30+ new Notion features you should know about

notion released over 30 new features in 2024 and in this video we're going to cover all of them both the major new features and some minor features and quality of life tweaks that you probably missed and like you can see here I also made an article version of this video so I thought it'd be more fun to go through the article with you instead of trying to memorize a bunch of lines so without wasting any more time let's get into our first major feature notion calendar is essentially a calendar app it's kind of a replacement for Google Calendar or other calendar apps where you can bring in your Google calendar but you can also bring in notion databases directly into a single unified calendar view so for example I've got a tasks database I have a meal plans uh recurring expenses database and I've brought all those into notion calendar along with my Google Calendar accounts where I have like my meetings and stuff which means I've got this nice little week view where I can see everything that I need to cook everything I need to do pay and all the meetings I need to attend in a single view it's pretty sweet now I made two different videos on notion calendar so I'm going to speed through the rest of this you can check those videos out if you want to but I will mention there are a couple of other cool features in notion calendar that I personally do enjoy quite a bit one of them is the scheduling feature where you can kind of like block off slots in your calendar and allow people to pencil themselves in for meetings kind of like kendly or savic Cal and we also have the ability to show multiple time zones kind of growling down the left side of the calendar view with your time slots and that is quite nice for anybody who's working with a remote team I've got people on my team who live in Poland who live in New Mexico there are all sorts of different time zone Shenanigans going on at the Thomas Frank operation so being able to see those time zones is pretty nice building a century moving right along to our second major feature this one is I think my favorite of 2024 it's maybe not the biggest feature it doesn't represent like a gigantic shift or a huge level up and capabilities like the next one we're going to talk about does but layout Builder has a special place in my heart and that is because it solves one of my biggest paper cuts that I've had with notion for a very long time and that's the way that database Pages were laid out in the past in a database you'd have your page title you'd have all your properties and then often like 10 miles below your properties you'd have your page content well with layout Builder we can now customize the layouts we have in our database pages and it gives you all these cool tools for just making things a little bit better for example I just kind of want to show you what my content database looks like now I can open up a page in side peek and I have my script or my outline right here instantly I also have this little pin section here where I can see the most important properties for my database in this nice little horizontal row and we have all the other properties in this sidebar which is very easily toggled closed or open depending on whether or not I need to see the properties I made a whole video about layout Builder so I won't talk about it too much in this video but it is genuinely my favorite feature of the year and I do want to mention when pages are open fully you can even use a nice little keyboard shortcut I think it's control or command shift backs slash to toggle open that side panel and one request for notion before I move on please make that keyboard shortcut work in side Peak which is the best way to view database Pages because right now it doesn't work and it should we are now moving on to easily the biggest change that we saw in notion in 2024 and that's all of the different upgrades and changes that were made to Notions automations feature so the automations feature itself is something that released in 2023 it's basically like this zappier style if this then that automation builder for notion databases but when automations launched in 2023 they were kind of bare bones it was kind of like the first form of Frieza version or cell version just not that powerful the power level wasn't past a billion yet and Goku could very easily defeat notion automations back then but in 2024 that all changed I am now using notion automations out the Wazoo and the biggest reason for that is the addition of custom for formulas now in any action in an automation you can click the little custom formula button and you're going to have access to the entirety of Notions formula language and you can use this to dynamically change the values that you're going to set in your automation actions not only that but there is a trigger page object in the formula Builder and that is the secret sauce that is what allows us to access the context of the page that triggered the Automation in addition to custom formulas we also got a few different actions that make automations pretty useful first we have a defined variables action now this one seems kind of innocuous at first kind of like final form Frieza he seems pretty small diminutive how would he have a whole lot of power in there but like Frieza Define variables can blow up an entire planet well maybe it can't do that but it can let you define custom variables using the formula editor and then pass those variables and reference them in further action steps in your automations and the Define variables action has another trick up its sleeve it will actually allow you to create a variable able that

represents a specific list of pages and then you can edit all those pages using the edit Pages action later on in addition we got a send notification action which can send notifications natively in notion to any user in your workspace we got a send mail action which can send emails and you have formula capabilities in pretty much all the fields for your emails like the body and the subject and then there's the big one send web hook now if you are not an automation nerd like me if you've never done PR programming if you've never worked with like zapier or pipe dream then the word web hook might not mean much to you but this is just monstrously powerful to give you like a brief Cliffs notes version of what this represents sending a web hook basically means we can fire off what's called an HTTP request to any URL and pretty much the entire internet functions on HTTP requests when you go to Thomas JF frank. com to read all of my great blog posts you are sending an HTTP request from your browser to a server somewhere and then that server sends a response it's how all of the internet works essentially so why is it useful here well in the past we've always had the notion API which will allow other tools like say zapier or pip dreamer make. com to um kind of interact with our notion workspaces and what they can do is pull the notion workspace on a schedule to see if things have changed and that worked well enough but if you wanted to say like sync a notion database to Google Calendar you would have to pull your workspace super duper frequently which on a lot of apps would cost you a whole lot of zappier credits or make actions or a whole lot of other credits that would cost you tons and tons of money but with this action here when something happens in an automation we can send a web hook event in real time and that can be used to trigger another automation somewhere else like on zappier which means that you no longer have to pull on a super frequent schedule you can react when something happens because notion will now tell you that it happened and pretty much the sky the limit here you can do kind of anything because now notion send events to any other app that can receive them form of water okay next up on our list is notion forms so this is a nice little form Builder inside a notion that you can spawn incredibly quickly you literally type SL form and you got a form plus a database attached to it now uh in addition to that speed something that I also love about notion forms is you can very easily share the form and you do not have to give access to the underlying database to whoever you share the form with which means if you're thinking creatively right now you can do some pretty interesting stuff when it comes to client management workflows I made a video recently about how client portals are very tough to build an oce because you can't give your client access to say a slice of a tasks database where only the tasks they create are the ones they have access to just doesn't work that way but now you could create a single page for a client in your workspace embed a form for your tasks database on that page right there and they could very easily submit new tasks or requests or tickets into a centralized database without needing to have access to it with forms you can also embed those forms on notion sites which we'll talk about a bit later in this video which means you can create contact forms and email signup forms all kinds of stuff and combining forms with say automations and other features let you do some really fancy things now speaking of fanciness I do think that notion forms is currently in its like first form of Frieza phase it's kind of in its baby phase because it doesn't have some of the more advanced features might expect it doesn't have like hidden Fields doesn't have default values there's certainly no conditional logic at all in it so if you do need those Advanced features I would recommend T. O it's a fantastic external form Builder which is both free and also has a really good notion integration but if you need a quick and dirty form notion forms is the tool for you all right next one is notion home now notion home is a weird one if you go to that little home section your notion sidebar you're going to see something that looks basically nothing like the rest of notion instead of a Infinite Canvas where you can put blocks wherever you want create your own layout you have this very rigid system of a limited handful of widgets but there's one part of notion home that's far more fascinating than anything else and that's the my tasks widget so when you enable this you can bring in tasks that are part of what are called task databases and a task database is something that any database can turn into after you go to the little customize page and you go through the task database model and this will basically ask you to do three things set an assign property set a due date property and set a status property and in doing this you're essentially ensuring that the database you're customizing adheres to a specific schema or structure and by doing this you can actually bring in the pages from that database into my tasks along with pages from any other task database it's the only area in notion right now where we have a single view that can show pages from multiple databases all mashed

together and I really hope that this idea makes its way into actual database blocks that we can put anywhere else in notion in 2025 at okay moving on we also have charts in notion so essentially notion charts are another type of database view but instead of showing you like a table view of all the rows or showing you really any you use the data from those rows to create chart views you can create bar charts you can create line pie charts you can do grouping so I'm not going to go too much into all the charts features in this video I will note that a couple of the use cases I mentioned here in the blog post might be pretty interesting you could do hours tracked by team member if you set up time tracking which I'm making a video about very soon you could do like assign tasks by team member to see the workload of each individual person on your team there's a whole lot you could do here so if you are curious check out my charts master class I did like nine example charts in this video I think it's like almost an hour long so check that out if you're curious moving on what does this button do we now have database buttons to talk about so in 2023 notion created a feature called buttons really they kind of like just revamped a feature called template buttons from way back in the day into this button feature but essentially you can click a button and you can trigger an automation which is very similar to the full notion automations feature the only difference being that you click the button instead of some other like indirect trigger triggering the automation well now we have those same but buttons as a database property so in any database you can add a button property and then that'll allow you to click the button and trigger an automation just like you would with those actual button blocks the only thing you can't do with database buttons that you can do with regular button blocks is ADD blocks beneath the button which totally makes sense but database buttons even though they can't make those blocks kind of rock and recently I built an entire time tracking setup in my copy of ultimate brain here's an example of it I can click this little start button on any task I can click the end button to end the tracking and I've got it set up where I can track multiple work sessions across a single task so if for example this task here takes me three different sections I can see the total time I took across all those sections um and that's one of the reasons why I absolutely love the database buttons feature I've got a whole video on database buttons and I've got a video coming very soon on this time tracking setup so check that out and uh keep your eyes peeled for the second video moving on so we have all always been able to put notion Pages live on the internet I think that's been a feature ever since I started using notion back in 2018 it's what drives my ability to share notion templates with you guys but it also means that you can more or less use notion as a website builder you can throw together a page for a bake sale you're having or a resume that you want to share with an employer make it public on the internet and share that URL you've always been able to do that but with notion sites they've added a whole bunch of extra features which I've listed here that more or less turn that feature into like a full-fledged website builder product you can now add a custom domain to a specific set of pages on notion you can create a header section with a horizontal uh like sort of top menu if you want to you can add favicons you can do Google analytics you can do SEO settings so this just sort of like adds the cherry on top of the already really useful functionality of making Pages public and it kind of turns notion into a competitor for website Builders like framer Squarespace or Wix I can't Sur in this market all right now we're going to move on to something that I don't think I've talked about on my Channel at all this year and that's Marketplace so in the past you always had this templates option in the sidebar of the notion app and when you click that you could see templates that were made directly by the notion team and add those to notion but that was kind of it well now that has been replaced by a new feature called Marketplace and as the name implies pretty much anybody can share templates and even sell them directly on the marketplace and as a user you can buy or get free templates and install them directly in the notion app so this makes things a lot easier for users but what it represents for creators is a lot more interesting a lot more important so that's what I'm going to focus on here essentially Marketplace allows you to sell templates or distribute them for free directly through notion you can also collect email addresses so that can actually help you to build up an email list if you want to um and there's a few other features that I think creators is going to be pretty excited about not least of which that you can protect your template there's a new protection feature that when turned on will prevent people from re-sharing templates that they have gotten from you either for free or that they paid for there's also a refund policy so people can actually get refunds for paid templates and notion will literally take them out of the workspace and then one that I think is really nice notion is acting as what's called The Merchant of record which means they entirely handle sales taxes for you we need to talk about your flare moving on to the item on my list that I think got the big biggest Applause at

the make with notion Event in San Francisco that I attended back in November it's custom emoji why is this in my major features category well people went crazy for this feature even though it's super tiny so like in slack a Discord you can now add custom emoji to notion um sort of different from the upload option that's always been here when you add a custom emoji it actually becomes part of a set here you can do gifts if you want to and when you add custom emoji you can add them pretty much anywhere all right suggested edits is the next item on our list this is kind of like the suggested edits feature in Google Docs if you want to suggest changes that should be made to the structure of a page you can do that and you can do it if you have can comment permission level or higher on the page now this is a feature that I have some mixed thoughts on it does work well and it's very easy to approve or reject the changes that have been suggested if you're somebody that has edit permissions on the page but this feature has some quirks as well one big one is that you can't hide the suggested edits on the page very easily you either have to accept them which will change the structure of the page or reject them which will simply delete them so I'm hoping in 2025 this feature gets a little bit of love and uh we have the ability to hide those suggestions very easily you are a robot all right we are now on to notion AI upgrades I think the most interesting new capability that ocean AI got in 2024 is the ability to analyze PDFs and images which also means that it can analyze PDFs made up of images now this is such an interesting use case for me because if you can feed AI a PDF you can say hey please act as an OCR bot and extract the text and that means you can digitize handwritten notes this is such an interesting use case for me in fact that I wrote an entire blog post tutorial earlier this year on how to do this exact thing take pictures of your handwritten notes and digitize them in notion um in my case I used a pipe dream workflow and the open AI API directly which makes it really cheap in fact I think you can do it now free using Google Gemini but nonetheless you can do it directly inside of notion with notion AI now if you are paying for notion AI there's also a new Global AI shortcut which is pretty sweet if you have uh notion installed on your desktop and I think if it's open you can do command or control shift and J to bring up notion AI kind of like a little raycast window almost um and I did want to mention that in addition to this shortcut you've got command shift K to bring up Notions Global search while you have any app open so if you're in the browser and you're like playing heli Attack 3 for some reason on addicting games and you need to search for something in notion like the strats to beat the boss you can do that with this cool little keyboard shortcut I love this and I also love my cool little CSS for keyboard input on my website I'm very proud of that even though it doesn't really matter next up we have ai connectors basically notion AI can connect to slack to GitHub projects and to Google drive to answer questions about all the files and projects in there we have one-click ai actions that can summarize the content of a page or extract action items basically you just click the little face guy in the bottom right corner and choose from these different actions we'll probably see more of those in 2025 we have a general knowledge capability now we have the ability to at mention people or pages to narrow down searches when the AI is trying to pull information and last but not least we can mention specific pages when guiding the model's response in terms of like tone and writing style so if you have a style guide page you could be like hey make sure you adhere to this style guide or I'll will have to give you a c instead of an A and you're going to get grounded by your dad that brings us to our minor feature releases section so we've covered all the major stuff I did videos about most of those all the stuff going forward I don't think I made any content about this year but the first one I'm actually quite excited about it's a floating table of contents block so basically now on new pages that have heading blocks we have this nice little floating table of contents element and when you hover over it you can see all of the headings on the page and very quickly click over to them something that Google Docs has had for a long time Dropbox paper has had it pretty much every other major writing app has had it for a very long time so I'm very happy to see notion finally at it we also got a sidebar upgrade the main thing that I'll point out here is in the private section if you have too many pages there's a little more button and you can open up this nice little slidy little Pane and then in there you can sort all the pag pages in your private section by their last edited date which I think is a really nice quality of life feature and I'm hoping that this is a Herald of things to come or a harbinger I'm hoping it's sort of like signaling that we're going to be able to show database views in a pain like this in the future don't have any Insider information but I'm manifesting it now would love to see like a view of a database here in a pain that I can lock open speaking of locking things open we got an inbox upgrade and I think the most interesting thing here is that you can lock open the Inbox as a

centered pane so you have your sidebar you got your inbox and then you have the actual notion content and this kind of makes the app almost feel like an email client you have your list of notifications here you can very easily click through them and you can get things done in the nice little content pane here without closing this and I have found that this actually gets me to go through my inbox notifications where I never did before so nice work on this feature notion next up if I can get out of my light box here we have URL mentions this one's super duper quick and simple but basically when you paste a URL for an external website now you got this little mention option and that'll turn it into this nice little pretty favicon plus title mention which can go in line unlike bookmark cards we have image cropping so for any image in notion you now have this little crop tool where you can crop using the handles to a custom aspect ratio or you can choose from preset aspect ratios or a circle which I'm not sure is an aspect ratio tell me if I'm wrong in the comments below we have a PDF and Google Docs importing here which I kind of have a bone to pick with this feature because you can call it from the slash menu which would kind of infer that you're going to embed the PDF content on the page where you use the slash command but instead it opens up this big Global import workflow and brings in all the text to the PDF kind of a paper cut hopefully they're going to fix that in 2025 but it is pretty nice that you have a tool for actually extracting the text from PDFs and putting that in Ocean in instead of just embedding the PDF document itself nice little upgrade we have pinned tabs in the desktop app so in 2023 we were able to uh create tabs in the desktop app which was a sorely lacking feature and now you can pin tabs which means they get smaller like this and they will open up by default when you open up notion unlike tabs that were not pinned we have new iOS shortcuts so if you are a iOS or Mac OS shortcuts nerd like I am we've got new notion actions in there you can create a page you can search you can append text so some nice little quick capture possibilities and potentials there and that is our minor feature round so now my friends we're going to kick off the lightning round which is a round full of quality of life tweaks and fixes to little paper cuts that you probably missed so first we've got some new formula functions if you're a formula nerd like me you will now be able to put on your propeller hat and your taped glasses because we have new math functions we got mean and we got median you can do stats in notion baby we have the today function which returns a date object without the time that's actually way more useful than it sounds at first glance um and then we have pad start and Pad end which just kind of append uh strings to other strings either before or after kind of small but uh there are some use cases for that we have a new text and background Color Picker which means now you can independently select a different text color and background color if you want to have like a yellow background with brown text that's disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself but you can do it you can customize the background of buttons as well not database buttons but button blocks at the very least I think this is kind of gross but I did it for uh the purposes of giving an example we have rounded checkboxes which actually are kind of great every time I would use notion I would get a pixel cut from the sharp edges on Square checkboxes so I think it's a you know a great thing the notion has done here with rounded checkboxes constant OSHA violations with those Square check boxes and now they're OSHA compliant thank you so much for bringing a civilized border radius into 2024 personalized page URLs so uh this is a paid feature but uh before when you would share a public notion page it would have all sorts of gobbledygook and random strings and characters and Batman symbols and cubert language over here you can change that to something really simple like weighted scores and that's just way easier to say put on screen as a URL for somebody to remember and maybe even type in if they like typeing their URLs we have commenting on database properties so this one's pretty nice in the past you could always comment on blocks and individual bits of text and Pages now in a table view or in a full page database page you can actually add a comment directly to a database property value on a page we also have links on images now I didn't know we couldn't do this before but now you can link to external sites from images uh we have the ability to hover over desktop tabs to preview what they look like kind of a small feature I don't really use it much but it is a feature uh this one is much more important we' have improved command orrf search so if you do command P or command K that brings up the global search but you can also do command F to do on Page search and before it was fairly useful but any content in closed toggles was not findable and content in database properties was not findable either now both of those are findable so here I got tiny turtle up in my command F Bar and I can see that tiny turtle is highlighted right here and another Super useful feature here is the show details button in formulas this is so tiny but so nice in the formula editor you now have this little I icon which will show

you the data type of the formula's return value and this is really nice in this case it's showing that it's a list of blocks which we would call an array if we're nerds it even puts the uh little brackets around the list to make it really obvious that it's a list not a comma separated string and this is quite nice because especially in automations you often need to understand the data type of what's being returned from a formula is it a date is it just a piece of text that looks like a date awesome addition from the nocean formulas team very happy with that one uh we have the ability to shorten URLs and URL properties not much to say here you just toggle this and URLs are nicely truncated which just looks a little bit better you can hide weekends in calendar view which is technically a feature release it's got to be on this list and then finally wrapping up Notions actual releases we have a monday. com data importer so let's wrap this video up by talking about the stuff that my team released we did work too we should get some recognition right so the main thing I want to talk about in this section here is our notion Web Clipper fly lighter if you're looking for a better way to quickly capture information from the web like highlights from articles that you're doing research on or full article text and you want to specifically fill in notion database properties as well give fly letter a try it's a free browser extension it allows you to create as many forms or we call them flows as you want and in those flows you can automatically fill in database properties with web data you can take highlights you can do a whole lot of really fancy stuff as well this is a Web Clipper for nerds and we have a lot more functionality coming in the future on our website you will see a weight list link but you can also buypass that weight list just by joining our Discord and that is where you can interact with me you can help to shape our road map and you can try out our latest build there are even upcoming opportunities for testing our upcoming Dev builds uh beta testing opportunities things like that we also released a brand new version of ultimate brain so ultimate brain if you haven't heard about it is the system that I use to run pretty much my entire personal productivity system in notion I've got all my tasks there all my notes there my goal tracking there my recipes meal plans which go to notion calendar my book tracking all of it is in a single template and I spent a lot of 2024 completely redesigning ultimate brain from the ground up to be leaner meaner much easier to use and more valuable as well and I just want to point out my personal favorite part of ultimate brain 3. 0 in this section which is this little execute section of a page called my day so a feature that I really miss from an app called wonderlist back in the day is that you could star tasks which would add them to a special little section which basically represented tasks that you know you're going to do today instead of relying on due dates you wake up in the morning and you go I'm going to do this add it to this section that is what execute is there's a little check boox here and on all your regular task views you can check that to add it to a section called my day um and this is the execute section of my day so here I can see the stuff I've done I need to do I can do time tracking and all kinds of stuff as well I can add little energy or location tags but this gives me like a laser focused area and notion that only shows me the tasks I have deliberately decided to do today and that helps me to keep myself from getting distracted and going and chasing shiny objects which I am unfortunately want to do sometimes so if you want to get ultimate brain 3. 0 you'll find a link in the description down below you can also go to thas JFR frank. com srain which is a really easy slug to remember last but not least if you are a programmer like I am now I'm a JavaScript developer I'm going to own that notion helper is another project that I released and you may find it useful so if you've done any work with the notion API maybe you've gone through my full notion API tutorial it's like two hours long here on YouTube for free then you will know that the notion API is powerful but kind of verbose and kind of hard to work with and because I spent so much time working with the notion API for things like my notion voice tasks workflow and my voice notes workflow and other stuff I got kind of tired of typing a zillion brackets and a zillion curly braces to work with the API so I just started building myself a set of custom functions that would hopefully like provide some shortcuts then I tripped and I fell and I accidentally ate 10 hot dogs on the way down and I also made a full JavaScript library that's like a whole bunch of quality of life features for the notion API so for example let's say you had like some Json here you wanted to create an album inside of notion with some properties like the name and the artist and then you wanted to create a track list on the page like that in the notion API you'd have to write something like this there like 80 lines of code to get all this in here you'd have to create your own little Loop function for all the U the list items there in notion helper it's really easy you can install the package which isn't even a line of code I just put that there as an example and then you just import it and you use what's called a fluent interface to chain methods together so if you want to just like create a page you can specify the parent database title property you can specify the artist property and so on there's even a

nice little Loop function that will automatically allow you to Traverse arrays and create any block you want for each item in the array and it gets really fancy from there if you are curious it's on mpm it's on GitHub it's open source and I have a whole bunch of additional uh examples on the web page for it which I will have linked below along with everything else and that's it that is everything that notion released in 2024 along with all the stuff that we released we're going to close the curtains on that year and start making a whole bunch of cool stuff this year I've got a bunch of videos that I'm really excited about I'm building a space repetition tutorial for notion I've got a Time tracking tutorial which I've already got implemented in my copy of ultimate brain 3. 0 freaking rocks I'm super excited to publish that tutorial in particular it's coming very soon so if you don't want to miss out on New tutorials and even template releases you can number one make sure you're subscribe to this Channel and number two join our notion tips newsletter at thomasj frank. com fundamentals all the those fun links are in the description down below YouTube thinks you'll like this video but I think right here even more click on them to do algorithmic things otherwise thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one