Everything you need to know about Notion Charts - how to create native charts in Notion
Notion has recently released Charts. This allows you to create visalizations of your data on any Notion database, if you are on a paid plan (users on a free plan get maximum 1 chart in their workspace). See more details about Notion pricing here.
Before Notion Charts, the only way to create data visualizations from your Notion databases would be to use a third-party tool. Here is a post explaining how that works.
Charts allow you to visualize your data in aggregate to get more insights. The types of visualizations you build depend on the data you store in Notion, and what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you intend to visualize. Having an effective data structure (database properties, property types, relations) in your Notion workspace has become even more important now, because lacking an appropriate data structure will likely hinder your ability to create charts.
Notion Charts plan availability
Notion Charts are limited to maximum 1 chart on free plans. Paid plans (from Plus to Enterprise) can use unlimited Charts. If you are using the free plan in Notion and you duplicate a template containing a Chart, that will count toward the limit. So, if you have already used your 1-chart limit, you would not see the Chart view in the new template you just duplicated.
How to use Notion Charts
Notion Charts are a type of view in Notion databases. You can create a Chart in Notion by creating a database view. You can create a database view on any existing database, by clicking on the ‘+’ button at the top (next to the view names), or by creating a new blank page and selecting ‘Table’ from the list of buttons, or on any page by typing ‘/linked view of database’.
Then, you can select ‘Chart’ as one of the available layout options. After that, you will configure the chart according to your needs. Here is a list of all the available features for setting up a Chart in Notion.
- Chart type - select the type of visualization you would like.
- X axis - select which property you would like to show on the x axis (horizontal), how you want to sort it, and whether to omit zero/empty values (i.e., the pages that don’t have the property populated).
- Y axis - select which property to show on the y axis (vertical). Here, you can also do aggregations on properties of numeric type. Further, you can group by a specific property (e.g., grouping deal values by deal owner).
- Style - select the color of the chart, and set the chart height, value colors, data labels, and grids.
- You can also export any Chart as PNG or SVG via the dedicated option ‘Save chart as…’
This concludes the overview of how to use Notion Charts. The use cases will depend on your use of Notion and what type of data you store in Notion databases. For teams, here are some example use cases of Notion Charts:
- Incomplete tasks by assignee
- Completed tasks by assignee
- Overdue tasks by assignee
- Percentage of tasks completed on time by assignee
- Deals value by month closed
- Deals value by quarter closed
- Deals value by year closed
- Total meetings per month
- Total meetings per month by participant
- Total meetings per quarter
- Total meetings per year
- Total deals created per week
- Total deals created per month
- Total product sales per week
- Total product sales per month
- …and many more, which will depend on what you want to track and how you determine success in your team efforts. This video by Ryan Deiss can be helpful to draw inspiration for metrics to track in your business.