How to Navigate Notion in 2025
- Last Updated on February 3, 2025
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Feeling overwhelmed by Notion’s interface? You’re not alone! This powerful tool offers endless possibilities, but getting started can be confusing. In this lesson, we’ll break down the key elements of the interface into manageable sections, teach you essential navigation techniques, and equip you with the knowledge to confidently leverage everything Notion has to offer. Get ready to transform from a bewildered beginner to a master navigator of your Notion workspace!
Notion has three visual areas or sections:
- The top left-hand sidebar: To access your pages and view recent updates quickly.
- The bottom left-hand sidebar: Where you can easily navigate, create, structure, and see all the Teamspaces, pages and databases available in your workspace. Here you can also access Notion’s Calendar, settings and templates.
- The right-hand page: where all your digital content is edited, stored, shared, and visualized.
Top left-hand sidebar
The top-left-hand sidebar, known as the control panel, is static and provides the following features.
Workspaces
Ability to alternate between workspaces. You might be wondering, why do I need different workspaces? Since Notion was created to be versatile enough for both personal and professional use, users can create multiple workspaces and organize information for different aspects of their lives. Also, you will see additional workspaces when someone shares a page with you or adds you as a member in their Teamspace.
The screenshot below shows two workspaces, Carlos Ayala HQ and the Philomath Movement. The latter is a project I am working on with other Notion enthusiasts where you can share your knowledge on a specific topic while practicing how to use Notion.
Benefits of a workspace:
- Having a dedicated workspace helps maintain order and structure.
- You can customize each workspace to align with your workflow and preferences.
- Provide a collaborative environment where you can control access to pages and databases based on permissions set by you for different users.
- In addition to creating your workspaces, you can also join workspaces and teamspaces created by other people or organizations.
- A hub where teams, friends and family can collaborate in real-time.
Expand & hide sidebar
The two arrows << allow you to expand and hide the left-hand sidebar. A collapsed sidebar helps you to stay focuse by minimizing distractions.
Create new pages
Create new pages fast by clicking on the pen inside the square 1. Notion changed the location of this feature on April 2024. Before it was located under Settings & members. They also removed the option to choose where to add the new page as now it is automatically added at the end of your private pages.
I preferred the previous version because now I have to move the page which is an extra step. I believe Notion made this change to lower the risk of high sensitive information being accessed before page content and permissions are reviewed.
After creating a new page 1, give it a title 2. You can then start writing or ask Notion AI to help you write, choose from a list of templates to use 3 or create a database/table 4. The last option 5 lets you choose from various layouts or database views available to help you visualize information in different ways.
For simplicity and practice, we are just going to create an empty page for now.
Search
The search feature let’s you find your digital content quickly. Just click on Search, type what you are looking for, and click on the circle with three lines to activate the filter. It will let you sort your results by edited and created time. You can then filter by Title, who Created the page, Teamspace, Include only specific pages or databases, or Date.
To the right side of the search window, you will see a snapshot of what’s inside that page or database to refresh your memory.
Notion AI
Notion AI is an integrated artificial intelligence assistant designed to help you work faster, smarter, and more creatively within your Notion workspace. It’s a phenomenal tool for automating workflows and managing your knowledge base.
Here’s a breakdown of its key features and capabilities:
Writing Assistant:
- Brainstorming: Notion AI can help you generate ideas and brainstorm topics for your projects. You can adjust the tone of your writing to suit different audiences or purposes.
- Writing: It can assist with writing emails, blog posts, reports, and other documents.
- Editing: Notion AI can help you improve your writing by suggesting edits, corrections, and alternative phrasing.
- Summarizing: It can summarize long texts or documents, saving you time and effort.
Text Generation:
- Content creation: Notion AI can generate new content based on your input, such as blog posts, product descriptions, or social media captions.
- Language translation: It can translate text into different languages, making communication easier across teams or with international clients.
Task Automation:
- Simple tasks: Use Notion AI autofill property on a database to generate extraction items, summaries, translations, and more.
Knowledge Management:
- Question and Answer: Notion AI can answer questions based on the information contained in your Notion workspace.
- Search and Retrieval: It can help you find relevant information within your workspace faster and more efficiently.
Additional Features:
- Tone adjustment: You can adjust the tone of your writing to suit different audiences or purposes.
- Spelling and grammar check: Notion AI can help you improve the accuracy and clarity of your writing.
- Idea generation: It can suggest new ideas or topics based on your existing content.
Ready to work smarter, not harder? Notion AI is here to supercharge your productivity. Check out Notion’s pricing page to get started.
Home
The Home page is a dashboard added in April 2024 that shows you recently visited pages and upcoming events. Although helpful, the home page is too generic. I prefer to create my own dashboard because my personal needs and the project information will certainly vary.
The home page includes the following sections:
- Recently visited: This section will show the last twenty pages you visited. Just keep scrolling to the right to see them all.
- Upcoming events: When you connect Notion calendar with Google calendar, it will show the upcoming events up to one week.
- Database views: Let’s you connect to one database. This is useful for tasks or items you need to keep track frequently.
- A Learn section displaying Notion tutorials. You can hide completed courses or hide this section from Home.
- A Featured templates section displaying six templates created by Notion. You can explore more Notion templates from there or hide this section from Home.
Inbox
Inbox, 1 previously known as Updates, shows all notifications triggered by reminders, page changes made by others, or when you are mentioned in a comment. 2 You can click the ●●● dots to “Mark all as read” or archive all the notifications to clear your Inbox. You can also filter the notificatons but I find this feature not very useful since it only has four filtering options. It would be great if you could have the same filtering options available in Search.
When you hover over a notification 3, you have three options:
- Change the page notification settings to either include All udpates, Important updates, or only Replies and @mentions. I find the last option to be very useful when you have a page that has a lot of activity and want to reduce the number of notifications to only action items that require your attention.
- Mark notification as read.
- Archive the notification.
Bottom left-hand sidebar
The bottom-left-hand sidebar will contain all your pages and databases for quick access and management. The following features make this section intuitive and versatile:
- Access your workspace pages and databases which can be grouped in different categories such as Favorites, Teamspaces, Shared, and Private. You will only see these categories when they have pages assigned to them.
- Staying organized. You can drag-and-drop individual pages, databases or full Teamspaces to organize your workspace to best suit your needs. Clicking on the Teamspaces or toggles next to each page allows you to expand or collapse all the pages or databases inside it (databases will show a ● to the left of the database title).
- Quickly add pages and databases, or create new teamspaces by clicking on the + sign.
- Click the ●●● to access page or teamspace settings.
- At the end of this section, you will find links to additional features such as Notion Calendar, Settings, Templates, Trash, and Help. I will expand on this in future lessons.
Settings
Settings allow you to edit your personal account and workspace settings. I will expand on this section in a future lesson.
Right-hand page
Now that you understand how to navigate the left-hand sidebar, we can talk about how to navigate the right-hand page commonly known as the editor. In this area, you will be adding and editing your content which could be a page or a database.
Customize your page
Remember the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”? This is true when trying to find information in Notion. The following two features will help you visually organize your pages and databases:
- Add a page cover 1: include an image that can illustrate your content. You can upload or paste an image link. This helps to visualize the content in board and gallery views.
- Add a page icon 2: I use icons to represent categories. This helps me differentiate between pages, databases, and their purpose. For example, you could use the magnifying glass icon
for a page that focuses on research or for goals.
Page settings
The following features, located at the top-right corner, will allow you to customize your page:
- Share: Invite others to view or edit the page or subpages. You can also publish a static website of the page. I will explore permission settings in another lesson.
- View and filter all comments & suggestions for that page.
- View page updates, analytics and history (last option only for paid plans).
- Mark the page as favorite so it can show up at the top of the left-hand sidebar for quick access.
- Clicking the
●●●opens additional page settings:- Font style: Default, Serif, and Mono. I prefere the first option to keep it simple.
- Small text: turning this feature On compresses the text. A little counterproductive as I have to make an extra effort to stay focused. I prefer to leave it Off.
- Full width: Stretches the content by removing the margin limits set by Notion. I prefer full width to keep the blocks fluid.
- Suggest edits: When on, any edits you make will be styled in blue. Then, they need to be accepted or rejected. You will need to turn off this setting when done making edits.
- Lock page; this is useful for high traffic pages when you don’t want individuals making accidental edits.
- Table of content; I love this feature specially when you have a very long page that contains H1 and H2 headings. Instead of scrolling up and down through your document, just hover over the horizontal lines on the right to activate the window.
- Dictate: This feature let’s you write hands-free.
- Customize page; this allows you to control the behaivour of the top-level page discussions, backlinks and page comments. To avoid cluttering your editor, I recommend turning off “Top-level page discussions” and “Backlinks”, and set the “Page comments” to “Minimal”. Turn backlinks ON only when you want to see all the pages that link back to the current page when it’s mentioned.
- Turn into wiki; There are moments when converting a page into a wiki is helpful. Specially when you have a repository of pages containing information that needs be reviewed and up-to-date. Notion will create a drop down menu below the page title with a table view displaying all the pages you are referencing to, the owner and verification status.
- Notify me; this is useful when you want to control the amount of notifications you receive for the page. You can either choose “All updates”, “All comments” or “Replies and mentions”. I prefer the last option to stay sane.
- The other settings are self explanatory so I won’t go into details. Import, export, and connections will be explained in another lesson.
Styling text tool bar
The styling text tool bar brings your text to life. After creating a page, you can start typing by placing your cursor below the title. You can then activate the tool bar by highlighting the text. Below are some of the features and formatting options available:
- Explain: Displayed when less than eight words are highligted. Notion AI will read the words and then the whole page to provide context or a definition. Could be used for summaries.
- Improve writing: Displayed when more than eight words are highligted. Notion AI will improve and rewrite the text. Great when experiencing writer’s block.
- Ask AI – to improve your writing, summarize content, translate, and more.
- Text – turn text into a heading, to-do list or any basic block. Love this feature!
- Link – you can link to a webpage or another page or database in your workspace.
- Comment – leave a comment on the highlighted area for spot-on collaboration.
- Suggests edits
- Bold
- Italic
- Underline
Strike– in case you are editing a paragraph that needs to be replaced.- </> Mark as code – for program developers who want to produce cleaner documentation.
- √𝑥 – mark as equation: from z=x^2+y^2 to z=𝑥²+𝑦²
- Change the color of the text and background.
- Click the
●●●to open block settings.
Formatting command tricks
These commands are very useful to edit existing content without touching your mouse or touchpad. Think of how many times you reach for your mouse in one minute. Five, ten times? These tricks and commands can help you stay focused by avoiding doing an extra step in your writing process.
The comands below will apply only to the current active block and your cursor can be anywhere in the text.
| Outcome | Command |
|---|---|
| Transform block type into… | /turn |
| Turn block into bullet | /turnbullet |
| Change text color to red | /red |
| Change background color to yellow | /yellowba |
| Change to default color | /default |
Markdown styling
Notion uses an easy-to-write plain text format in their editor to support all Markdown styling on web, mobile, and desktop.
In case you haven’t heard the term Markdown, it is a markup language created by John Gruber in 2004 to make it easy to write formatted text using plain text. It’s often used for writing documentation, blog posts, and other types of content.
To learn more about this topic, you can visit the Basic Syntax page from the The Markdown Guide website.
Markdown shortcuts
Speed up your writing with this list of supported markdown commands in Notion.
| Element | Markdown Syntax |
|---|---|
| Heading 1 | # + tab key |
| Heading 2 | ## + tab key |
| Heading 3 | ### + tab key |
| Toggle list | > + tab key |
| Quote block | “ + tab key |
| Number/letter list | 1., a. , or i. + tab key |
| To-do checkbox | [] + tab key |
| Bulleted list | *, -, +, + tab key |
| Bold | ** on both sides of text |
| Italicize | * on both sides of text |
| Inline code | ` on both sides of text |
| Code block | `` on both sides of text |
| Strikethrough | ~ on both sides of text |
| Horizontal line | --- |
Content blocks
Content blocks are the foundation for creating anything you can imagine in Notion. They allow you to customize your page with many different types of content, from images to videos and databases to mention a few examples.
When you press the slash / command anywhere in a page, a menu of content types appears. You can use basic blocks such as a Heading or a To-do list to more advanced options such as media upload or embed videos. I expand on the many different types of content blocks in the next lesson Deep Dive into Notion Blocks.
Content block settings
Content block settings allow you to access a menu of options that could be slightly different depending on the block type. Click on the six dots to activate the menu. This is also known as the action menu. Check out the second lesson to learn how to edit a block in Notion.
Drag & drop
Drag & drop allows you to move any content block to wherever you want in the same page. Just click the gray six-dotted icon to the left of the block and drag it.
Notion AI Icon
And lastly, at the bottom right of the page, you will find the Notion AI icon. It activates Notion’s artificial intelligence tool for the current page and has the same functionality as the one found in the top-left-hand sidebar.
When clicked, a window will pop up with a list of suggested items for that page. As you populate and grow your workspace, Notoin AI will become your search engine on steroids to find what you need in seconds.
In this lesson, we have learned how to navigate Notion’s interface. We have broken down the key elements of the interface into manageable sections, including the top-left-hand sidebar, bottom-left-hand sidebar, and the right-hand page. Each of these sections serves a unique purpose in helping you organize and manage your workspace. By understanding these elements, you are now equipped with the knowledge to confidently explore everything Notion has to offer.
This lesson is part of the Notion Essentials Fast Track course. To continue your journey towards mastering Notion, in the next lesson we will take a deep dive into Notion blocks which are the fundamental elements that fuel the page editor to unlock endless possibilities.
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