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Category: Productivity Tips
Tags: CustomizationMarkdownNote-takingObsidianPlugins
Entities: ObsidianSkillshareSyncThingTemplaterVisual Studio CodeWindows
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By the end of this video, you will know exactly how to get started with Obsidian. Set up your first vault, understand how plugins, tags, properties and templates work, and make Obsidian feel like your note-taking home.
Spoiler: you don't need coding skills, and
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you don't even have to organize your notes in folders if you don't want to. Whenever possible, I will demonstrate each step directly in Obsidian, making it easy for you to understand what I'm talking about and to work along if you like.
We will start with a completely new vault
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without any customizations. This is exactly the experience you will get after installing Obsidian for the very first time.
First, we go to the Obsidian website and download the correct version for our operating system. In my case, that's Windows.
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Once downloaded, just go through the setup process. Once installed, we can open Obsidian and create a new vault.
I will call it "Beginners". We just need to tell Obsidian where to create it.
When we're done, we get this nice welcome note next to the Graph view.
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Let's close both of them for now and take a quick look at the user interface. Remember, this is plain Obsidian.
No customizations, plugins or other fancy things. We can see that the user interface reserves its largest area for our notes.
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On the left hand side, we have a toolbar with several icons, triggering common actions such as opening the quick switcher, which lets us find notes, well ... quickly, opening the Graph view, currently somewhat empty, creating a new canvas,
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that's basically an infinite space where we can put shapes, documents and images and build things like workflows or mind maps, opening today's daily note. If it doesn't exist, Obsidian will create it for us and by default, place it in the root directory of our
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vault, inserting a template. Since we don't have any templates, this doesn't do much just yet.
And opening the command palette. Here we can tell Obsidian what we want it to do.
If you ever wonder how to do something in Obsidian, come here and search for it.
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Odds are that you will find it there. Next to the toolbar, we find the left hand pane.
By default, this shows the file list, which is our vault structure with all its folders and notes. At the top of that, we have five icons.
The first one lets us create a new note.
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We click on it, give the note a name and can start writing. And if that's all we need, we're already done.
We don't need anything else to just start writing. Everything else in Obsidian is about structuring and organizing our notes,
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automating and simplifying the note-taking and finding process and making Obsidian look the way we want it. If we want to give our vault some structure, we can add folders with the second icon here.
This is just like creating folders and
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subfolders on your hard disk. Next we can choose how to sort the items in this view.
We can change the default alphabetical ascending, meaning A to Z, order to descending order. Or sort by modification or creation date.
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Because of Obsidian's great linking functionality, we will often find ourselves editing notes that we did not open via the file list. If we always want to see the currently active note's location in our vault, we can click this icon and activate the "auto reveal
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current note" setting and Obsidian will show the open note in the file list automatically. And the last icon here lets us expand or collapse all folders at once.
Still in the left hand pane, we can find the search icon next
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to the file list one. Clicking on it opens a search bar with various parameters.
Right below the bar, we can see the results of our search. We can click on them to open the respective note.
And the last item in the left hand pane is the bookmarks icon.
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Here we can add bookmarks to items in our vault and also create bookmark folders for organizing them. So if we have frequently used items, storing them here as a bookmark can be very useful.
You may have noticed that I skipped this icon here in the top left corner.
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This toggles the left hand pane on and off, which is nice if we need more space for a note or just want to minimize distractions and focus on the note content instead. Constantly mentioning a left hand pane suggests that there is a right hand pane too.
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By default, this is collapsed but by clicking on the respective icon up here, we can open that one, too. For now, we won't worry about the various options here.
We will get back to those later. Okay, this is our starting point.
Now let's jump into the
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questions and find some answers. People often have the impression that coding skills are required for using Obsidian.
Well, let me tell you a secret - since it's just you and me: I cannot code either. If you asked me now to code a simple
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"hello world" statement, I could not do it. So yes, whether you can code or not.
Obsidian is for everyone, from non-techies to hardcore developers. You can get started and very often keep going without writing a single line of code.
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Let me show you. We are back in Obsidian.
We create a new note and type some text. We can display Obsidian notes in three different ways.
Let's open our new note three times and then, via simple drag and drop, arrange the tabs
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so that we can see them all at once. In the top right-hand corner of each note, there is this little icon.
Hovering over it tells us that this note is currently in "editing" view. Now let's go to the second tab and click on this icon.
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This changes the view to "reading", but only for this tab. Lastly, we go to the third tab.
Click on the three dots and select "source mode". I suppose the fact that it's called "source mode" contributes to the rumor that coding skills are required.
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But this does not refer to source code as in software development. It just means that the markdown elements are always visible inside the note.
Let's go to the first tab and add another paragraph. As you can see, the change is immediately visible in the other tabs, too.
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And all the tabs look pretty similar, so what's with the different views? Well, we added content in the first tab, which is in edit view.
If we try to do the same in the second tab, we would be out of luck, because it's in reading view.
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Let's add a heading 1 to the document. Now we see a difference.
As long as my cursor is in the same line, we can see the hash character that creates a heading 1 in markdown. In the reading view, we don't see that.
If I move away from that line, the "hash"
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character disappears from the edit view too. But in the source code view, all the markdown code is constantly visible.
Of course, we can also modify the note in the source code tab. Let's add a few more elements, like a
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heading 2, a link, a quote, and a few callouts. How these elements look like in the edit and reading view depends on our theme and other customizations.
What we see here is the default theme. We will get to themes a bit later.
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For now, it is important to understand the different views and that, depending on what we are doing, each of these views can be useful. So, Obsidian does not require coding, but learning it might still be beneficial.
A great place to do so is Skillshare, the
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sponsor of today's video. Among the hundreds of different classes, there are many that can help you learn how to code in different programming languages, or even how to use AI for software development.
And if you could not care less about programming, you will definitely find other interesting
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topics on Skillshare. From AI to photography and productivity, and pretty much anything in between.
I recently finished a class about creating my own children's book. And no, it's not for me.
I am creating a book for each of my two kids, with them being
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the main characters in the stories. And this class really helped me to understand how to instruct AI to create not only the stories I want, but also suitable illustrations.
And if you are not into creative topics, but into systems thinking, digital workflows,
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or building a second brain, there are plenty of productivity focused classes too, covering everything from time blocking and creative routines to mastering tools that help you think clearer and move faster. If you are still uncertain, I have good news for you.
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The first 500 people to use the link in the description get a one month free trial of Skillshare. With that, you can safely join the largest online learning community for creatives and benefit from their "learning by doing" approach when submitting your own project
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and getting feedback on it. Next question.
Is my data safe and private in Obsidian? That's an easy one.
Yes, it is. Contrary to most note-taking applications, Obsidian saves notes as
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plain text files directly on your device. You control where your notes live and how they sync.
Let me walk you through that. We are back in our vault.
We can see Obsidian and next to it my Windows Explorer with the folder that we created for this vault.
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Obsidian creates and edits text files in this folder. We have the vault named "beginners" and inside that, we find a few folders needed by Obsidian.
We can also see all the folders and notes that we created. Now let's open our note
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from earlier here in Obsidian. Then we can double-click the file and it will open in our default editor.
For me, this is Visual Studio Code, but you can use whatever you want. We immediately see that this is indeed just a plain text file containing our notes content
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with the markdown elements. Basically, this is what we see in Obsidian's source mode view.
Now let's add some text here in the text editor. While I'm doing this, the note in Obsidian does not change.
But once I saved the changes, they are immediately visible in Obsidian too.
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All of this happens locally. No data leaves our machine.
Let's clarify something quickly. "Vault" might be a confusing term for a note-taking app.
Many people ask, "What is a vault in Obsidian actually?" and
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"How do I get started with creating my first vault?" As explained in the previous chapter, a vault is just a folder that holds your notes and all your Obsidian settings. It's where everything lives.
Chapter 1 shows how to create a new vault
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and chapter 3 explains what and where it is. If you skipped those chapters, go back and watch them.
I created a separate one for this question so you would not miss it. Speaking of vaults, I often see people wondering, "How many
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vaults do I actually need?" I recommend starting with one vault. It keeps things simple while you learn.
You can always create more later if you need to. The main reason for having multiple vaults include the separation of private and worknotes,
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wanting a dedicated vault for a major project like writing a book for example. If you have a reason to maintain multiple vaults, go for it.
Otherwise, keep it simple. Fortunately, Obsidian makes it fairly easy to work with multiple vaults.
We are back in our "beginners" vault.
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If we expand the left-hand pane, we can see the vault name at the bottom of the pane. If we click on the name, we get a list of recently opened vaults and clicking on one of them will open it while keeping the beginners vault open.
So it's really simple to switch between them.
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Two tips here. First, try to make the individual vaults look slightly different from each other.
This makes it easier not to work in the wrong one by accident. And second, you can create shortcuts to open a specific Obsidian vault directly by using
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Obsidian URI syntax. Sounds scary, but is really simple.
I will show you. All we have to do is to right-click on our desktop or any location you want, click on "New" and "Shortcut" and then paste this URI address.
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We click on "Next" and give the shortcut a name. Then we just click "Finish" and that's it.
Now we can open this vault directly and if it is already open, it focuses on the respective Obsidian window. Obsidian URI can do more things.
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I left a link to it in the description if you are interested in learning more about it. One thing that scares many beginners is the ominous markdown used by Obsidian.
So it's not surprising that they often ask "What is markdown?" and "Do I need to
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learn it?" Quick answer: Markdown is a simple way to format text. No, you do not need to learn it.
But it makes writing faster and it's really easy to learn, too. Here is how you can get along without knowing markdown.
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I prepared a note with unformatted text describing the desired formatting. Now, if we don't know how to use markdown, we can always use the previously mentioned command palette.
And for some things, we can use common keyboard shortcuts similar to other
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editors and applications. Let's start with the headings.
We click into the line that should be a heading and press CTRL+P. That's the default shortcut for opening the command palette.
Then we type "heading" and select the
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heading type we want to apply to this line. Let's take heading 1 for this.
Then we move on and do a heading 2 here and a heading 3 in this line. What about the rest?
That one should be bold.
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So we select the text and we could again use the command palette. But we won't.
Instead we just press CTRL+B for bold. The same is true for the next text, which should be in italics.
We select it and press CTRL+I. Easy.
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Moving on. Here we want the bullet list.
We select all the items, hit CTRL+P, search for "bullet" and select "toggle bullet list". The process is the same for a numbered list.
Select. CTRL+P.
"numbered". Apply.
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Because we are in edit mode, we can see that Obsidian inserts the relevant markdown code to achieve this formatting. This tells us that instead of using the command palette, search, and select the proper formatting, we could simply have inserted 1, 2 or 3
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hashtags for the headings. Used asterisks to format text as bold or italicized.
Used dashes for bullet lists and numbers for numbered lists. That's really good to know.
We just learned a bit of markdown and can
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be faster next time. Nice.
One last thing in this chapter: One of Obsidian's greatest strengths is the fast and easy linking of notes. For this, we can also use the command palette.
Here we want to link to our first note.
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Remember this is the note's actual title, so we just select it, hit CTRL+P, search for "link" and select "add internal link". If we hold the CTRL key and click on it, this note opens in a new tab.
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But what if the link target does not exist yet? Well, no problem.
We just select the text and add an internal link again. We see that this link looks slightly different.
That's because this note does not exist yet.
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The fastest way to create it is to just click on that link and add our text. Back in our previous note, the link format also indicates that the note exists now.
And if we want to be faster, then we just select the text and type 2 square brackets.
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And with the markdown you learned in the last 5 minutes, you can easily cover 80% of your formatting needs. As I said, it's not that hard.
If you want to learn more, check the link in the description for helpful markdown resources. While we don't really need it, knowing
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even the basics that I just explained makes us much more efficient when taking notes. Now that we know how easy formatting can be, we might be wondering, what is the best way to organize all these notes?
Well, let's tackle that in the next chapter.
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Okay, we have our vault, we know how to create folders, notes and even how to use markdown. Once we start creating notes, we are faced with the question, "what folder structure is good for me?" As always, there is no single answer that
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is correct for every person and every use case. It depends.
There are two things to keep in mind. One, most beginners do best with a simple structure in the beginning.
And two, however you set it up now, it will change over time.
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Now with that in mind, let's look at some simple examples. You can take them like this or use them as inspiration to create your own structure.
We are back in our beginners vault. I start by creating folders for "example 1", "example 2", and "my approach".
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When creating your own structure, you won't need those. I just wanted to separate the different versions for this video to give you alternatives.
Okay, I highly recommend having a folder for things that are not content. That means not notes,
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canvases, images, etc. This is where we keep things like templates.
The minimal approach is to simply create a folder as shown in "example 1", called templates. If we want to have more control over the folder order, we can use
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numbers in front of the folder names. This could be "90 Templates" as shown in "example 2".
In my vault, I have a folder called "90 Organize", and in there I have the folder "templates".
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That's because I have not only templates for organizing my vault but also classes, dashboards, databases, lookups and embeddable elements. As a beginner, we won't need that.
But why not plan ahead a bit for later? Another recommendation is to have a
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folder for quick uncategorized notes or information like web page snippets that you collect quickly and may want to process later. For this, I suggest a folder called "inbox" or - with numbers - "00 inbox".
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And the third folder I suggest having in your vault is the one for your actual content. This could be super simple and just be called "notes" or "10 notes" in "example 2".
Personally, I am using a combination of folders and tags to organize my content.
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That's why I prefer not to dump all my notes into one folder. Additionally, this might result in slow response times when querying them later.
So what I do is to work with an adapted version of PARA - Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive -
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with some additional folders. Here is how my top level structure looks like at the moment.
Although I might get rid of "areas" soon. I have additional folders for my habits, bullet journal, objectives and key results and one for testing and
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experimenting called "the lab". Again, this works for me.
Your ideal setup might be completely different. When I started, I thought I needed folders for everything.
But after a few weeks, I realized a simple "notes", "templates", and an "inbox" were
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enough to start with. Obsidian grows with us and that's part of the fun.
One of Obsidian's greatest strengths can also be the source of much confusion for beginners. Wondering "how do I use properties, tags and aliases?"
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While tags, aliases and properties all help us describe and organize our notes, they serve different purposes. In short, tags are great for categorizing our notes.
Aliases let us define alternative names
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for a note, and properties let us add structured data to notes. Let's look at this in detail.
Starting with tags. In Obsidian, we can add tags directly in our notes.
These tags help us find other notes with
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the same tag, helping us to organize notes beyond rigid folder structures. Often, a note relates to multiple topics, but it can only exist in a single folder.
Tags let us overcome this limitation.
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Binding all notes on a topic regardless of their vault location. We can also use tags in the so-called front-matter section of notes.
This is something we have not seen yet. We are currently in source mode.
If we go to the very first line in a note, right below its title and enter
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three dashes, we create this front-matter section. It always begins and ends with three dashes.
A good way to understand front-matter is to think of it as a place where we can store information about our note to
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describe and categorize it. Whatever we put between these two lines will not be part of the actual note content.
For example, we can enter "tags:" followed by "demo". We can also add multiple tags by
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separating them with a comma. Let's add "organization" here.
If we now switch to reading view, this front-matter section gets the title "Properties" and shows the tags property with both values. If we want to hide this section, we can
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collapse it by clicking on the title. And this brings us to properties.
Basically, every field in our front-matter is a property describing our note. It is very common to use a "tags" property, as we have just seen.
Another useful one is
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the "aliases" property. We can add this either in source mode, just as we did for the tags, or in reading view by clicking on "add property".
We give it the name "aliases" and the value "how to organize our vault".
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Once again, we can add multiple values here. Let's also add one called "vault organization".
We can use these aliases when searching for a note. This is really helpful for me, because I don't always remember a note's title and then find it via its alias instead.
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Let's open another note side by side, and link from here to the "tags, properties, aliases" note. First, we say "how to use" and then link to the note title "tags, properties, aliases".
We can link to the same note, but instead of showing its title, we can show one
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alias by typing "let's learn about" and then link to "how to organize our vault". And lastly, we can type "everything about" and link to the alias "vault organization".
If we switch to source mode, we can see
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that all three links go to the same note, but the last two use an alias as the link text. We can also do this manually, using the "|" character between the note title and the desired display text.
So you can put anything there, even if it
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is not a defined alias. Let's come back to properties.
We can add here anything we want. Some common properties are "created" and "updated".
For those, we need to change the property type to "date and time". Other property types include list,
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number, checkbox, and date. We can easily add a list property called "status", or a checkbox for the property "checked?".
We can add as many properties as we need to organize our vault more efficiently. Again, how many you need and which ones
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depends entirely on you, and fortunately can be done very easily in Obsidian. By now, we know how to take and organize notes.
Naturally, the next question is, what plugins should be installed first?
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My recommendation here is to be clear about what you want to achieve. What is the desired outcome?
Understand the Obsidian core plugins, there are quite a few of those. Search for a suitable community plugin,
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but do not start browsing community plugins and installing those that look interesting. This leads you very quickly into a very deep rabbit hole, and you will find yourself working more *on* Obsidian than *with* it, which is of course neither productive nor
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efficient, and definitely not what we want. To see all core plugins and their status, we click on the gear icon down here.
This opens the Obsidian settings, where we can click on "core plugins". Contrary to community plugins, the
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Obsidian team creates and maintains the core plugins. Many of those are active by default.
Now, we cannot cover those here, but I created two videos covering all of Obsidian's core plugins. I left a link to these videos in the description.
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In those, I go through all the core plugins, explain what they do, and show how to use them. I recommend watching those to get an understanding of the core plugins in a short time.
Now, let's talk about community plugins. If we want to use those, we need to click
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on "community plugins", "turn on community plugins", and "browse". Let me emphasize the importance of knowing what you want before coming here.
At the time of making this video, there are well over 2000 plugins.
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If we are not careful, we can spend days and weeks here without getting anywhere. So, having a purpose and an objective when looking for a plugin is important.
Once we have found a plugin that we really need - let's take the "Templater" plugin as an example - we click on it.
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Then on "install" and "enable". Many plugins come with options.
If so, click on the "options" button to see them. For "Templater", we need to tell the plugin the template folder location.
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This location depends on the vault structure. Let's use "Example1/Templates" here.
The process is the same for all community plugins. Two more remarks.
First, remember that individuals usually create and maintain these plugins for free.
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This also means there is no guarantee that they will be around and functional forever. Second, the more plugins you install, the longer it will take Obsidian to load them when you start the application.
Consider this when deciding to install another one, or two ... or three.
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We already spent some time in Obsidian and tackled some questions. But let's take a step back and try to answer a key question here.
"What can we actually use Obsidian for?" Obsidian is so flexible that the short answer is: pretty much
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everything and anything that involves writing things down or using them later. This includes many use cases.
But Obsidian is also not a great tool for many other things. So the better approach is to say: "I would like to do X.
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Is Obsidian a good solution for that?" Let me give you a few practical examples of both categories. Obsidian is great for general notes - anything goes here.
Meeting notes. Team meetings, one-on-ones, whatever it
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is, we can keep structured notes. Person notes.
To keep track of relevant people and our interactions with them. Task management.
Obsidian lets us put tasks wherever we want and then consolidate them very easily.
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Recipes. From ingredients to instructions, nutritional values and full meal plans, book notes and reviews.
Make it easy to record the relevant passages and key learnings of all the books we read. Then there is of course journaling.
From short log entries
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to full-blown diaries. We can do it right here.
Knowledge management and documentation. Building our personal wiki has never been easier.
It's not just that we can link items. We can also use the properties to build topic overviews and tables of content.
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Travel planning. Business trips, family vacations, long stays or short.
In Obsidian we can plan the whole thing, consolidate all the relevant information, share it with others, and write a trip review - if we are so inclined.
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Habit tracking. Whether we want to build a good or break a bad habit.
Obsidian makes it easy to collect the relevant information to keep track of our progress and visualize it. Subscription management.
Do you really know all your subscriptions, how much they cost,
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why you have them and when they expire? No?
I didn't either. Until I put them into Obsidian.
Giving me not just a complete overview but also reminders to cancel or renew them when they are about to end. CRM.
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Yes, one can use Obsidian as a simple CRM, too. Complete with accounts, contacts, products, and leads.
TTRPGs - Tabletop Role Playing Games. Obsidian is great for creating campaigns,
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maps, character sheets, and everything else one needs to prepare for awesome adventures. So these were a few use cases where Obsidian is really good.
I left links to videos or channels for all of these use cases in the description to give you an easier start.
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Go and take a look - after this video, of course. On the other hand, Obsidian would not be my tool of choice for things like large tables and calculations.
Excel is better for something like this. For password management.
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Remember, Obsidian stores information in plain text. Not a good idea for passwords.
Real-time team collaboration. Although the team is currently working on a multi-player mode, so this might change soon.
At the end of the day,
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you should ask yourself, what is it that you actually want to do and then figure out whether Obsidian is a good solution for it. I hope my examples can help you with this decision.
I mentioned templates several times already. The question is, do we
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really need templates? And if yes, how do they work?
Strictly speaking, we don't need templates. Obsidian works fine without them, but they do make life much easier.
Especially if you frequently take similar kinds of notes.
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Just think of meeting notes. These usually have the same components, such as a list of participants, an agenda, notes for each agenda item, etc.
We can put all these blocks into a template, and whenever we create a new meeting note,
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Obsidian can apply the template. Overall, templates save time and create consistency.
They are easy to set up using either the templates, core plugin, or the Templater community plugin. I created a separate tutorial for the
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template core plugin. Once again, the link is in the description.
The same is true for the Templater plugin. The fundamental difference between these two plugins is that Templater give us more options for defining rules and automating note creation,
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while the Templates plugin is less powerful, but somewhat easier to use. Obsidian lets us link our notes very easily.
Still, many beginners are asking how this works exactly. So let me show you.
The fastest way to create a link to a
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note is to just type two opening square brackets, like so. Then we can start typing the name or the alias of an existing note.
For example, to our first note. Creating links is cool, but wait until you see what happens
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when Obsidian automatically shows you every note that's linked together. It's one of the coolest features.
Obviously, links are great to get from one note to another, but they do not just work in one direction. Let's open the first note and also expand
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the right-hand pane. Remember, we ignored this earlier, but now we take a closer look.
By default, there is an icon here that lets us see the so-called "backlinks" for the currently active note. Here we can see that there is one link from our daily note to the first note.
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And if we add another link from a different one and go back to the first note, then we can see that one, too. For more details on backlinks, check the separate tutorial via the link in the description.
Obsidian also uses these links between our notes to create a
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visualization - or a "graph" - of our vault. There is a local graph and the global graph view.
We can open the local graph via the command palette. Remember, CTRL+P opens that one.
We search for "local" and select "Graph
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View: Open local graph". This opens a new tab with the local graph for the currently active note.
We see our first note at the center and all the notes with incoming links and any links from the first note to others.
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Personally, I like to take the local graph and just drag it over to the right-hand pane. This lets me navigate from one note to the next without having to go through the folder structure or search for them.
As mentioned, Obsidian creates this graph for all the notes in our vault.
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If we want to see that, we can click on this icon in the left-hand toolbar or use the command palette to open the "Graph View". We can customize this view in various ways.
Once again, I have a separate tutorial for this and of course
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you can find the link to it in the description. I know I keep saying this, but I really tried to put all the information you might need into one place.
So I highly recommend checking out the description and going through these links for details on the different topics.
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At some point, we will have many notes and may need to search for them. So how can we search our notes effectively?
"Search" is one of Obsidian's core plugins that lets us find notes based on their title, location, properties, and tags.
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And yes, that's another link for a tutorial that you can find in the description. As powerful as the search plugin is, organizing our notes properly by using a combination of folders, tags, and properties will make it even easier to find
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what we are looking for. Many people start using Obsidian on their PCs.
Eventually, they want to access their notes and work with them on a mobile device, too. Which begs the question: "how can we use Obsidian across multiple devices?"
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Well, there are multiple options available. You will have to decide which one is best for you.
The key criteria are usually cost, complexity, reliability, device, and operating system. While we cannot cover them in detail, let
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me give you an overview and a starting point. The simplest and most straightforward option is to use the "Sync" core plugin provided by Obsidian.
This plugin works perfectly on Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices based on Android or iOS.
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It's fast, reliable and easy to configure, as you can see in the dedicated tutorial - once again, linked in the description. The catch?
It's not free. While the pricing is very modest, starting at $4 per month for "Sync standard" and going up to $8
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per month for "Sync plus", this may still be too much for many of us. So, what can we do?
One popular alternative is called "SyncThing". This is a separate application that continuously synchronizes files between two or more devices.
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SyncThing is free, open source and available for all major platforms. The drawback is that it requires some setup.
It's not rocket science, but certainly not as simple as the core plugin mentioned earlier. There are more alternatives out there.
If the core plugin and SyncThing are not
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for you, just do a quick search online. You will definitely find a solution that works for you.
Once we made it this far, we should have a functional Obsidian vault to work with on our PC and our mobile device. And that's great.
Now might be the time
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where many users wonder: "how do I customize the appearance of Obsidian?" The short answer: themes. Themes let you change how Obsidian looks quickly and without technical knowledge.
You can choose from hundreds of themes with just a few clicks.
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Let's do that. We go to "Settings" and "Appearance".
Here we can see that we're using the "default" theme and, after clicking on the drop-down arrow, that no other themes are available. Let's click "Manage" and we get a list of well over 300 community themes.
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We can browse, preview and install the one we like. We click on the "minimal theme" to see its documentation.
We like it and just click on "Install and use". And right away, Obsidian looks different.
Let's try another one.
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Personally, I like the "AnuPpuccin" in one. Click "Install and use" and there we go.
If we go back to the appearance settings, we can find options for changing the font. Let's add "JetBrains Mono" as our text font.
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We can also adjust the overall font size here. But that's pretty much it in terms of customization via the Settings menu.
If we want more control, we can install the "Style Settings" plugin. We go to "Community Plugins", "Browse", and
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search for "Style Settings". We click on the plugin, "Install and Enable".
Then we close the plugin dialog and go to "Style Settings" under "Community Plugins". Here we see our currently active theme,
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in our case "AnuPpuccin". If we click on the theme title, we get a bunch of options that we can configure as we wish.
We can change the theme flavor, in my case the one for the dark theme, the accent color, for example to teal, and define our own
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colors without knowing anything about CSS. Let's find "teal" and use the color picker to change it for the dark theme.
Clicking "Save" applies the change immediately. The same is true for tons of other options like font types and sizes,
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custom heading colors and formatting, etc. If you want to customize your vault's look and feel, find the template that you like and use the Style Settings plugin to tweak it.
Once again, you don't need to know anything about CSS for that.
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I admit that this is probably not everything beginners ask about Obsidian, but I believe it covers the most frequently asked questions and most important topics. What do you think?
Did I miss anything crucial or do you have additional questions? Let me know in the comments
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and I will try to answer them. I really hope this video helped you to understand Obsidian better and perhaps even to overcome some doubts and fears about using it.
I understand that it can seem confusing and intimidating in the beginning.
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If this did help you, a like and subscribe would mean a lot to me. And it helps others to discover Obsidian too.
And if you want to keep leveling up your Obsidian skills, check out the next video linked right here. And that's it for today.
Thanks for watching and see you next time.