Notion adds charts to help visualize work projects

Notion users can now create charts to display data held in the productivity app, providing a new way to visualize information such as project status.  

Notion Charts, available to paid users as of Tuesday, includes options for bar, donut, and line charts. These are accessible via the new “chart” view in Notion databases that appears in a drop-down menu alongside table and board views. 

It’s also possible to embed a chart into another Notion document. The embedded chart graphic will then update to reflect any new data added to the source database. This can help liven up status report documents, for instance, while several charts can be combined to create a project dashboard doc. 

The chart view is useful for visualizing the status of a project or tracking OKRs [objectives and key results], Notion said. Customers often use the app to track large amounts of information related to work projects and is even used as a sales or CRM tool, the company said. 

“Charts have become a top feature request, since it’s hard to make sense of and understand progress in your tracker once it’s more than a 100 rows,” the company said. “With charts, we want you to confidently add hundreds or even thousands of rows to your Notion database (CSV import in Notion is great for that!). Then, in a couple clicks, you can make sense of all of that data.”

Notion said its AI assistant technology will make it easier to create effective charts by automatically tagging data. This can be a chore when creating graphs, said Notion — a list of user feedback requests might need to be tagged as “bug,” “improvement,” or “new feature,” for example. 

To help with this, Notion AI will provide a list of tags to designate each database entry. “It can do this for multiple rows at once and then automatically tag a newly created row,” the company said. “This gives you more ways to visualize your Notion data without all the manual work.”