You can do almost anything you want in Notion, even without a relevant built-in feature, as long as you know the right workaround. There's always an alternate way to do something in Notion. Adding star ratings is one such instance.
The Notion progress bar allows you to display progress only as a Ring or a Bar. If it could only allow adding emojis, we could have easily added star-ratings but since it doesn’t, we need to find an alternate way to do that.
In this guide, we will discuss two methods of adding star ratings to a Notion database. We will reference the sample employee database in the below image and add performance ratings for all employees.
Let’s get started.
Method 1 - Using a formula
We will use Notion’s formula property to turn the rating in the numbered format into a star rating. For example, if you type 4 in a column, Notion will display four stars in another column.
Here’s how to do that:
1. Add two columns to your Notion database
We added two columns to the database - Rating and Performance Rating.
After we are done setting it up, when the user adds a number between 1 to 5 in the Rating column, the Performance Rating column will display as many stars.
2. Change the property type to Numbers and Formula
Since we would be adding numbers to the Rating column, we changed its property type from the default value Text to Number.
Also, since the Performance Rating column reads the Rating column through a formula, we changed its property type to Formula.
3. Type the ratings in the Numbered format under the Number property type
4. Add a formula to the Formula property type column
Click on the Edit property option for the Performance rating column and click on the Edit dropdown.
Next, paste the below formula into the view and click on the Done button.
if(empty(Rating), "", repeat("⭐", floor(Rating)))
Here’s what the star ratings look like:
You will notice that the half-star instances are rounded off to the nearest full-star value. That’s because a half-star icon does not exist. You can have only full stars on Notion or anywhere else unless you plan to use an image for the ratings.
Method 2 - Using the Select property
The Select property allows you to select only one of the pre-specified values to the database cells. By adding five values with different star ratings, you can create an easily accessible drop-down view which allows you to select the rating.
Here’s how to set it up:
1. Add a new column to your database
2. Set its property to Select
3. Add the five star-ratings to the Select property
4. Change the background color of the stars
5. Individually update the cell value for all rows
We shared two methods of adding a star rating to Notion. The first one is methodical while the second one is quite straightforward, but either method works. Now, whether you want to add ratings to your product-based Notion website or review employees, you can set up star ratings using Notion databases.
