I’m trying to learn Obsidian. Looking to use Obsidian to organize the information needed in a direct primary care medical office.
Things I have tried
I use wikis, a networked drive, files with super long names and a cool free tool called ESP to find the files I need. But I’d like something more “browsable” for staff to use and contribute information to about how things work like:
how to use various software (digital fax, EHR software, booking software, Obsidian, How to book patients, lists of specialists, Tips for patients about low iron, etc. (etc, etc, etc).
Running a medical office, or any business for that matter, requires the management of lots of information. I was one of the first paid users of Notion - it really is a great software idea and many of the things I wanted in a “Knowledge Management” platform where there. But the hosted aspect of it wasn’t great for medical things and I also didn’t take the time to do a good job of it.
Obsidian checks quite a few boxes for my needs and I’m ready to double down on it. I want to start with Office ToDos, How to Manual for office software, Office Policies documents. I know i’ll need Dataview for that and I have been learning it - and - kinda incestuously, making notes about Obsidian, Dataview, Markdown, Sync, etc.
So here comes the thought: why doesn’t someone make a downloadable markdown vault that serves to help learn Obsidian (make Todos, document progress in learning, create Pages that are relevant to me) all the while USING the tools I will need.
I want to learn Dataview, by using it !
Does such a downloadable Obsidian Vault exist ? I’d like it to use the following addons: Dataview, Tasks.
The best way to learn coding is to download code and edit it ! So … to learn Obsidian …
I can’t think of any vaults that would be directly relevant to your usecase. However, there exists at least one, likely more, such as Ideaverse by Linking-your-thinking. I can’t speak to the usefulness, I just know it exists.
That said, the common knowledge for Obsidian seems to be start small and expand when necessary. In your case that might mean start out with just a few files or patient files or whatever you work with. Then get going with Dataview. If you haven’t had a look at the plugin’s wiki, check it out, it’s really good.
It’s easier to troubleshoot problems with your Dataview queries if there aren’t too many files. With very large queries, Dataview can become quite slow. The creator of Dataview has been working on an improved follow-up, but as far as I know, there’s no estimate when that’ll be ready. There might be an overlap in uses with the (currently in beta) core plugin Bases. I don’t have a Catalyst license, so I haven’t used that.
However, depending on the number of files you want to display, there might be better options, ones built to handle real databases.
I hope this is helpful, and if you have questions, let us know.
Best way, to my mind, is to just start doing what you actually want to do. In little steps. Don’t start learning dataview, but rather start taking notes and in case you find yourself in need of things you could achieve with e.g. dataview, install the plugin and solve exactly the problem you want to solve with it. Nothing more. This way your vault and its complexity will grow alongside your knowledge and skills about the tools on hand.