Use case or problem
I am personally often in a situation where I have to create a spreadsheet (in Excel or google sheets) just because I need some very basic math-totals for a list of things I might already have notes for in Obsidian.
Now that we have bases I can already display my notes in a spreadsheet/database-view, but I still can not calculate simple total-values for the properties of those notes.
Instead of duplicating data by creating a spreadsheet in a different app, I would love to stay in Obsidian where I might already have a lot of additional information about the list-items in the notes.
That’s why I am suggesting the addition of simple math-total-values in Obsidian bases!
Example-Use-Cases:
Imagine you have a Base with a couple of number-properties (e.g. the “price” of the thing the note is about or the amount of “things” someone owns of a certain kind or the Cash-Inflow/outflow of a booking etc.) or checkbox-properties (e.g. Habit-Done-Today) or Date-Properties (e.g. Creationdate)
In those cases it would be really nice to be able to create total-values with simple math-formulas for the current-view, e.g.:
- The total sum of the prices of all the visible notes
- The total cashflow (sum of all positive values minus all negative values)
- The total number of checked/unchecked checkboxes in a Column (how many times did I do the habit this month - in a view that filters daily notes for a month)
- The total number of unique-days in a view that shows all notes to tell you on how many days you created notes etc.
Example-Benefits of this feature
This would give us basic-excel-capabilities on top of our notes and allow for completely new use-cases like:
- simple Money-Trackers in Obsidian
- better Habit-Tracking in Obsidian
- Lists of Posessions and their value → you can easily calculate the total value of your posessions
In General it would make Obsidian (Bases) way more flexible and allow us to use our notes in a new way. Bases already offers a lot of Excel/Database-Capabilites and this would go one step further.
Proposed solution
In my mind the solution would be to add an optional “total-values”-row to the top/bottom of the base (also pinnable so that it is always visible - see: Bases: Ability to Pin / Freeze Base Table Headers )
In this total-values-row the user can then select for which columns totals should be caluclated using which (simple) math formula - e.g. Sum for Column1 etc.
This configuration should be View-Specific but if no view-specific settings are found it should take the one configured for the general base (if there is one and the totals-toggle is active).
Ideally this total-value-row always respects the current filters and only calculates the total-value for the currently visible files.
I hope I was able to describe what I am looking for - feel free to ask/discuss in the comments!