Tired of your Notion content all being in one long list? Making Notion columns is the perfect way to create distinct sections and organize different types of related information on your pages.
In this article, I’ll show you step by step how to create columns in Notion pages and arrange content into separate visualized areas to structure your data.
How To Make Columns in Notion
Columns are a great way to organize and view data in Notion. Unlike the traditional way, you don’t need a table to arrange text into columns.
Previously, creating columns in Notion took some work. You had to carefully drag and position blocks to arrange them next to each other. And there were limitations on where you could use multi-column layouts.
However, Notion has come a long way. Now there are built-in Column blocks that make it super easy. Just use the block inserter to create as many columns as you need to organize your stuff.
There are two ways to create columns in Notion these days. Let’s start with the simpler method using the columns block. Then we’ll look at the old dragging technique in case you ever need it.
1. Create Columns Using Slash Key “/” shortcut
To explain the process, I will be showing you how I created columns in my Invoice Manager template.
- First, navigate to the page where you want to add a column and press the “/3c” to open the blocks menu. You can also use 2c, 4c, and 5c to create two-column, four-column, and five-column layouts respectively.
- Add the column block to your page which will automatically create the number of columns you chose.
- Lastly, drag the content blocks you want into the columns. You can also resize these columns which we’ll discuss later in this article.
Let’s now look at an alternative method that many users previously used to create columns in Notion.
2. Create Columns Using Drag and Drop
- Start by adding empty paragraph blocks to your page by pressing Enter on a new line.
- Move your mouse to the left edge of one of the blocks until you see the little dots icon
⋮⋮that looks like a handle.
- Drag that block left or right edge until you see a blue line. When a vertical blue line appears, release the mouse button to create a two-column layout.
- You can add more columns to the layout by repeating the previous step. When you’ve finished adding columns, drag and drop content into them to organize your page.
That’s it. This dragging technique allows you to manually create two, three, or four columns on a Notion page.
Isn’t it easy to create columns in Notion?
Now that you have learned to add columns, let’s see how to adjust the column width in Notion.
How To Adjust Column Width in Notion
Adjusting column widths is also important to make sure the content is displayed well and easily readable. There are times when you may need to adjust column widths to provide more space for images or tables in one column or make the columns narrower to fit more content horizontally on the screen.
You may also want to adjust the width when you’re looking to create a navigation menu inside of a Notion template.
You can easily adjust the space between columns with just a few clicks. Here’s how to do it:
- First, select the column you wish to resize based on its content. Hover your mouse cursor over the light gray border on the right edge.
- Then, click and drag the border inward or outward until you get the column of the desired width.
- Release the mouse button to fix the column width. Lastly, repeat the same steps for any other columns needing size adjustments.
That’s it. However, with these methods, when you create columns, there’s no visible divider between them. If you want to add a vertical divider between the columns that remain visible, you can refer to our guide on how to do so.
Wrapping up: How To Create Columns in Notion
Columns are definitely handy for organizing content. There are two easy ways to make columns in Notion. You can either use the slash / key shortcut or drag and drop blocks next to each other.
Play around with different layouts to see what setup works best for keeping your Notion pages tidy and organized!
That’s it for this short tutorial on how to make columns in Notion.
