7 Tips For Better Notion Charts 📊

Notion Charts have been out for a while now. If you’re still struggling to get the hang of them, hopefully these 7 tips will help unlock some things for you.

Today’s newsletter in bullet points:

• 7 pro tips for better Notion Charts;

• A new tutorial video walking through these tips and examples; and

• Landmark Lifetime is having a significant sale this week—if you’ve had your eye on it, now’s a good time to lock it in.

7 Tips For Notion Charts

1. Use 1 database with many properties: One of the most common mistakes/issues I see people making when working with Notion charts is trying to combine data across multiple databases.
   
   They have an expenses database, a revenue database, and another database trying to connect the two… Unfortunately, Notion charts aren’t really friendly to pulling data from multiple sources (yet). And so the best practice, I’ve found, is to think about a larger category for your databases, then add tags and properties to filter your data and charts from there.
   
   So, for example, if you wanted to create a Profit-Loss chart, you could achieve this with Notion charts by having:
   - 1 database called ‘Transactions’;
   - A ‘Type’ property with revenue and expenses;
   - A formula to turn ‘expense’ items into negative values; and
   - Simply use Notion charts’ native ‘Sum’ property to calculate the positive - negative values in your chart for you 🙌 
   

2. Include a Date property by default: There are a couple of reasons to do this. Firstly, most charts will benefit from having some time-series component to them—tracking revenue month to month, for example—and so you’re going to need that information anyway.
   
   But also because Notion has packed a bunch of neat features into their native Date property that will let you combine values, filter elements and and work with charts in really useful ways.
   
   So, don’t just add a text property and write ‘Jan. 5th’. Make sure you use Notion’s native Date property and reap the benefits.
   

3. Right type for the right data: Here’s the quick breakdown:
   
   📊 Vertical Bar Charts & Line Charts: Best when you have a Time or Date element
   🍩 Donut Chart: Best when you have a no time element, but want to break up a larger sum into its respective categories;
   ➡️ Horizontal Bar Chart: Great for tracking progress or counts, again when there is no date element needed in the visualization (e.g. Projects & Tasks).
   

4. Duplicate your chart views: Once you have your database setup and you’ve configured your first chart, the fastest way to create new charts is to simply hit ‘Duplicate’ on the existing view. Don’t waste time reconfiguring every chart, just duplicate an existing chart 🤷 
   

5. Use filters: Best filters to use with charts:
   
   - Categories: Filter for a specific tag or type of item;
   - Date: Filter by relative dates to capture items, say, in the ‘last 30 days’;
   - Status: Filter out items that are already completed, or filter for items that are ‘Overdue’;
   - Size: Filter for items that meet a certain size condition, for example, filter to only show revenue items that are > $1000.
   

6. Make it simple to add new data: In the video, I show how you can add Notion buttons to automate the process of adding new items to a selected database from anywhere in your workspace. But you can also simply use filtered table views to make it easier to add new items into the correct categories/date periods.
   

7. Style it simply: Avoid overdoing it with Notion’s colorful charts. You can use color to signal certain things about what each chart represents. Whether that’s using green and red for Revenue and Expenses respectively, or using a specific color for a department of the business (like ‘Orange’ for content, etc.). You can often communicate a lot of information very quickly by simply making better use of color in your charts—and not overwhelming the workspace with multi-colored charts everywhere! 🌈 

And that’s it. Take a look at the video for more details, and I hope you find these tips useful!

And as mentioned at the top, Landmark Lifetime is currently on a significant sale. If you’d like to secure it at this current reduced price, now’s the time :)

Best,

Gerrard
Founder @landmarklabs.co