Hello
I’m currently working on a research paper and I’ve been wanting to switch to Obsidian from Notion.
An example for one would be this here I made for my last paper:
I’ve used the Database option in Notion and I thought I’d need to use the base option on Obsidian. The issue is, it shows me all the files in my folder when it’s not supposed to show me any at all. On Notion, I have pages for each paper with notes.
One more question: Can I create templates and do I have to publish said template or can I keep it private? Another drawback of Notion is that I constantly keep on having to redo the general layout when I always use the same.
Possible solution
I haven’t tried anything yet, but I could imagine using mutliple tables instead. Honestly, though, it’s not ideal at all. I seriously need my databases to keep organized and multiple tables isn’t necessarily the same.
In Notion, you had a database along with “pages” related to each entry. In Obsidian those pages are called “notes”, and each note is a markdown file.
An Obsidian base essentially is a list of all the files in your “vault” (a vault is a folder on your computer). You decide what subset of files (“filters”) and which meta-info about those files (“properties” and “formulas”) each base displays.
So indeed, every entry/record/row in your base must be a file. That file is where you type your notes, as you would in Notion’s “page”.
To stop seeing certain files in Obsidian’s file explorer, you could put them all in a folder that you never expand, or you could use CSS or a plugin to hide the folder. You could also exclude the folder (Settings > Files and links > Excluded files) from some search-and-display features, which either hides them or makes them less noticeable, depending on the feature.
Yes. Obsidian has a built-in template feature. It is useful but not particularly rich in capability. A popular community plugin called Templater offers many more features.
Each template is a markdown file on your computer. It’s private. You would have to go out of your way to find somewhere to make it public.
Obsidian doesn’t have the kind of seller marketplace that Notion does for template publishing.
Side note: Obsidian does have community sharing. It’s themes and plugins far more so than templates. They’re by and large free. Downloading themes and plugins is integrated into Obsidian. Templates are shared on public places (such as this forum, Discord, Reddit, GitHub, blogs, Publish sites).
Notion handles template changes better than does Obsidian if your goal to update all the notes that already “use” a template.
With Obsidian’s built-in template feature, you can apply templates in two ways:
automatically when you create a new “daily note”, and
on demand when you press a keyboard shortcut or select a command.
Those actions insert the template’s contents into the note. Once inserted, they are text in a markdown file. They aren’t connected to the original template. Any changes you make to the template won’t affect previously applied templates.
Plugins and old-fashioned bulk find-and-replace can be a big help with simple content changes. And using markdown syntax and CSS or themes lets you very easily change the appearance of notes all at once. But complicated changes such as rearranging layouts can get messy, tedious, or both.
I don’t know that this fits your workflow, but it could be worth considering: Many users (I’m one!) continue using dedicated tools such as Zotero. There are plugins to help integrate research paper apps so that you can reference, annotate, and update within Obsidian.
