Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything  ## Metadata - Author: [[Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo]] - Full Title: Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #obsidian - #knowledge-management - #productivity Author: Nick Milo Source: YouTube Video "Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything" Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4 date created: 2025-05-28 08:30 --- # Title: Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything — A Deep Dive into Structured Note Management ## Table of Contents:  - 📝 [Summary](#-summary) - 📖 [Main Content](#-main-content) - 🗒️ [Notes](#-notes) - [00:00–02:00 Introduction to Obsidian Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=0) - [02:01–06:00 Creating and Filtering Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=121) - [06:01–11:00 Customizing Tables and Properties](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=362) - [11:01–14:00 Embedding Views and Multi-view Management](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=661) - [14:01–19:00 Advanced Filtering and Project Organization](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=849) - [19:01–25:00 Implications and Reflections on Database Use](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=1140) - [25:01–30:00 AI, Community, and Future of Obsidian Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=1500) - 📖 [References](#-references) - 🗣️ [Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - 📰 [Newsletter](#-newsletter) - ✅ [Action Items](#-action-items) - 🧪 [Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - 📊 [Methodology](#-methodology) - ❓ [Questions](#-questions) - 🔮 [Future Research](#-future-research) - 💡 [Implications](#-implications) - 🧠 [Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - 📊 [Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - 🌍 [DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - ✅ [Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - 🔍 [DARVO Analysis Prompt](#-darvo-analysis-prompt) - 🔍 [SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - 🎯 [Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - Milo, Nick. “Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything.” YouTube, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4 ## 📝 Summary: Nick Milo presents Obsidian’s new “Bases” feature, a core plugin that transforms a user’s vault of notes into powerful, fast, and flexible databases. Unlike apps like Notion, Obsidian Bases treats the entire vault as one gigantic database, allowing rapid filtering, multiple customizable views, and embeddable tables inside notes. Milo walks through creating bases, managing properties and filters, and explores implications for knowledge work, creativity, and potential AI integration. The video balances practical walkthroughs with philosophical reflections on structured vs. freeform note-taking. ## 📖 Main Content: Obsidian Bases revolutionizes note management by allowing users to build databases from any notes in their vault, transcending the fragmented “base” concept found in competing apps. This enables complex filtering by properties like rank or author, multi-view layouts, and seamless embedding of dynamic views within any note. Milo highlights Bases’ speed advantage over third-party plugins, especially with large vaults exceeding 10,000 notes, making navigation smooth and instant. The video also demonstrates how to customize and reorder columns, apply advanced filters, and organize projects by status and rank. Beyond features, Milo cautions about balancing structured database use with traditional freewriting and spontaneous linking, warning that overstructuring risks diminishing the joy and serendipity of note-taking. He also explores the unclear future role of AI with Bases, hoping that AI-assisted coding and querying will make advanced filtering accessible to non-coders. Throughout, the video is an accessible blend of step-by-step demonstration, user-experience insights, and community encouragement for experimenting with Bases during its early access phase. ### 🗒️ Notes #### [00:00–02:00 Introduction to Obsidian Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=0) - Bases turn a user’s vault into a unified database for all notes. - Unlike Notion, no need to segment notes into multiple fragmented bases. - Allows instant filtering and searching across all notes in vault. #### [02:01–06:00 Creating and Filtering Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=121) - Create a new base through command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + P). - Filtering by properties (e.g., collection contains “quotes”) drastically reduces visible notes. - Multiple filters and filter groups are possible for complex queries. #### [06:01–11:00 Customizing Tables and Properties](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=362) - Properties like “rank” and “author” are editable within bases. - Columns can be reordered, resized, and renamed for clarity without altering original metadata. - Some UI aspects (searching properties) still clunky; expected to improve. #### [11:01–14:00 Embedding Views and Multi-view Management](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=661) - Bases support multiple views per database (like Airtable). - Views can be saved, toggled, and embedded in notes via markdown syntax. - Embedding views helps integrate dynamic filtered content inside project notes or agendas. #### [14:01–19:00 Advanced Filtering and Project Organization](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=849) - Demonstrates filtering by project status folders (active, simmering, sleeping). - Vault-wide search and filtering bypass Notion’s fragmented base issues. - Current UI for folder path display less clean than some community plugins but improving. #### [19:01–25:00 Implications and Reflections on Database Use](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=1140) - Obsidian bases speed and structure empower analysis, prioritization, and rapid context-building. - Warning: over-reliance on structured properties and databases can reduce creative freewriting and serendipitous linking. - Encouragement to balance both database and exploratory workflows. #### [25:01–30:00 AI, Community, and Future of Obsidian Bases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4&t=1500) - Current advanced filtering (formulas/functions) challenging for non-coders. - Community sharing and AI-assisted code generation expected to lower barriers. - Unknown how AI will interpret base file formats and rendered views, but potential for powerful integrations. - Milo’s enthusiasm for rapid iteration and encouragement to experiment with early access features. ## 📖 References: - Obsidian Official Documentation: https://help.obsidian.md/ - Idea Verse Pro Plugin: https://ideaverse.io/ ## 🗣️ Paraphrase:  1. Original: *"Bases is blazing fast, handling vaults with tens of thousands of notes without lag, unlike other plugins that freeze or slow down."* Paraphrased: The Bases plugin operates with exceptional speed, efficiently managing massive note collections without the performance issues seen in comparable tools. 2. Original: *"A database environment encourages more structured thinking and analysis but may limit freeform writing and spontaneous connections that foster creativity."* Paraphrased: Working within a database framework promotes organization and analytical clarity, though it might constrain the natural flow of creative note-taking and linking. ## 📰 Newsletter: 🚀 *Unlock the Power of Your Notes with Obsidian Bases!* This week, discover how Obsidian’s new Bases plugin can transform your scattered notes into lightning-fast, dynamic databases. Easily filter thousands of notes, create multiple custom views, and embed live data tables right inside your projects. Whether managing quotes, projects, or reading lists, Bases lets you organize smarter, not harder. Nick Milo’s detailed walkthrough shows the magic behind the scenes—and the balance you’ll want between structured databases and creative freewriting. Ready to supercharge your workflow? Dive in: [Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4) 🎯💡 ## ✅ Action Items: - Introduce Obsidian Bases concepts in WordPress contributor workshops to improve knowledge - Summary: Turn your notes into powerful, customizable databases with Obsidian's new core plugin: Bases. Instantly filter quotes, projects, and plans—right when you need them. 🌌 GET IDEAVERSE: https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/ideaverse-pro?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=obsidian_bases 00:00 - Introduction: What is a Base? 01:14 - Getting Started: Creating Your First Base 08:30 - The 3 Best Features of Bases 14:53 - Recently Modified Dataview 16:30 - Project Dataview 19:08 - The Additional Features 21:54 - Implications of using Obsidian Bases 25:47 - The Current Limitations 27:52 - Current Guidance 29:12 - Close 29:51 - Outro 30:07 - End 🔆 GET WEEKLY INSIGHTS: https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/learn-more-now?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=obsidian_bases 💥 SUBSCRIBE TO THIS CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA?sub_confirmation=1 🐦 TWEET: https://twitter.com/NickMilo 📖 READ: https://medium.com/@nickmilo22/my-pkm-story-3763985b7a3e 🎬 LEARN OBSIDIAN: https://youtu.be/QgbLb6QCK88 🗿 DOWNLOAD OBSIDIAN: https://obsidian.md/ 📩 EMAIL: [email protected] 🔖 TAGS: #Obsidian #obsidianapp #Obsidiannotetakingapp #LinkingYourThinking - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMCGohQkm4 Imagine having every note you've ever made instantly filtered to show exactly what you need right when you need it. Your quotes instantly sorted by your favorites, your projects filtered by deadlines. You can with the right base. A base is a foundation. It's a platform that gives us footing. So when we go from the physical world to the world of ideas, a base becomes a database. A database then is a foundation that gives us the footing we need for viewing our ideas in a structured way. And now we have a new way to create these databases in Obsidian. Introducing Bases, a new core plug-in that lets you turn any set of notes into a powerful database. With Bases, you can organize everything from those projects to travel plans to reading lists and everything else. That's directly from team Obsidian. And in this video, I'll show you the three best features of bases. I'll show you three examples of how to set up your own bases in Obsidian. And just as important, I want to talk about the implications of using bases for your knowledge. But first, hey, I'm Nick Milo and I'm here to help you do your best thinking more often. And if that's important to you, well, you know what to do. And so, without further ado, let's look into my Obsidian Vault, my idea verse. And what I have on screen is our agenda for today. We just covered the introduction and now we're going to go into the first example. So, let's start from scratch. How do you even create a new base for the your first time? Well, to accomplish that, let's go down to the gear icon, which will open up settings. Make sure you're on general and check out if your current version is version 1.9.0. Now, if you're watching this immediately upon its release, you may not have access to this if you're not an early insider with a Catalyst license. You can see that I'm a Catalyst license here. You definitely don't have to support the Obsidian team. Eventually, this will be a public release and we'll all have access to Obsidian bases. So, just make sure you at least have a version that's equal or higher to what you see on screen here. That means we have access to bases. So, on a Mac, you'll hit command P. On Windows, that's control P. And it will open up the command pallet. Now, start typing bases. And you will see, if this is your first time, you'll just see create new base. Go ahead and click on that. Now we've created our first base. What's really fascinating about Obsidian is as opposed to Notion, Notion has all these bases. And so you have to make sure that you create a base within that base and that all the notes that you want to to see within that base are there because if they're in a different base, that's not your base and you won't get the results in that base. If that made any sense. Conversely, Obsidian has one giganto database. So, no matter what, like it doesn't matter where you create your bass or anything like that. It's going to be able to look at all of your notes. That's intuitively, I think, what we want. And then we just filter however we need to to get the data that we'd like to. So, in this case, I'm going to do a version. I want to see my best quotes. So, how do I start? These are like all my notes sorted alphabetically. The first thing you'll want to do is click filters, then twirl open the all views. And this is where I'm going to add a property that I use in Ideaverse Pro, which is the collection property. And I want that collection to contain a link to a note for quotes. And immediately, you can see now we have all these different quotes that are linked here. So, what I've done is gone from 10,000 notes and I filtered them down to, I don't know, roughly 70. Not too bad. Now, we can keep adding filters. I won't do that. Now, we can add filter groups. We could become really advanced with this. And we can actually go into specific views. That'll take me to the next thing I'll show. Okay. So, what did we do here? We chose a property. Collection contains quotes. Now, just as a reminder, what does a property look like? And so, for this one, let's go and open up one of these quotes. And now on the upper right, you can see my properties. So, here's that collection property field. We're going to talk about the implications of bases as it pertains to properties in the back half of this video. Needless to say, properties become more important if you want to use Obsidian bases. In this case, we can see it's got a high rank, a rank of 4.7 out of five. I really like this quote. So, we're going to go back to the base that we're in. And now we can hopefully understand that this property collection quotes is the filter that we've applied right here. There are many ways to filter. That's just the one that we're going to go with here. And why is that? Because in idea, here's my note for quotes. And using not Obsidian Bases, but using something that's been around for about four or so years, um, a third party plugin called data view, I've created this view. And we can see that Carl Sean's quote is showing up right here. So using data view, I have quotes, I have the author, and I have a rank. So my question is, can I replicate this using Obsidian bases? So let's go ahead and now let's give this one a name and say quotes base example because I'll show you a different one later. I don't see any columns though. So how do I add a column? And this is where it gets a little tricky and I'm sure they'll iron this out because this is still early on. Go ahead and click now on properties and I'm looking for rank because okay, just as an example, if I go back to our quote from Carl Sean, I can see the property of rank. So, I want to find this. But when I go over here to properties, I don't see it showing up. Well, all you need to do is start typing in search. It's not totally intuitive because I'm thinking to myself, where are all my properties? And I kind of like the auto suggestion or the auto reminder. So, I'm hoping eventually they add those here. But even if I just type the letter A, now I start to see all these different properties I've added in into different notes at different times. Let's go ahead and type rank. And now I can see this is the one I want. Let's select it. And immediately now we see in this table we have rank. Let's add one more. The author. So I have a a property called by like you know by by this person. And now we see that that shows up there. Now, here's something else like you can close on properties and it might bother you that by and rank and name, they're not capitalized. So, without changing the the metadata property in all the notes like here, we can go here for the table and just change it. We go and make sure as you're looking at this, you go all the way to the right and select the right arrow here. You can then edit the property and then you can just say give it a capital B. And now we're good to go. We can see it's a capitalized B here. But if we go to any note, the property itself retains whatever that formatting was, which I just, you know, lowercase is the way to go for that. So now we have that set. And we can nicely move these around. Finally, this long end of the video, and we're we're looking at data. We're having fun with it now. So this is cool. These are some of my favorite quotes. And I can just click on rank and now I'm organizing it by rank. So now the fives are at the top. I have what the name is. Oh, check this out. Now we can easily I mean this seems like such a simple thing but now we can just easily expand and contract the column so we can see in this case more of the quote itself which is kind of nice and we can see who who the quote is by. So now we can go ahead and compare it back to this quotes format that I really like that is made you for the idea verse pro and it uses a data view and um we can kind of compare and contrast. I think this one's got a few more things that make it look nicer. For one, it has my custom font. Uh, for whatever reason, this, I think, is just the system font with Obsidian bases. Hopefully, down the road, it'll also display the custom font that we install for some of our themes. But, it's looking good and it's doing the job. It's allowing me to see all my quotes in a list with the additional context that a database provides, which in this case, rank and author. And we can keep adding all sorts of different fields. So let's go back to our overview for today. You just saw a little bit of how it worked using our example on quotes. Now I want to talk through the best features. The best features of Obsidian bases. Number one, its speed. What's wild to me is that when you create a new base, remember that's command or control P and then start typing bases. Create new base. When you do that, you're actually seeing I'm seeing my entire list of notes. I could scroll for a long time. That's over 10,000 notes. And it's immediately, it's so fast. It kind of boggles my mind because if you try to do that with our next best solution currently in Obsidian, which is the amazing third party plug-in data view, what you're going to find is it really it gets sluggish. It slows down. In fact, it might take a while where the whole app freezes until it loads. Not with Obsidian Bases. So speed is huge. Obsidian CEO responded to me when I asked about the speed issue and he said Bases has a ton of optimizations for scrolling large tables and can handle my vault with tens of thousands of files without issue. So whatever they're doing for the optimizations as a person scrolls, it's definitely working. I can say that. So that's the first and most important feature in my mind is speed. If it's slow, it won't work. Why are we in Obsidian? Well, we do like local. We like owning our own files and information, not somebody on the cloud that can have access to them at any time. We also love the speed. That's something that Notion just can't keep up with. Uh Notion can do amazing things, but it's slow and these bases are blazing. So, that's the first, second, and third best feature. But the second best feature on this list, multiple views per base. So, if anyone's familiar with Air Table, which is really bestin-class with this. So, let's go to the the quotes. I made an example that we looked at, but I want to actually go into the one I spent a little bit more time with. Now, you can see I have a list of quotes by rank over four. So, anything here will have a rank that's over four. How did I accomplish that? I went to filters and you can see I have the filtered view that we created previously where the property collection contains a link to quotes. In addition to that, we also have where the rank, the property rank is greater than four. So the only notes that show up here have a rank greater than four. And you can see them all on screen here. Also cool is I can play around with adding, you can see I have the author field, but I also added a different field just for fun, just to see what would show up. But what if I just want my top eight quotes? I'll explain why I want this later in this video, but let's just go ahead. We can create a new view. We can call it whatever we want. And we can hit enter. And now we have a new view here. Not any good. It just has all of our unfiltered quotes. So it still has this main filter at the top, but nothing else. But now I can quickly switch to a different view like my top eight quotes. And I can then switch to quotes by rank over four. And we can do this really fast. Now, where this gets really exciting and I'm going to jump ahead just a little bit and then we'll then we'll get back to you know what this is the third best feature embeddible. So, it's really nice when you make a custom view like that and then you can specifically embed that view in a note. It's kind of hard with data view currently because you have to create this new code within a note and then you know like how are you going to repurpose that and where does the code go? But here all the variations of codes associated with all my quotes. I can just quickly whip together a brand new view like top eight quotes. And then what am I going to do? I'm going to embed this view in a different note. In fact, it's in our agenda note for today. And it follows the same syntax of how you would normally link to not just a note, but you can actually link to the header within a note if if you know how to do that. So, for example, if I wanted to link to the best features in this note. So, what I'm going to do is hit exclamation point bracket twice and then I I want to start with this note obsidian bases the overview. Now, what I'm going to do is it can autocomplete. I'm just going to hit the hashtag. And now I see all of my headers. So, I can actually choose let me choose just embedible, the one right above this. And pretty neat that but we actually see oh I've created an inception effect where it keeps on layering itself which is kind of hilarious. So let me get rid of that. That same idea now allows us to go through the last stage of this quotes walkth through because now we can embed that quote space. So see this is a note and it's called quotes base. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do is just right here for fun. I'm going to embed quotes base quotes base. I'm going to hit the hashtag to autocomplete. And now I can choose the view that we made, the top eight quotes. So, when I click on that, now check it out. In the middle of whatever note I'm in, I can drop very specific bespoke content into that note. That looks pretty nice. So, I mean, we have our regular example. This is quotes by rank over four. And we can see it's a little I mean, it's okay, but if it got much longer, it might kind of get in the way with the rest of the content in the note. But that's where example two that I just showed you, it's just the top eight notes. And let's click on that. There they are. And that's a lot smoother. It's a lot cleaner. We can also change views here. Now, it's a little buggy, but I'm sure that they'll iron this out. But if I go ahead and just click on quotes by rank over four, then we'll have everything show up. Then I'll click back to top eight quotes and then this shows up. So that's where the third feature is so powerful. Embeddable embeddible views. So we have speed, we have multiple views like air table and we have embeddible views. So now it's easy whenever I want to just kind of spin up a custom view, I can go ahead and do that. And then I know I can just embed it using that standard Obsidian syntax. And that takes us to two more examples I want to show you of how you can set up bases in Obsidian. So we did quotes, but I have this really cool data view. It's called recently modified. You can guess what it does, but I've customized it using data view, a community plugin. And I have all these nice pre-rendered emojis at the front. You can see here. And it also is showing the parent folder on the right. So, what does it look like to try to create a view like that using Obsidian bases? Well, here is an attempt. You can now see that we have recently modified. And right now, modified looks a little clunky as far as the timestamps. I'm hoping in the future we have more flexibility on the way that the time is displayed. I really don't need um the hour, minute, and second of the day. I for me the date is fine enough. I tried something that we'll get to here. It's not working. And then I even linked to if there was an up link in the property fields and the related links and we can see some really cool things happening with a few of these notes. And then remember in the nice clean view the it just shows the parent folder and I think that's quite nice and I think it's quite clean. This is in idea verse pro. You can download idea verse light. There will be a link in the description. But if we look at Obsidian bases currently, it's just going to show you that folder path, which gets a little messy depending on how how many nested folders you have. I just don't think it's as clean or as nice to look at. So, we might lose that ability to do really fancy things or we might not because that would take us into something else that I don't have time to show you today and that is going to be formulas. Formulas and functions. So, I'll come to that in just a moment. Now, one more example. Let's check out projects. My current projects note I have pulled open already. It looks like this is part of idea verse pro. Again, I know I'm saying that a lot, but it's kind of lovely because I can go from active projects and just see the active projects, the ones that are simmering for me, the ones that are sleeping, and I can click up and immediately go to all my projects, no matter what level of intensity that they're at. And in this view, I can get a broad overview. It's fantastic to help me budget my bandwidth and figure out what I really want to prioritize. How can we accomplish this with Obsidian Bases? So, here's my current attempt. We have a great use of views here. So, I can go to all projects and let's see what our filters are saying. Folder contains Oh, just active. So, I I'll fix this. I'm going to change it to projects. And why is that? Just so you know, the ACE folder framework is over on the far left and under efforts and projects, we have three levels of intensity for our projects. Active, simmering, and sleeping. This is part of the ACE folder framework. And so anyways, when we go to filters, we can go where the folder contains and now instead of active, I want to see all the projects in all three of these folders. So I will just type projects instead. And now I see all the projects no matter what the folder is on the inside. Now, here it looks a little, you know, it's cutting off, actually. I'm not sure if that's meant to be that way. Oh, there we go. We can expand it from the top. It's a little bit better now. You just have to be able to grab the handle so we can see the full file path. Now, again, I don't need the full file path. I would love if it just showed up like this. Hopefully, we can get there. I'm hopeful. Obsidian bases, they're so early on in their development, so we'll see where it goes. But we do have the rank. We can organize by rank. And if all projects is just a little bit too much, then I can go ahead and just click on active. And now I can if if I apply the filters properly in this view, I'm going to say where folder contains active. And now now I can easily pop between all projects and active projects. Isn't that nice? So, we're getting the same effect through the the custom wavefinders in Idea Versse Pro here. But you can accomplish this maybe not as beautifully, but you can still accomplish this right out of the gates with this alpha version of Obsidian Bases. Where it will go, what functionality we have, we shall see. So, I hope you enjoyed these walkthroughs. Now, I'm going to talk about a few additional features. As I mentioned, Obsidian Bases searches your whole vault. So as opposed to notion, notion fragments your bases. They're here, they're here, and then you have pages within the bases. So it becomes a constant issue of do I have the right pages in the right base? Because if I if I start to search a database in this base, but I have pages and notes over here, they won't show up. And the way that Obsidian has implemented their databases completely sidesteps this huge issue because your Obsidian vault that contains everything. It just becomes one giant database. Adjustable columns. Now, the thing that I haven't mentioned because it's just a bit beyond my skill level is the amazing power with functions. It's still early and as a non-coder, functions are just beyond my comfort level. But let me show you where they're at and what they might be able to do. So if I go ahead and like add a property, I can actually put together a formula that uses a bunch of different functions. And there's this huge long list of functions. And long story short, it will allow you to do all sorts of crazy advanced filtering. I have a cool example that I'm thinking about, and I'll get to that um down here. One other thing worth noting is that with Obsidian Bases, you're getting a new file format and this is directly from the Obsidian team. It's the base file format essentially. Um, let me open up one of our notes just so you can get an idea of what it looks like. This quote base. So, let me go ahead and I'm going to open it up with simply text edit on the Mac. Let me make it a lot bigger. And so, this is what we're looking at. The quotes base just looks like this. It's a really short note and it's just giving it um all the filtering mechanisms needed to give us this view. Am I worried about a different file format? No, I'm not at all. It's just a filtering node of sorts. And another thing worth mentioning is bases here. They won't replace maps of content. They just they're giving us another way to to view information, to analyze it, to make sense of it. All right, we're in the home stretch now. A couple early rough edges. it's hard to figure out how to add properties, which I mentioned earlier, and there's currently no note counter. So, if I go to the note I have on quotes before obsidian bases, I can see, oh, 47 quotes right here. However, if I go into the quotes base, there's nothing that says the amount of notes. So, that's a little frustrating because you don't know how long you might be scrolling or just you just want to know like how many notes do I have in this view. So, I'm sure that that's something that the team will get to. Okay, let's talk about the implications of using obsidian bases. The first implications affect obsidian properties. So, a couple years ago, Obsidian introduced properties. That's what we see over here on the right hand side. And at the top of this note, they are hidden, but if I go into source mode, I can see, oh, that's where all this property data exists for this note. It's at the top of the note. There it is. And we just see it rendered nicely here. Maybe you are already using properties a lot. maybe you're not. But if you want to use bases, you're going to have to get very comfortable with obsidian properties. So there are pros and cons to that approach, but just know that with the introduction of obsidian bases, properties are being elevated in importance, and I think that's fine. I do have some reservations. It just makes my inner gardener sad. the person who likes to wander around my notes, who loves serendipity, who loves to to be thinking and writing and freewriting and linking my thoughts and making spur-ofthe- moment connections. When we get into this kind of database way of thinking, well, it's more of an architect way of thinking. Yeah, we need both, but it's just something to be mindful of. How much of your time are you going to spend uh developing all sorts of databases? And I'll cover that more in just a moment. So, there are implications for links as well. So, I want to make this nice and big so you can read read along with me. If we're spending more time in a database like bases, it might subtly change the thinking environment that we're used to in Obsidian. It might become something more akin to notion. It won't be as slow as the notion databases. Everything's fast in Obsidian. That's the advantage of these small files, but the underlying activities involved with a database. It's less about this sort of loose but cohesive form of of writing and thinking and linking. Instead, a database provides this environment that's inherently more structured and inherently more intellectually jumpy. It's excellent for analysis and planning and prioritizing all that stuff. It's excellent for rapidly building context as you look at these notes that are all lumped together. At best, a database like Obsidian Bases, it becomes a powerful tool to enhance our sensemaking, and that's how I intend to use it. However, at worst, we allow the potential of bases to consume our activities, and we trade, writing, and thinking and linking with more methodically building tremendous amounts of structured notes like you see all these properties, and we just build out all this property metadata. So, we have the perfect database to view only to realize that once we get there, we don't really need it. And the joy that we had with thinking with our notes and making wild connections, it's disappeared a while ago because we traded the linking and the thinking for the databasing. So, that's the trap of a database. And that goes with any tool you might use. So, we have a new environment in Obsidian bases. And I would just say use it effectively, use it cautiously, and don't forget the joy that you might have from other environments within Obsidian. Whether you're freewriting in a note, whether you're linking spontaneously out to other notes or new ideas, those things, if they're lost, it would be quite a shame. So just figure out how you can balance these different environments within Obsidian itself. And then last, implications for AI. Really, to me, it's uncertain right now. I don't know how AI will interpret a base because as we saw in the back end of what the quotes base actually looks like. It's just this. So I'm not sure to what extent AI will be able to use this effectively. Will AI be able to observe the rendered results of a base? That is something that I'd be interested in understanding, but we'll get there eventually. Current limitations also for non-coders. advanced filtering using the formulas and the functions. They're going to be difficult to figure out. I mean, that's beyond me. But this will improve over time for two reasons. The first reason is that the community, as always, will share examples that the rest of us get to copy. And two, AI models will become familiar with this Obsidian base format and all the formulas just as it did with data view. And then it will allow non-coders like myself to be able to code with AI and we'll ask it something and I did this all the time with idea verse pro. So when we look at like the recently modified to get this parent folder all nice and clean here to get all these emojis rendered I worked with Claude and I was like how do we do this? Tell me and let's work it back and forth. So, that was a really great example of the flexibility of a thirdparty plug-in data view in this case. And I just don't know if that's something that Obsidian bases will be able to do. Maybe it can though. And I'm hoping that we can ask it something like this. Make me a base for all my quote notes sorted by rank showing the number of inlinks and outlinks. And also try making a special cool column that adds a relevancy ranking by computing some sort of formula that combines my personal rank with the inlinks and the outlinks that each note has. And that's just a start. And then you see, oh, this cool column that's got a number and it's ranking things differently than my personal ranking because it's based also on the links. I think there's potential there. And that's just one random idea that I came up with. How am I going to put that together? It's not going to happen. But we can ask AI for ways to help us to create the columns and the database views that might be really useful for us. And who knows, like I was just showing, will Obsidian Bases be able to prepend emojis onto specific types of notes? I don't know. And it's not the end of the world if they can't. It was just a fun thing I was able to accomplish using data view in Idea Verse Pro. So, finally, my current guidance for you, if you're still with me, is that it's really early in Obsidian bases. It's very promising. The Obsidian team, they're known to rapidly iterate, especially when they launch a new feature like this. That's what they did when Obsidian Canvas came out. They just iterated for a month straight and kept on pushing all these new updates and features based on the feedback that they were receiving from the entire grassroots community. So, this one I've heard is going to stay in early access for a longer period of time because this one's really complex. So, if you want early access, it just requires a onetime payment to the Obsidian team. That's uh $25 and you'll look for their Catalyst license. We'll try to provide a link in the description below. And I think this is probably a good time to say that I'm in no way affiliated with Obsidian. Um no financial affiliations, never have been. Um I just love the app so much. So, um it's fair that sometimes, uh people will ask because I'm often talking about Obsidian, but that's just it's the best tool out there. I talk about it. they've paid me nothing ever. So, just want to get that out of the way. So, my current guidance is to try one or two bases and try to remake any useful data view you might currently have. In this video, you saw how I had quotes. All right, how can I remake that using Obsidian bases? So, you try something similar and that's the way to go. And just to close things out, here's a quote from Samuel Johnson, author of the dictionary. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. Databases then are a solution to find the information we want to be reminded of. They are great for efficient retrieval and analysis. And I'd go further. I'd say a good database, it can almost instantly upload a web of all these related bits of information into our mind in just mere seconds. And I think that's a really powerful thing. I'm excited to see where we go with Obsidian bases and how you might use it. Hey, and if you like this overview on a new big feature in Obsidian, then you'll definitely get a kick out of the one I did on Obsidian Canvas. I'll see you there. Now, [Music], Obsidian Bases Just Changed Everything, Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo, 01jwbjjqjjasst5v8gtbzvz5kc.