Notion Book Sorter
Quick tip on custom sorting in Notion.
A while ago I started keeping all of my notes in Notion. Mostly because I wanted to be able to easily access and edit notes from my phone, rather than only on a laptop. My old system was too desktop oriented.
One of the things I had set up for my old notes system was a way to “book-sort” text. I use this when sorting Book, Show, or Movie titles.
Here’s how I achieve the same thing in Notion:
- Create a new column in the database called sort name.
- Press the lightning bolt at the top of a database to create a new automation.
- For the triggers I set them to: when
anyof “Page is added”, “Name is edited”, or “sort name is set to x” - For the Action I set Sort Name to
replace(replace(replace(lower(Trigger Page.Name), "^\W+", ""), "^(the|a|an)\b", ""), "^\W+", ""), make sure to do this in the Formula mode, not plain text.
Now, any time a new page is created or the Name field is edited, the sort name will become a lowercased version of the name with leading articles removed.
It’s not perfect, as if you modify the name multiple times in a second, only the first edit triggers the behavior, but I think that’s probably not very common.
Enjoy!
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