A quick introduction

Notion is a software made for taking notes, organizing notes, and creating databases of information. It is all hosted online, so you can use Notion in you browser, or you can download the desktop app for a better editing experience.

This entire website is created as notes/pages in Notion. To access and edit this website, log into the Notion account associated with classroomphysicists@physics.mcgill.ca.

The very very basics (pages and blocks)

This is my extremely rudimentary explanation of the basic of Notion. It is a very easy tool to use, but requires a little bit of start-up time to get the ropes of.

Notion is made up of pages → you are on a notion page right now! The hierarchy of pages is created by you, and you can have as many pages inside pages as you want.

In a page, you populate it with content and words simply by starting to type. Each piece of content you add to a page is referred to as a 'block', and these blocks can be formatted and moved around pretty much as you please.

Every time you type out a block, or included a piece on content in a page, you can hover over the left-hand side of it and see a set of six dots (I call it the handlebar).

By dragging the handlebar, you can move block around a page, and even push them next to each other to create columns. This comes easily with practice.

By clicking the handlebar, it opens up options for how you want to format the block. There are more options for text formatting if you highlight text in a block, as this prompts a little formatting toggle to appear above your cursor.

There are many different types of blocks, which you can view if you type in a backslash onto a page, or click the + next to an empty block. For example, you can create:

• headings
• to do lists
• toggle lists
• new pages

Most importantly, you can include databases.

Databases are basically sorted sets of pages with attributes, and can be sorted and linked in powerful ways. This can get quite involved to fully understand, and even explain, but luckily Notion is widely used and has an excellent set of resources for beginners learning to use Notion. The quality of these resources are much much better than anything I can offer, so at this point I will simply list the most helpful resources I found which I used to make this page.

Note: when in doubt, most answers are on google, and there is a subreddit for Notion that has lots of information and helps crowdsource questions.

Notion tutorials and documentation

The official place for getting to know Notion is here:

https://www.notion.so/Help-Support-Documentation-e040febf70a94950b8620e6f00005004

I recommend starting with the 'What is Notion' and 'Notion training: the basics' videos.

Notion is extremely powerful for collaboration and team working, hence why it is hosted online. For the scope of this project, however, we are not taking advantage of that side of Notion. You can skip over tutorials about sharing and collaboration.

Below here I have included what I think are the most relevant aspects of Notion to learn for the scope of what we are doing here with this project. All of these are on the Help, Support and Documentation page linked above, and you can find even more tutorials there too. (All of the below pages are copies of those included on the Notion Help page.)

The most confusing aspect will probably be databases. This website is heavily reliant on linked databases (for example, the Featured Physicists and McGill Courses databases are linked). It might pay off to play around with creating some databases in an empty document, and trying to link them and format them. This isn't necessary if you don't plan on developing the structure of the webpage further than it already is.

The instructions for adding new content to the website are described in detail here: