you're a content creator like I am. So here in my copy of Creators Companion, which is my entire content planning system, I've got a view of my main channel and all the videos that I completed on that channel. And you can see here that I actually have the view counts, the like counts, and the comment counts for all these videos. I use the notion API and the YouTube data API to pull these numbers

in and keep them relatively up todate. And I think it would be cool to make the videos that performed really well stand out. So let's once again hit settings. We're going to go to conditional color. And this time we're going to choose the view uh the views property here which is a number type property. And we'll go with the little greater than or equal than sign. And I'm going to go with say oh 500,000 for this particular channel. So uh I think card background or green is totally going to work there. Now we can still see all of the videos that we created here or I guess that I created here. the ones that had over a half a million views are going to stand out in green. And if I'm scrolling through here looking maybe for some inspiration or just sort of trying to remember the topics that my audience really resonates with, they are going to stand out and I can just see them a lot more readily. And as a side note, this view of finished videos isn't the only part of this system. If I look at my Thomas Frank Explains channel, the one that I'm kind of working on right now, I've got all my completed videos here. But I can also scroll up on this channel page and I can see all my inrogress projects by their status. And there's even a place where I can very easily brain dump any ideas for new content that I have. And then I can even give it tags like long form or short or stream. I can give it idea merit tags. descriptions so I can make sure that I'm investing my time in the best possible ideas. And this actually gives me a full dashboard for my entire creator business across multiple different channels. I can very easily see everything that I'm working on. I can see the statuses of all my different projects. I can see all of my ideas across all my different channels as well. This gives me a onestop place to manage all of my content creation from idea generation to research and scripting to filming. And it even creates that really useful archive of finished projects where like you saw earlier, you can even bring in YouTube views from the YouTube API. So, if you're a content creator, you can get the exact same system that I'm using at thomasjfrank. com/cc, which I'll link to in the description down below. So, at this point, I've shown you the basics of this feature and given you a few examples for where you could use it. At this point, I want to get into some of the more nitty-gritty details and show you some advanced usage. So, one thing I want to point out is that we could actually create multiple conditional color rules. For example, here is a table view of that today view of our task manager. So again, we're showing all the uh tasks that are due either today or here in red, ones that are overdue. What if we also wanted to highlight high priority tasks? We've got a high priority task here, and here. Well, if we go back into our conditional color settings, one thing you're going to notice is that we can actually add additional rules. You can stack rules just like you can stack filters when you're creating database filters. So, we'll add another here, and we are going to select our priority property. And something you're going to notice because the priority property is a status type property is we now have this match option setting for the page background with select multi select and status properties. You can kind of see this already. The options that we can pick have their own inherent colors. So match option is basically going to make the background color sort of match the color that's in the selected option. Now if we don't want to use that, we can actually disable it. And I'm going to go ahead and disable it now because the way we want to set up this rule is instead of priority being not empty, we're going to say uh let's color pages if priority is and then only select high priority right there. And you can see that if we had match option on, it would make those pages red as well, which really wouldn't distinguish them from the overdue tasks. So instead of red, I think we'll go ahead and toggle off match option, and we'll set that to yellow. And now we've got a single view where overdue tasks are in red and high priority tasks are yellow. Now I do want to point out this lift weights task right here. Both to ask you do you even lift and also to point out the fact that this is a high priority task that is also overdue but it is in red not in yellow. And that is because if multiple conditional color rules apply to a specific page only the top level rule is going to lend its color to that page. You're not going to get some sort of weird red yellow hybrid here. So, at this point, I've shown you conditional color here in a table view. I've shown you it in a list view, in a couple of gallery views here. Let's talk about the supported layout types for this feature. And it really kind of just comes down to all the layout types where conditional color would make sense. That is to say, if we go into settings here and we go into layout, show you all the different options here, uh, minus one that I'll talk about in a second. Pretty much all of these support conditional color except for chart as well as the form view which you don't see here because you can only add forms directly to a source database. Those emissions actually make sense. Charts really kind of aggregate data from a database. They don't show individual rows and then forms are kind of similar. They don't show individual rows. They just kind of give you a way to get new individual rows created in a database. Everywhere else you can use conditional color. Now

property support is a little bit more sparse. Here is a list of all the properties that are currently supported in uh notion databases for conditional color. And these are all what I would call simple writable properties, which is to say you can click on one of these properties in database and you can either type or click a value that is directly written inside of that property. It's not referenced from somewhere else. Meanwhile, here is a list of all the properties that are currently not supported for conditional color. Now, there's a few right off the bat that kind of don't make sense to me. Email, URL, and phone are all basically just aliases of the text property type. So, I'm not really sure why they're not supported. And then there's a few that kind of hurt my soul because they aren't existing right now. Uh, and that is formula, relation, and rollup with a particular emphasis on formula. And I want to go back to the screen share here to show you why I badly want formula support for conditional color. So here is a view of my business expense tracker. And I made a whole video on how you can build this for yourself if you are curious. I just pointed but I don't know where I'll put it on screen. Um where I really would like to use conditional color in a view like this is to show the expenses that are going to renew in the next say 30 days. That's kind of the whole point of why I built this expense tracker to show me the rough monthly cost even for annualized expenses and also to show me the next upcoming renewal date which is especially important for reminding me when annual expenses are about to renew. And as you can see we are currently sorting this by name. So let's say this is a toz or alphabetical view of this expense tracker here. I think it would be really cool to be able to highlight these rows if they were going to be say charging me in the next 30 days. Now, right now, you can see that we have a conditional color rule set up, but it's only based on the status property, which I just had there as an example. So, I'll go ahead and get rid of that. Uh, the reason that you're not going to find renewal date as one of my options here is because renewal date is not a date property. It is in fact a formula property that is referencing a date property. You'll see that we have a charge date property somewhere else in the view. This is the original date of the charge that happened. uh but that's not really useful for planning and getting reminded about upcoming charges. So we create a formula which references that charge date along with the current date and some recurrence data and tells us hey you're going to be charged at this particular date. Wouldn't it be cool if this could be highlighted in red? Now, my guess is that there's not support for formulas and relations and roll-ups right now because those property types reference data from potentially other databases, other places in the workspace and maybe there's performance issues there. However, I don't really buy that because as I mentioned earlier, conditional colors are really kind of just like database filters. And if we go to make a database filter, you will notice that renewal date is actually an option here. And that's because formula properties are actually supported. So really hoping that the notion team fast follows and adds formula support as well as hopefully relation and rollup support as well. There's a couple of other little spots for improvement that I think they could add. Uh number one, this is currently called conditional color for a reason and that is because it is not conditional formatting. We can only change the background color of the page based on the rules we set up. Meanwhile, over in Excel or Google Sheets, if we look at the conditional formatting for this rule over here, which is going to be uh in the format menu, not in the insert menu, and we go into the rule itself, you can see that we can set the background color, but we can also set the text color. We can add strike through, underline, itallic, and bolding. It is true conditional formatting, and I think that might be nice to add to Notion in the future. Uh the other one definitely not a critique at all because I wouldn't have expected this to be included but is a sort of like wishlist item for me is uh the color scale feature. So right now you can see in Google Sheets that I've got a very simple conditional formatting rule where if the value is less than 0. 15 15% of my income being invested we are showing this in red and I get an emotional arrow in my heart. I actually think we could be a little bit more refined with this. If we delete this, you're going to notice that if we add a rule here, we have this color scale option, which also exists in Excel as well. So, instead of applying a single color to the cell if the condition is met, we can create a scale. So, right here, I'm going to go into my formatting rules in the preview. Uh, we're going to choose, I think, this scale right here, red to white to green. And what we can do at this point is establish a minimum value, a maximum value, and then a midpoint, which actually does not have to be the numerical midpoint of our midpoint and our max point. So, I'm going to go ahead and say the midpoint will be zero. I could be theoretically in investing 0% of my income, just blowing it all in Vegas or something. Uh, the max point could be something

pretty high actually. Um, let's come back to that actually because I want the midpoint to say 15%. That is the threshold. I want to say if I am investing 15% of my income exactly, the cell will be white. If I'm investing less than 15%, I want the cell to start getting gradually red to make me really feel the heat. But if we're over 15%, let's start making it a bit more green. And that begs the question, is 30% the max of our income we could invest? Theoretically, no. I'm not sure what the theoretical max is with taxation thrown in there, but it's higher than 30%. So, let's just say 50% as a placeholder. And now you can see because we're at 9. 41%, we're at a nice little light shade of red, a rosé if you will. And if we go up here and we bring our 401k back,000 bucks a month, we are going to be in the green 21. 95%. So, that is color scaling with conditional formatting. And I think that would be pretty sweet to add in uh to the conditional color feature here in Notion if they ever want to bring that in. In fact, I would rather see that added than the additional bolding and italicizing and all that kind of good stuff. Now, if an inkling of curiosity was stirred inside of you when I opened up this formula editor and you're wondering, "How could I learn the wizardly powers required to write these kinds of formulas? " I've got another video on this channel right here whenever it pops up that will teach you Notion formulas from scratch. It is one of the videos I am most personally proud of, even though not a ton of people have watched it because it's kind of technical, but I think you'll really, really enjoy it. And if you want to learn notion formulas, that is the video to watch right there. If you're feeling a little shaky on notion databases and you want a project to really solidify your understanding, this one right here is where you should click. You will go step by step with me to create a full task manager, which you can actually use. It'll be super duper useful and practical, but you'll also touch nearly every part of notion databases, and you will come out of that project with a ton of expertise. See you in that video or see you in whatever video you click on