I’ve been using Obsidian for years now and for the past year or so for work. I wasn’t sure if Obsidian would replace my use of Notion. I’ve made the switch now that I’ve not touched Notion for a year.
One of the biggest issues I had was with the level of complexity and ever evolving tools in Notion; I appreciated it’s simplity back in 2019. The entire platform commanded more and more of my attention and became more of a burden to getting work done. I was consumed.
I wanted to move to Obsidian but I didn’t understand all the complex processes to prep CSVs and md files to then use scripts to import them into an Obsidian…seemed like a full time job…I nearly hired a developer to do it for me.
But I found Obsidian’s “Importer” plugin! Awesome possoms!
As I imported all my thousands of files all my database views came in totally crazy. I coud see they were tables but portions were greyed out. The tables were not rendering.
all tables were indented, that was an easy fix
my calculated properties that I had used “%” glyphs were needed to be replaced
As a none-sorta-Obsidian-wanna-be-super-user, I hope that this helps any other wanna-be-Obsidian-super-user!
Right now that page creates the impression that importing from Notion is easy-peasy, and the only information that would lose some minor fidelity is this:
Note that in Notion you can write content in Folders, this is not possible in Obsidian and these pages will be added as a subpage under the folder.
I think it would be honest to,
mention on that page the limitations of Markdown files and the directory structure, so those interested in the migration can decide if it fits their data and use cases
mention the important limitations on GUI features (e.g. the absence of filtering for tables)
(and while at it, use the issue labels; right now most issues are unlabeled)
Out of the advanced features of Notion, I’ve only tested the import of databases/tables, and found that the rows are exported as individual notes with tags (great), but they’re also copied into the table. This means they’ll get out of sync as soon as you edit a record in one place. Embeddingcould solve this (CC @garryknight since they mentioned transclusion), but rendering the table would be even slower than it currently is.