How to Use Synced Blocks in Notion

I. Introduction

• Introduce the topic of synced blocks in Notion
• Mention the API and link to a future video on the topic

II. Overview of Synced Blocks

• Show examples of synced blocks being used for navigation
• Explain the "add new page template" function
• Demonstrate how the synced block updates dynamically on different pages

III. How to Create Synced Blocks

• Show how to access the synced block feature in Notion
• Explain how to add content to synced blocks
• Demonstrate how to view all pages with a synced block
• Explain how to unsync blocks

IV. Use Cases for Synced Blocks

• Discuss using synced blocks for navigation
• Mention using synced blocks for templates
• Discuss other potential uses for synced blocks

V. Creating a Navigation Bar with Synced Blocks

• Walk through the steps to create a navigation bar with synced blocks
• Demonstrate the final result

VI. Conclusion

• Recap the main points about synced blocks in Notion
• Encourage viewers to experiment with using synced blocks in their own workspaces.

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Hey there guys, welcome back to another video. My name is Carter Siraj, the productive dude here on YouTube, and in today's video I'm going to be going over a feature that kind of got overlooked with the notion API coming into play. A lot of people are really hyped up about that, but they overlooked this new feature called synced blocks. I really want to talk about this because it's a very powerful feature. We have an API video coming out soon and it will be linked up in one of these corners when you want to check that out. Go ahead and check that out because the API is super powerful. We're going to have a lot of great videos about that, but in this video we're going to talk about synced blocks and some use cases and basically just how to use them.

So without further ado, let's jump right in. Here we are in my notion account. If you guys are familiar with how my home page usually looks, you might notice that it looks a little bit different now. We've got this nice little navigation bar here on the side and let me just show you how this works because this is actually taking advantage of that synced blocks feature that I was telling you guys about. So if I want to go to a different area of my notion workspace or a different page, I can literally just click on any of these and as you can see this synced block stays the same across every single page that I go to. There's kind of just some continuity and it sticks together a lot better, so that's why I really like the synced Notion blocks feature. It works great as a navigation function. I can also show you guys how to make this menu. If you stick around to the end of the video, I'm going to be basically going through how to create this menu for yourself.

It also has an "add new page template" button, which is really nice. It adds a new page immediately and it pulls us to a template page. So the nice thing about this is you know, I just put my title in right here and it's ready to go. It already has my synced block in the template page and then I just give it a new name. And if you guys watch as I give it a new name, it updates live on the right in the synced block. So let's just say I wanted to create a page called "Tutorial." Boom, and then I can go in here and I can change this to whatever I want it to be. I can change my cover photo and whatnot, but yeah, that's kind of how I've been using the synced blocks feature.

Now let's talk about how this feature works. And then a little bit later in this video, I'm going to show you guys how to actually create this navigation bar here. So to do this, I'm going to create a new page over here and I'm just going to call it "Synced Blocks." This will be a good way for me to kind of show you guys how this works. There we go, that's kind of cool. And I'm not going to add a cover for now. I'm just going to show you guys how the synced blocks feature works.

So what you're going to want to do first is hit the little plus button and then go down all the way to "Sync Block" at the bottom. Or if you want to, you can hit a slash and then start typing "Sync Block" and that's a quicker way to get to it. So once you create a synced block, you can enter things into here. So if I do a slash, you can enter the following in here.

Okay and then I go back to the synced blocks page. You'll notice that it updated dynamically, which is super nice. If you want to see all the pages that this has affected, you can go in and click on the editing icon, and it'll show you where the synced block is located.

I'd also like to note that you can unsync blocks. If you go in here and click on the three dots, you can hit "unsync all" and then hit that again. What you'll notice is you've still got "hello world" here, but if I edit it and put like a little smiley face in there and then go back to the homepage, you'll see that that has just stayed the same now and it's no longer a sync block, it's just a normal text string.

So now I'm going to get into how to actually go ahead and create something like a menu with these synced blocks and how to have continuity between all your pages.

So let's get into that. The first thing you're going to want is like a home page, right? So like a central hub. I'm just going to rename this "home v2" because I already have my home page over here, but I want to show you guys this use case.

So let's do "home" and then I'm just going to come up with a few different pages that I want to create. Let's do "page 1." It might be um, let's just say we're doing it like a traditional website, so we've got like an about page and then let's create a contact page. So you could literally make your website in Notion, it's pretty cool.

Now, what I would recommend here is actually creating some space in the page that you can edit and change things and then creating a template so that you can recreate the same sort of page layout every single time, and that's what gives it that continuity between all the pages.

So I'm just going to put in some text so that I can move this over here and this section will be our synced block.

All right, I'm also going to link, I'm going to add a linked page link to page "home v2" and I'm going to put that up there. And then now that we've got that, it's going to pull up this back link here. I don't really like how that looks, so you can go over here and you can actually turn off the back link if you want to. And I also usually go small text full width, I think that usually gives me a little bit more freedom. Here you can change the font if you want, but to get rid of that back link you can just hit "customize page" and instead of "show pop over," you could hit "expand it" if you wanted to, but I'm just going to turn off the comments too, just want this to be a clean page.

And then in here we're just going to put our title. Right, so let's do H2 and there we go, we have a title. And then what we're going to want to do next is for my particular home page, I just add like a quote or a little like information section here. But it's actually a quote, so you can just hit this plus button and go to quote, and you can start entering your quote here.

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