Transcript of Video
00:01
Hey there, Adam here. Today I want to go through the new Obsidian Properties feature, which is not really a new feature, but it is to a lot of people. Let me explain. So if you’ve heard of YAML, Y-A-M-L which was a way to add properties to Obsidian files previously, you already know how this works. This is the same exact thing. You are just adding a property using YAML. You can even use the same format. So if you already use YAML, then you already know 90% of this video. But for the rest of us, let’s continue on. Obsidian Properties are a way to add basically groups and values for organizing your files. So Obsidian is not a great organizational tool, generally speaking. And Properties is a way to add metadata to your file to help keep it more organized and help you find stuff later that are if you want to associate multiple files together, but you don’t want to link them all together using backlinks.
01:06
So this is an example of a property. The side on the left is the category, side on the right is the value. So let me show you an old note of mine that uses Properties to show you what it looks like in practice. So this is for a book. So you’ve got your author is the category name of the author title of the book, is a category actual title of the book. And then I also created a property for tags. Probably not really necessary to do it this way. Now, I liked it then, but I also added a tag, which I will show you why in a second in the Data view. So this is what properties look like. This is what they look like in practice, and this is what they look like once you start using them. So how do you use them?
01:51
So, three different ways to do it. You can do Command Palette, which is Control P, and then type in property and add file property. There’s also a default hotkey of Control plus semicolon. Or my personal favorite is let me show you a new note. You can just do the old YAML hot code for it, which is just triple Hyphen. And now you got one. So that’s how you create a property. You can additional properties. You can make date properties, you can name whatever you want, put whatever data you want in there. That’s the joy of obsidian. So that’s how you create a property. Now that you know how to make one, what do you want to do with these properties? I’ve got two different primary use cases that I would suggest. The first one is to embed properties inside of your templates. And then the second way is using Data View.
02:47
So let’s start with the easier the two, which is putting it inside of a template. So this is my literature template. So I was just showing you one of my books. This is the template that created it. So you’ve got your properties already set up inside this template. And this template is going to be what you use whenever you want to create a new book tab, a new book. So you’ve got your author, your title, your tags, already set up, already prefilled. So this is from Templator. This automatically fills the name of the file. I’ll show you in a second. This automatically fills in the date that you create the note. So for example, let’s make YouTube video book example. And I’m going to hit okay, I’m creating a template, a note based on my literature template. I’m going to hit OK. Now you’ve got the author is blank just like on the template.
03:37
You’ve got the TP file name title has got the same title, you got the tag and you got today’s date on it. So now you’ve got your properties and it’s in a nice clean format at the top of every single one of your books. And that really is sort of all there is to it’s, just nice and clean. So you can do a couple of different ways to search through these. So if you go on the right side panel and expand it and click on all properties, you’re going to see that you can search for any note that uses the author category. So this is every note that has an author on it. Or you can also search by specific authors and you can search by ones that use the date thing. So any of these classes so to speak, or categories, you can search to get every single note that uses that particular category.
04:31
The other way to use this, other than just the obvious of you got nice clean boxes in which to put your stuff. Oh, also it’s sort of a neat one. You can see if I can change it’s going to get mad at me. So the other way to use it is to use it in the data view. Do not be overwhelmed, I will explain. So this is the data view plugin. I am pulling the authors from the author property and then I’m also pulling every single literature tag. So this is the 15 files that have an author with the literature tag and it’s got the name. And then you can click on let’s just say this is just the books I’ve added in recently and I can click on it. And there you go. This one’s actually sold. It’s got an old version of it.
05:35
So let’s do a more recent one, warren Buffett book. And you see that I made this note, whatever that was five months ago. So that is a real brief introduction to properties. I like to keep these videos nice and clean and short. The last thing that you can do is let’s just say you don’t like having the properties. Oh no, you can’t hit delete. You can do the command palette again, and then type in Property Properties, and then clear your file properties and they’re gone. All right, so I hope that this was useful for you to get started again, just like any other feature in Obsidian. If you watch my Getting Started video, if this seems overwhelming at all to you, just don’t use it. Don’t get overwhelmed. Getting overwhelmed will really remove the fun of this for you, and you can use it just as little notepad files and still be totally successful with it.
06:35
You do not need to do something that doesn’t look useful to you yet. I did not start using this sort of stuff for probably six months, and I’m pretty tech savvy. Let me show you the two add ons again that I use, just so you know. Or Plugins. I am using the Templator Plugin for some advanced template functionality. If you look in my Obsidian playlist, you’ll see a video there on Templator plus Quick Add. That was what allowed me to create it using a hotkey. And then the last one is Data View. So if you look at my Obsidian Playlist again, which I will link at the end of this video, you will see a playlist that has videos on each one of these add ins plugins that can help get you started. If this seems interesting to you, or if it seems like a total waste of time, just skip it and move on with your day.
07:23
And hopefully you just found this video interesting, even if not informative. All right, well, that’s all I got for today. Let me know what you think. If you have some questions, let me know. If you think this video was awful, let me know that too. I’m always looking for feedback and comments, and I hope I’m just going to stop rambling now. Thanks again. Bye.