Powerful and Visually Appealing Personal Note App - Notion¶

Taking notes, whether in school or at work, is an efficient and orderly way to live life.

Common personal note-taking software includes:

• Microsoft's OneNote
• China's Evernote

Today, we will introduce an iOS flat-style treasure app - Notion. This article is a personal review, starting from practical use and personal preferences, and only represents personal opinions.

1 OneNote¶

As a Microsoft product, it has the same Office-style as always, and it is neither ugly nor beautiful. It can be used personally or as a platform for enterprise team collaboration or knowledge sharing. The function is not powerful, but it is an undistinguished enterprise-level standard product.

2 Evernote¶

As a well-known domestic personal note-taking product, it has a large audience. However, when you open the homepage, there is a wave of "50% off for 3 years for members" advertisements, which makes people feel a bit of a deduction for Evernote.

Notes are divided into two types: ordinary and super notes. The super notes and Notion are surprisingly similar, both composed of modules (Block), such as code blocks, tables, etc. However, some modules are exclusive to paid accounts, which is suffocating. The ordinary notes are indeed very ordinary and can meet the basic needs of most users. However, in terms of details, it is a bit boring. For example, there is a lack of code highlighting in the code block, and text editing does not have practical small details such as formatting brushes or plain text formats.

In addition, the team collaboration functions that are advertised are just released and do not have too much presence.

3 Notion¶

Notion is a note-taking application developed by a Silicon Valley start-up company. The first impression of the official website is a beautiful and simple illustration style, which can be seen that the team is putting effort into making products.

Its slogan is to promote the workspaces for team collaboration, and it supports mobile terminals, web terminals, and local clients. In terms of charges, free personal accounts can basically meet the needs of personal use.

When you open Notion, the first getting started can be said to be an excellent note that fully showcases its functions. It includes interactive to-do lists, webpage links, and inserting videos, etc.

3.1 Page¶

Each Page in Notion plays the role of both notes and folders. Pages can be nested with each other to form a tree structure, which is convenient for induction and sorting.

3.2 Block¶

Pages are composed of Blocks, which are powerful and diverse components, such as text blocks, code blocks, to-do lists, and lists. You can even insert maps, videos, etc. These Blocks can be freely dragged and converted, flexibly achieving various presentation effects. In combination with flat-style emoji, it can be said that it has reached a high level in both appearance and detail. Users can conveniently insert corresponding Blocks by entering commands such as /code (code block) by entering /.

It is worth mentioning that Notion's code block also supports code highlighting in multiple languages.

3.3 Text Editing¶

Notion also supports Markdown syntax. The Markdown text content completed in other apps can be directly copied and pasted into Notion for layout processing and organizing work. Less is more, only a few text formats not only avoid inconsistent formats but also have a simple and beautiful Zen, improving note efficiency.

3.4 Template¶

In addition, Notion also has 50+ built-in templates to meet the needs of different application scenarios, such as the Kanban for recording project progress:

There is also a fully-equipped Personal Home:

When using it, just click the Templates in the lower left corner and select the corresponding template.

Of course, we can also make our templates for easy calling. For example, in the Meeting Notes page, we created the Project Review template. When we use it in batches, we only need to fill in the content.

3.5 Team Collaboration¶

We have also tried the team collaboration function of Notion. In addition to sharing notes and knowledge sharing, we can also see real-time updates, comments, or use Kanban to meet the needs of some project management.

3.6 Other¶

In order to facilitate migration, Notion provides powerful import functions, including from commonly used Evernote, Word, and other software. After importing, you may need to use Blocks to layout the content. In addition, the previously criticized problems in Chinese search and unstable connections have been well resolved.

3.7 Shortcomings¶

The only drawback is that:

• Notion's interface currently only supports English and Korean.
• Notion presents tables as Databases (with sorting, filtering and other functions), which is very powerful but cannot be used as the most common table.
• Blocks cannot be nested, such as lists cannot be nested in code blocks.
• The learning curve is slightly higher than that of OneNote and Evernote.

4. Summary¶

In summary, Notion is an excellent note-taking application with a clear visual appeal, powerful functions, and even a little bit of "fancy". If you want to improve work efficiency and turn note-taking into a "fun little happiness" in life, you may want to give it a try.

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