Dataview Intro and Basics

Welcome to Dataview. A powerful tool that aggregates your notes into lists, reports, or calendar views. But an example is worth a thousand words. Let’s say:

• You have a note for each person in your social group
• Each note contains the person’s name, address, and phone number
• You store these notes in a folder called contacts
• You also store notes about companies in this same folder
• Here is an example of the report Dataview can produce for you:

Example Dataview report screen print | by author

Now think of all the possibilities across your entire graph. The options are endless.

Dataview leverages specifically defined items in each note that are consistent across all notes.

These defined items are called data fields and follow a specific format either in the Front Matter of your note or within the note itself (inline).

With the help of a structured language called Dataview Query (DVQ), you can produce a report on a select set of notes.

In our example above, you want only notes about people (not companies). Dataview can use a defined data field, tag, single file, links (to or from) and any combination of those to select the notes you want.