Hi, Hello! My name is Sarah - the writer behind redgregory.com.
The Beauty Of The Formula
Notion has a pretty intuitive formula system and it's relational database foundation would suffer without it. A program built for scheduling, communicating, and storing needs automation. Why? The intention for Notion users is to keep tons and tons of information stored into databases. It's a space that invites hoarding, collecting and organizing hundreds of data entries. The only way to manage, recall and relate so much is to use formulas.
If a user, for instance, wants to return the weekday of every date property in a database with 200+ entries, they'd rather not do it manually. Instead, they may use this short formula:
formatDate(prop("Date"), "dddd")
.Another use for formulas that's a bit more fun is to add holidays to a calendar. I found this list of common holidays from Wikipedia to put inside my example:
Calendar With Holidays
Name
Date
Weekday
Holiday?
Formula:
if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Dec 25"), "🎄Christmas Day!", if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Jul 4"), "🔔Independence Day!", if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Oct 31"), "🎃Halloween", if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Feb 14"), "💘Valentine's Day!", if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Mar 17"), "🍀St. Patrick's Day!", if(contains(format(prop("Date")), "Dec 31"), "⭐️New Year's Eve!", ""))))))
Want a 2020/2021 pre-filled database to insert a holiday formula into?
- I created one for purchase. Dates range from Aug 17, 2020 → December 31, 2021