Many small businesses and freelancers use Notion because it helps them organize their workflows — Notion tag is one of the most essential features that help with that. By setting tags, you can segment entries in your Notion databases into buckets. This helps you create a more focussed view for every management purpose.
You can also tag people and Notion pages by using this capability. But we will discuss that later, first, we will first demonstrate how to add Notion tags in a database.
1. Open the target database
We will use the below Notion reading list to demonstrate the usage of tags in a database.
Even though this table is complete, you can create a new database to test out Notion tags, the steps are the same.
We already have two examples of Notion tags in this database - “Types” and “Relevance”. “Types” column allows only one entry while “Relevance” allows adding multiple tags.
That’s because both these columns have different property types. Let’s explore them in the next step.
2. Update your column with the right property type
After adding a column to your new database, the first step is to change the property type to either “Drop-down” or “Multiselect”. “Drop-down” will allow you to select only one entry from a list of options while “Multiselect” - as the name suggests - allows selecting multiple items from a preset list.
The below image demonstrates the “Multiselect option.”
Currently, there are 5 preset options, and one can choose any number of them to display in the database. For the “Four thousand weeks” entry, we chose two of them.
This tagging method can help you bucket this entry as an item that impacts “Personal life” while being a “Casual” read.
The “Drop-Down” property type screen looks exactly the same — the only difference is that you can only pick one option.
Notice the different tabs for “Webinars”, “Videos”, etc? We were able to create them by filtering the master database for the entries in the “Drop-down” property type. This is one of the most useful aspects of using tags.
3. Enter the tag names
After you have set the property type as “Drop-down” or “Multiselect”, list down the options that apply to that property type. For example, the “Types” property type in our example, has 5 potential entries - “Book”,”Webinar”,”Video”,”Article”,”Whitepaper.”
All cells under this property type can take any one of these 5 entries. However, it’s a dynamic list — you can expand or shorten it the way you like it.
4. Apply tags to each entry
After assigning the property type and listing the potential entries, it’s time to fill out the pertinent cell with the correct option. In our example, the option “Article” assigned to the “The Secret Message” entry signifies that it’s a web article.
Similarly, fill out cells for all the entries in your database.
And just like that, you have created tags in Notion! Simple, isn’t it?
How to tag people in Notion?
You can only tag people in the same Notion workspace as you. To do that, simply type “@” in the page where you want to tag someone and start typing their name. Notion will show you their full name, clicking on it will tag that person and send them a notification, informing them about the mention.
How to link tags to a page in Notion?
You can only link pages from the same workspace. To add page tags, type “@” in the page where you want to add the tag and start typing the name of the page. Notion will display a list of pages with the keywords that you typed and you can select one of them to create the tag.
How do you edit tags in Notion?
You can edit the Notion tags the same way you created them. Click on any cell under the particular property type and start typing the new item to be added to the list. You must have edit access to the database to make changes to the tags.