Hello friends! I’m loving bases, an excellent addition to Obsidian.
I’ve been experimenting with replacing various spreadsheets with them, but I’ve got a few workflow snags that I’ve not figured out yet. I’d love to get your advice.
Most my use of bases are to record things that have happened. e.g. I performed a particular exercise, I did a certain tracked habit, etc. Each instance/recording is a note with appropriate properties that I fill in, and I add these using the new note + button on the base view. The problem I’m having with is that unlike a spreadsheet row, each note needs to have a title.
The default title is “Untitled”, which I want to change to something else, but a set of push-ups doesn’t have an obvious title. The best I can think of is to make a title out of copy-and-pasting several of the properties together (e.g. date + time + location + exercise) to create a reasonable title, but doing this by hand each time is a lot more work than if I was using a spreadsheet.
Is there a way to configure the base to pre-fill the title with a format of my choosing?
What could I do better here? I’d love to use bases for quickly recording data day-to-day!
One solution might be to just name the note by the date and have the data be stored as properties of this note (ex. “Workout 2025-12-13” with properties pushup-set1, pushup-set2, etc). You could partially automate the addition of the properties themselves using templates.
However, I would consider what you are hoping to achieve by using obsidian instead of the spreadsheets. If having the ability to do database-like queries isn’t more important than say, visualizing your data or ease of use, there are a bunch of dedicated habit tracking apps. Personally I use Loop Habit Tracker and FitNotes, but someone who actually uses obsidian for habit tracking might have more insight here.
One solution might be to just name the note by the date and have the data be stored as properties of this note (ex. “Workout 2025-12-13” with properties pushup-set1, pushup-set2, etc). You could partially automate the addition of the properties themselves using templates.
I’m creating many notes over a day (typically with properties for the time, name text, and value number) rather than making one note with some fixed larger set of properties, so writing the time in the right format down to the seconds would be error prone and possibly slower than copy-pasting it from the properties.
there are a bunch of dedicated habit tracking apps. Personally I use Loop Habit Tracker and FitNotes, but someone who actually uses obsidian for habit tracking might have more insight here.
I record various different things, so finding an suitable app per-thing isn’t possible unfortunately. They’re all overly prescriptive, and very few of them store the data in accessible way like. spreadsheet or Obsidian do.