Setup Your Notion Projects With TABS

Introduction and Overview

I know I'm a bit late to this one, but look better late than never. I want to talk to you about tab structured layouts within the pages of your databases and Notion. There is this other option that we have now called tabbed structure versus simple structure,  and it enables you to organize your database pages .

To minimize the amount of vertical scrolling and to make them feel a little bit more like an app.  So let's jump over into an example. I've got set up over here. We're gonna go through a project database.  And I'm gonna show you the old way versus the new way, and then you can figure out which one you prefer. 

Let's go.

Old Style Project Layout

So here we go. We have some projects. I asked AI to do this, so they've all got random names and we've got a bunch of databases that are all related to the project. So let me close that first bit of history. If I open up this Neptune Data Lake, this is gonna be the one that we're gonna work through in the video.

Let me just open it. Four page. Okay. Here is our standard. Old style way of viewing a project. So you can see I've already related some objects. I've related three tasks. I've related to documents, meetings, and updates. Now, what we're looking at right now is a standard title up at the top, a bunch of properties, a comment section, and then the page body starts here, right?

And you can add your standard beloved Notion blocks right here. Okay, so this is the kind of three part structure that we've been used to in the past, in the good old days.

Challenges with Simple Structure

So obviously looking at all our related data, yeah, you can imagine if this starts to grow, it might get a little bit unruly. So you might have a really long page to look at before you even get to the page body. So that's one negative side of the way that, you know, the original way of doing things. Another thing that's not so great is that.

You can't really filter. It's just a list, right? It's hard to see the properties. I mean, you can do this, right? You can click this button and you can choose to show different things. Like, I wanna see the status and then, okay, it shows the status. Okay? You can do that arguably, but it's still hard to filter by, you know, the person or filter it to any other sort of property that you wanna do it by.

So, most people ended up doing a linked view. So to give you a bit more flexibility, you could come down here and create a linked view. Now, let's say that we wanna see all the tasks related to this project. So we would find the database and we would say, okay, let's filter it by the related project.

And we'll set that project to Neptune Data Lake, which is this one. So now you can see we've got the same data down here. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Right, but we can see more information. At a glance, we can just hit open and get this nice side open, which is a bit harder to do here. That's not a lie. No, you can't do that.

But, you know, you can filter and you can create a bunch of different configuration down here. What people used to do in the past as well is, okay, we're kind of duplicating dates right here, so maybe we would go and change the way that these relations look. So let me show you what I used to do in the past.

I used to come in here. And I used to say, okay, let's get these out of the standard property group. So I'll just do this one by one by adding each of them to the layout first, right? Got all the relations down here now. And then what I used to do is I used to turn them into a relations group. Let me add them all to the relations group.

Okay, so they're all now grouped together. And then what I would do is I would show as minimal over here. And you get a pretty nice layout. You get. This style of layout and I would usually put it at the top or the bottom. But if we look at the looks now, then you see we're starting to get a pretty crisp view here.

So I'm just getting a overview of the related data, but I've only got one place to really look and interact with it. Okay? Now what we've been looking at is called simple view, simple structure.

Setting Up Tabbed Structure

I wanna show you another way to do this, which is available to be customized inside the customized layout

Okay, so what I'd do is I'd come and hit tabbed over here and then you can see this content pops up. This is sort of indicating the default view. So where we've got this structure of the title, the property body, and then the content at the bottom. But if we hit this plus right here, you can see it's already understanding what is related to this project that we're editing here, right here.

So let's say we want to grab those related tasks and set up a view for them. It's, what's really nice is it's already gonna set up the filter to the related project that we can see right here. So this is what you tend to have to do inside a template if you're familiar with that sort of workflow. But with this, it just automatically picks up the related stuff.

So you don't know to do much configuration here. And then you can just go through and add all the related databases that you want. So let's say we wanna add the related meetings. Again, it actually pulls in just the related meetings that are related to this project, so on and so forth. So if we apply that change, we now have three tabs.

The first one looks like standard, right? We've got the title properties and the page body. But as soon as we come over to related tasks, the properties you see will disappear, which is nice. And you just get a database view, and now you can change this. If you don't want a table, you can change it to whatever you want.

You're not confined there in any way. But one interesting thing is you can't actually come down here to the page body. And start adding your standard Notion blocks. The page body is kind of gone. All this area. That's one thing that people don't tend to love. But I think it's an interesting compromise that, you know, you're just restricting down to one view.

I personally quite like it. I personally like having one place for content. You know, this can be thoughts or like an area for like. Project planning and then you keep every other view just constrained to this is just the view, like let's keep it really constrained and focused. So that is how you set them up.

Benefits of Tabbed Structure

Now, in terms of benefits, I think this is really great because you get this, you can standardize the way that people interact with your database pages across the whole workspace, across your whole team. The previous route to do this, to create some sort of structure would be to create page templates.

Right. So if we jump back to here and we look at the projects, people would create templates, right? And then set a structure down here, which is fine. But the thing with templates is like they tend to sort of change over time and get eroded. And different templates have different structures, but with the tabbed layout.

Structure, you are effectively changing the way that people interact with this data across any template that is used. So it's more of like a, a low level structural change, which I think is really good for enforcing specific behavior across, you know, many people in your team, for example, so if you set up all your databases like this, then you're basically saying to all your team, you are implicitly saying, okay, this is the way that we view data, slice by slice.

And then it doesn't matter if they end up working in a different database. If the structure's like this, they're gonna inherently, intuitively understand that we can just jump over to different slices. I know that these are all related pieces of data and it should be really easy to digest and work with.

Whereas if you have to tend to, you know, go to a template, a template can be different. It can be organized differently, and it just creates that friction. So I think it's a really good way to standardize. That's personally my biggest, plus point of this entire process standardizing behavior across the workspace.

'cause as we all know, Notion is an everything tool, right? And that's it's plus and it's, its minus. But I think any way that you can find to try and create a little bit more of a structured scaffolding over your experience, I think it enables people to get less lost and less overwhelmed, which tends to be.

At least from the beginners and Notion tends to be one of their main complaints is like, I can't use Notion very effectively 'cause I'm just getting lost. So this is a really important thing to consider in my opinion.

Downsides and Improvements

So I've already mentioned one of the downsides is when you go on one of these views, you can't leverage the page body down here. Another one that I don't particularly love is I would love to be able to see the amount of related tasks within the actual tab itself, within the actual icon that I'm hovering over right now.

So if I'm on the content, it'd be cool if this said three related tasks and X related meetings right? Then I could get a clearer sense of just. The general connections without having to tab through and sort of count out manually. I've asked for this from Notion, so hopefully they will make this change in the future.

It seems like a really easy thing to implement. What else?

Yeah. Another thing that's kind of annoying is when you go to one of these tabs. Let's say I go to related meetings, and then I close this page and I go to another item. It saves where that is. So I, I end up for every item going to related meetings, depending on, on your use case and the way that you like to work.

This can be a good or a bad thing for me. I'd personally prefer if it just reset to content every time. So if I was like related tasks within Zephyr, I would like it. When I click Vega, it goes back to the content, but you know, it's just a personal thing. You might not be bothered about it.

You can sort of mitigate this one of these problems, at least with not being able to see the amount of data points. So you see this relations that we set up earlier. I really like this minimal style view where you just see you know, three related, two related right here. The cool thing about layouts is you can bring them up closer to the tabs now like this.

So it creates a nice glanceable way to view, so I can say, okay, three related tasks three related meetings. This kind of mitigates a little bit of that problem. I also. If you wanna get really crazy, you could create a formula. In fact, I'll stick it down in the description below. If you don't wanna have this relations row right here, you can have a formula which, creates sort of a nice little synopsis of the related amount of items as well.

Yeah, check it out. It's in the description. It's a bit geeky, but you can, I'm sure you can just pick it up and tweak it according to your own architecture.

Conclusion

Okay. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed that slightly deep dive into the difference between tab structure and simple structure. Maybe you got a little bit of a history lesson in Notion at the same time. This is, again, it's a preference thing. You've heard my positives for it. You know, if they resonate with you, then feel free.

Go ahead and start tinkering with this and applying it to your workspace. I personally really like it, but I do see use cases for both. Really depends on the use case. So hope that was interesting guys. Make sure to hit that subscribe button and if you find this valuable and if you wanna work with us, check us out in the description below, book a call.

We'll jump on and see if we can help you out. But until next time, take it easy. See ya.