Rolling out to all Notion workspaces this week is a new layout customization option we’re calling Tabbed Layout. This is available in all databases but must be enabled. This guide serves as a walkthrough in using the new feature and awareness of my current understanding of its limitations as well as some thoughts on what I believe are some initial bugs in the software.
As always, features tend to ship out progressively with Notion, so if you don’t have this feature in your workspace yet, hold tight; it’s coming!
Let’s dive in!
To start, here’s what it looks like:
In short, we now have a navigational component which features a Content tab which hosts our properties and page body content as well as any number of Tabbed Views, which are like Linked Views but they persist through all pages in the database. Where we add linked views to page bodies, we add tabbed views to Notion page layouts.
To access this new layout mode, first hover over the heading of a page in a database to reveal the “Customize layout” button:
Once we’re customizing the layout, to switch into Tabbed structure, click the Page Settings option in the top-left:
This will reveal the Page settings in the right sidebar. You can see there are two options for Structure now.
- Simple — the default Notion page layout. This is what we all know and love.
- Tabbed — Adds a “Content” tab as well as the option to add additional database views as tabs.
You’ll also note the option to toggle on/off Property icons in this view and they’ve moved the Full width page setting here as well. Other page settings options like comment and discussion style have been moved here as well.
Unlike linked databases in templates, tabbed views exist on every page of the database. If you’re accustomed to making template changes and then going back and reapplying the template to a bunch of pages, this is going to make life as a Notion designers a whole lot easier.
Once you’ve enabled Tabbed structure, you can find the Content tab (1) added underneath the Heading area of the page layout.
You can add views to this tabbed interface by clicking the + button (2).
This presents us with a view-creation picker which gives us all the relations to the database the page we’re customizing is in. Selecting one of these will create a blank view and add a new filter to the view with the new Page containing this view selected as the filter. This new special expanding filter will ensure that the view only shows content related to the page.
This is added as a Quick Filter at the top of the view. You can of course modify the filters and even add this filter to an advanced filter to further customize the view. To modify all our standard view properties, we select the tab and use the standard configuration which is presented in the right-hand sidebar.
This is where we do all our standard view customization work we’ve had for a long time in Notion such as customizing the icon presented in the view tab, the name, layout, properties, filters, sorting, and group.
Advantages
The advantage of this new layout system is that we’re now able to create persistent application-style UIs for our databases which are the same from page-to-page. No more views being outdated or having to reapply templates to 100s of pages. Simply make a change to your view and it is updated across every page in the database. Wow!
One of my favorite little additions which I’m hoping comes to linked views as well is the ability to Link exiting pages through the relation in a tabbed view. This improves the process which previously would mean having to access the property directly on the page instead of linking existing records through a linked view.
Disadvantages
You cannot as a builder interact with changing these views outside of layout customization mode. So you’re having to open the layout editor to make any changes. You cannot modify and then “Save changes” the way you can with a traditional view embedded in the page. For advanced users, this may be frustrating enough to prefer linked views over tabbed views.
There are also some permissions issues with the initial iteration that may be difficult to navigate in a shared or team workspace. I’ll get into those shortly.
Property Interactions
Both properties and page body content are presented as part of the Content tab. So if you switch to a secondary tab, your page properties will be hidden. However, the page title and pinned properties will persist in being displayed through switching to any view.
Permissions Bugs
After playing around with this feature in some shared workspaces, I found some notable issues with the feature. For example, if you add a view that is not related to the current database page…
…if the user does not have editing permissions on the database this view is attached to, they will not be able to modify content or add new content via this view, even if they have Can edit content permission on the source driving the view.
This can be problematic if you are running a multi-player workspace that is not all Full access as a sane Notion administrator should. Hopefully this will be fixed/improved soon!
Other Limitations and Issues
- You can at this time only have one Content tab.
- I’m currently tracking a bug where I actually have two independent Content tabs, one of which is non-functional. I expect this to be patched this week some time.
- Sometimes when you are configuring a view tab, the content will be completely empty even though there are related pages. This can make customizing the view very challenging without a preview of your data.
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