The capability to help users process data and generate insights is crucial for any spreadsheet tool. It should be able to support mathematical functions and make calculations easy. One of the most basic of those functions is addition.
Now, if you are planning your budget in Notion, working on an assignment that requires dealing with numbers, or even planning and optimizing a large scale marketing campaign, the ability to add in Notion comes in handy.
This guide is all about the addition process in Notion. Whether rows or columns, we will show how to add numbers either by using built-in functions or by writing formulas.
4 Steps to Sum a Column in Notion
1. Create a Notion database
Head over to an existing database with numbers or create a new one in the table view. This database with its rows and columns will function as a spreadsheet.
We will reference the below database while covering the steps to sum columns and rows in Notion.
This database contains the revenue numbers for different marketing channels across four quarters of the year.
2. Add columns and data
You can add columns and rows to the database based on your needs.
Since our intent is to demonstrate the process of summation in Notion, we will stick with just the revenue numbers.
3. Change property type to numbers
To enable the sum function within the database, we need to inform Notion that the value in the cells are numbers and not text.
To change the property type, click on the name of the column that you want to calculate the sum of, and then click on “Edit Property.” You can then change the property type to “Number” by accessing the “Type” section, as displayed in the image below.
You can also change the number format, we have set it to US dollar in our example.
4. Click on “Calculate” and select the “Sum” option
Hover your cursor under the column that you want to sum, and click on the “Calculate” option and click on “Sum” — as demonstrated in the below image.
Doing this will display the sum of the column as displayed in the below image.
The sum of numbers will tell you how much revenue was generated in Q1 on combining all the channels.
4 Steps to Sum a Row in Notion
Adding the cells of a row in a Notion database is not as easy as adding a column. We need to use a formula for that. Here’s how:
1. Add another column in your database
Notice the right-most column in the database that we created in the previous section?
We will insert a formula in that column to add all elements in the row.
2. Change the property type to formula
First, we need to tell Notion that the said column will contain a formula.
To do that, change the property type of the column to formula, as demonstrated in the below image.
3. Click on edit formula
4. Type the formula
We have used the SUM() formula and mentioned all Q1 to Q4 revenues in parentheses.
As displayed in the below image, this formula adds all cells in the row.
This way you can calculate how much was invested in total for each marketing channel.
FAQs
How to sum in Notion by category?
After creating categories through the single-select property in Notion, follow these steps to sum by category:
1. Click on the 3 dots in the upper right corner of the database and click on the "Group" option.
2. Next, group by category. This will generate lists of each category, as displayed in the below image.
3. Click on “Calculate” at the bottom of each group column and choose "Sum."
How to sum in Notion from different tables?
You need to use the rollups feature in Notion to sum numbers from different tables.
The first step to that is setting up a relation between two databases, this way you tell Notion how the two databases (A and B) are related.
Next, you can use the “Sum” function to add the numbers from database B.
As the final step, you can add numbers in the database A in another column and add them to the sum obtained from B.
