Welcome to Module 4 – Blocks. They are an essential concept in a Notion, and while we’ve already talked about blocks a bunch of times in this course, it’s now time to dive in deep into all the different block types and their functionalities. Before you do that, you might wonder; what is a block?
Welp, there are a bunch of ways to explain this, but let’s start this way:
Everything on a Notion page is a block.
Yep — this is one of the most unique things about Notion, and something we already explained a bit in module 3. Every single paragraph, every image, every file, and so on, is a block. While together they make up a unified page experience, they are also independent. As in, each block can be moved, transformed, and duplicated independently of any other block. See this GIF where I move a single paragraph of text around on a page:
[Moving blocks GIF]
Notion likes to compare their blocks to Lego blocks — and frankly, this is a pretty decent comparison. We can assemble, transform, and move blocks around as freely as physical Legos.
There are many different types of blocks, and the best way to preview all those different types is to simply start typing “/”. This will open the slash menu, which allows you to choose all the different types of blocks and add them to your current page. Feel free to do this now, just to get a general idea of what types of blocks there are. We’ll go through all of them during the upcoming lessons in this module.
Why blocks?
Someone might ask. Normal text editing has worked fine for dozens of years, so why change things up all of a sudden now?
Well, there are many ways to answer this question, and the definite answer should be left up to the creators of Notion themselves. While — yes, traditional text editing definitely works, it can be cumbersome to transform documents that are not made out of blocks. You have to precisely select the content you’d like to transform, then open a menu with a lot of options, and then hope that your formatting won’t get all messed up.
While Notion’s block based editor does trade away some text customizability (just three font options, limited alignment options, and a few others), it gains a lot in speed and ease of modification. With a bunch of convenient keyboard and text shortcuts, we can transform a text paragraph into a heading, a to-do list into a numbered list, and so many more.
It’s also so much easier to reassemble existing pages or move content to other pages with the block system. Since we can just drag and drop blocks, editing Notion documents is so much easier.
Copy link to headingBlock types
There are quite a few different block types in Notion. There’s absolutely no need to memorize all of them — most Notion users just use a few of the most basic ones. Here’s a comprehensive list of all block types, and in this module we will cover all of them. You can also browse available block types and play with them by hitting the / button anywhere on a Notion page.
Basic text blocks
- Text paragraph
- Headings
- Size 1 (largest)
- Size 2 (medium)
- Size 3 (smallest)
- Lists
- Bulleted
- Numbered
- To-do
- Toggle (explained later)
- Toggle headings
- Sizes 1 to 3
- Page (Covered in the next less, Even Pages Are Blocks)
- Callout
- Quote
- Table
- Divider (neat horizontal divider)
Media blocks
- Image
- Video
- Audio
- Code block
- File
- Web bookmark
Databases
We’ll cover databases as a whole in module 6, since there’s so much more to them than just regular pages.
Copy link to headingAdvanced blocks
- Table of Contents
- Block equation
- Embeds
- Button
- Breadcrumb
- Synced block
- Mermaid
Hope you have a decent idea of what a block is. Watch the video version of this lesson for a real life demonstration of how block work. In the end, it’s just best to open a new Notion page and play around by creating new blocks and dragging them around — no better learning than through practice!
In this module, we’ll dive into moving and transforming blocks, as well as every single block type and what it can do. Let’s go!