Overview

This is the ultimate Obsidian HOW TO. Learn how to supercharge your note-taking and note-making. Learn the power of the Obsidian App in this practical course from Linking Your Thinking. In this video, you’ll learn exactly the simple steps on how to get started with the Obsidian app for note-taking as a complete beginner.

Primary Focus

This tutorial introduces beginners to Obsidian, a note-taking application designed to help users organize, retrieve, and connect their ideas, effectively creating a “second brain.”

Takeaways

Connecting Ideas: The core power of Obsidian lies in its ability to link notes together, revealing patterns and fostering the emergence of new ideas from existing knowledge.
Building a “Second Brain”: Obsidian facilitates the externalization and organization of thoughts, providing a structured environment to manage information and build a personal knowledge base.
Intuitive and Customizable Note-Taking: While offering powerful linking capabilities, Obsidian maintains a simple interface with essential formatting and organizational tools, allowing users to tailor their workspace and workflows.

Core Concepts

Vaults

A vault is the primary workspace in Obsidian, analogous to a user profile on a computer.

“Once you set it up everything that you store on your computer is on this user volt and it’s really difficult to switch between volts so don’t think of this as a folder but more of this is going to be your workspace that will contain everything.”

Notes and Folders

The fundamental building block in Obsidian is a “note”
Notes can be organized into folders for categorization
Creating notes and folders is straightforward (e.g., command n or control n for a new note, clicking the new folder icon)
Users can drag and drop notes into folders

Internal Links

This is a key feature for connecting ideas within Obsidian:

Links between notes are created by typing [[ followed by the name of the note
Obsidian will auto-suggest existing notes
Create new notes from links if they don’t exist yet using command/control + click

External Links

External links (URLs) can be simply pasted into a note.

Interface Features

Edit and View Modes

Edit Mode: For writing and formatting
View/Preview Mode: For seeing how the note will look, including clickable links and embedded images
Switch between modes using preview icon or command/control + e

Adding Images

Drag and drop images into notes
Images are visible in Preview mode

Formatting Guide

Basic Formatting

Headings

Created using one or more hashtags followed by a space
Up to five levels available

Text Styling

Bold: Command/Control + B or **text**
Italic: Command/Control + I or *text*
==Highlight==: ==text==
Block Quotes: Using > before text
--- Dividers: Using three dashes

Lists

Checkboxes: - [ ] or command + enter twice
Bullet Lists: - or control + enter
Numbered Lists: 1. (auto-generates subsequent numbers)

Advanced Features

Views and Panes

Split Panes: Command/Control + click for side-by-side view
Linking Panes: Option to link panes for synchronized scrolling

Backlinks

Shows which other notes link to the current note:

“As you build out your notes and there’s more there are more connections that you have made between your ideas you’ll see more patterns emerging and that’s where new ideas will then come from.”

Core Plugins

Access in Settings > Core plugins:

Templates: Predefined note formats
Random Notes: Opens random notes for discovery
Daily Notes: Automatic daily note creation
Starred Notes: Quick access to important notes

Graph View

Visual representation of notes and their connections:

“Here are all of the ideas all of the notes that we’ve taken so far which is not a lot but already you can see ideas that are connecting together and with this once you see how they are connected you can build even more connections with what you already know…”

Obsidian Note Taking Tutorial for Beginners