Categorizing View Entries by Property

1. What is Grouping?

Grouping is a feature that organizes the rows in your database view into distinct sections based on a shared property value. For example, you can group a task list by its "Status" property to see all "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done" tasks in separate categories.

These groups often appear as collapsible toggles in a list or table, or as columns in a Board view. This lets you see a high-level overview of your data and then dive into specific categories as needed.

To start, let's get a formal definition of this feature.

2. How to Apply Grouping

Applying a group to a database view is straightforward. You can access the option from the ••• menu at the top-right of any database.

Once you select 'Group', you'll choose which property you want to group your data by. Let's see how this works in practice across different views.

As you saw, grouping behaves similarly across Table, List, and Gallery views, creating clean, collapsible sections. The Board view, however, treats grouping as its fundamental organizing principle. The property you group by defines the columns of the board itself.

3. Advanced Grouping: Sub-groups and Swimlanes

The Board view offers an even more powerful feature that is highly relevant to your project management background: sub-grouping. This allows you to add a second layer of horizontal grouping, creating what are often called "swimlanes" in agile project management.

For example, you could have a task board grouped by Status (columns) and sub-grouped by Assignee (rows/swimlanes). This would allow you to see each person's tasks and their progress across the workflow.

This quick video from Thomas Frank will show you exactly how to set this up.

This sub-grouping capability transforms a simple Kanban board into a multi-dimensional matrix, perfect for managing complex projects and teams—a valuable feature for a professional template.

4. Grouping by Different Property Types

One of Notion's most powerful features is that you can group by almost any property type, and many have unique settings. Understanding these options is key to building truly custom and intelligent templates.

Key options to remember for template design:

• Date: Can be grouped By day, By week, By month, or By year. Incredibly useful for weekly planners or monthly content calendars.
• Select/Status: The most common grouping properties.
• Person/Multi-select: An item will appear in every group it belongs to. For example, a task with two assignees will show up in both swimlanes if sub-grouped by Person.
• Text: Can be grouped by the exact text or alphabetically by the first letter.

✍️ Exercise: Create Your First Grouped Views

Let's put this into practice. We will transform your task database into a dynamic project board.

Setup:

• Open the page containing your All Tasks database.
• Ensure your tasks have properties for Status (with options like 'Not Started', 'In Progress', 'Done') and Priority (with options like 'High', 'Medium', 'Low').

Your Tasks:

• 1. Create a Kanban Board View

  • In your All Tasks database, click + Add view.
  • Select the Board layout and name the view "Status Board".
  • In the view options (••• menu), go to Group.
  • Set the "Group by" option to your Status property.
  • Drag and drop the columns to ensure they are in a logical order (e.g., Not Started -> In Progress -> Done).
  • Click "Save for everyone". You have just built a classic Kanban board!

• 2. Create a Priority-Grouped List

  • Create another new view. This time, select the Table layout and name it "Priority Focus".
  • Go to the Group menu for this new view.
  • Group the view by your Priority property.
  • You should now see your tasks organized into collapsible toggles for 'High', 'Medium', and 'Low' priority.
  • Click "Save for everyone".

• 3. (Optional but Recommended) Add Swimlanes to Your Board

  • Go back to your "Status Board" view.
  • Open the ••• menu and find the Sub-group option.
  • Sub-group the board by your Priority property.
  • You should now see your Kanban board with horizontal swimlanes for each priority level. This gives you an at-a-glance view of both status and importance.

Conclusion

Fantastic work! You've now unlocked one of the most powerful visual organization tools in Notion. By grouping data, you move beyond simple lists and start creating intuitive, structured dashboards. The ability to create Kanban boards and other grouped views is a cornerstone of almost every project management and content creation system, making this skill vital for your goal of selling high-quality templates.

Key Takeaways:

• Grouping Creates Categories: Grouping visually separates database entries into sections based on a property, using toggles in tables/lists or columns in boards.
• Board Views are Fundamentally Grouped: The 'Group' setting in a Board view determines its columns.
• Sub-grouping Adds "Swimlanes": This Board-specific feature adds a second, horizontal layer of organization, perfect for advanced project tracking.
• Group by Almost Anything: You can group by nearly any property, with special options available for dates, numbers, and more, offering deep customization.

Preview of the Next Lesson:
So far in this module, we've explored the three pillars of database views: filtering, sorting, and now grouping. In the next few lessons, we'll formally walk through creating and configuring the core view types—Table, Board, and List—to solidify your understanding of how these foundational elements come together to build any visualization you need.