10 New Notion Features You Need to Know About!

Notion’s latest wave of updates targets day-to-day workflow speed: smarter multi-column building, faster database page previews, and more “native” UI features for collaboration and presentation. The biggest practical shift is in how pages and database items open—side peek lets users inspect a database page in a sliding drawer while still interacting with the underlying page—paired with per-view controls that decide whether pages open as side peek, center peek, or full page.

On the layout front, Notion upgrades multi-column layouts so they’re no longer limited to clunky workarounds. Users can create columns directly with slash commands like /col (with options for two through five columns), or convert existing blocks into columns via the “Turn Into” menu. Nested columns are now straightforward: instead of building sub-pages and toggles, users can create columns inside existing columns using the same conversion and block-creation tools, including multiple layers of nesting. There’s also a practical constraint: selecting more than five blocks doesn’t create more than three column “tracks,” with child blocks nested under their parent blocks—useful to know for indented lists, numbered lists, and bullet lists.

The column update extends into other block types too. Multi-column layouts can be created inside toggles, synced blocks, and template blocks, but there’s a key behavior difference when moving existing multi-column content into those containers: dragging won’t preserve the multi-column structure, while cutting and pasting does. That distinction matters for anyone refactoring templates or reorganizing existing pages.

Database navigation gets a major quality-of-life boost with side peek. Compared with center peek’s dimmed overlay, side peek slides out a drawer showing the page content while keeping the rest of the workspace usable. The setting is configurable per database view through the view’s three-dot menu under Layout → “Open pages in,” with defaults varying by view type (galleries and calendars default to center peek; list, board, timeline, and table default to side peek). Users can also override the mode per open action, and adjust the drawer width—roughly from about 25% to two-thirds of the screen. List view is highlighted as the smoothest pairing because it avoids horizontal scroll issues.

Beyond layout and navigation, the update adds several smaller but meaningful features: database templates can be set as defaults so new database entries automatically receive template content and property values (with options for all views vs a single view, and with filters still taking precedence over template-defined values). Relations gain a “limitation” option for one-to-many setups, restricting a relation to a single related page and swapping the previous selection when changed. The relations picker also becomes more informative by letting users choose which properties of the related pages appear in the picker.

Collaboration and UI polish round out the list: comment reactions add Slack-style emoji reactions; comments can be linked anywhere with preview or mention-style insertion; the icon picker now offers a dedicated Icons set with multiple color options for consistent workspace branding; media blocks in columns can be aligned left or right; and native progress bars appear for number and numeric formula properties (with options to display as bars or rings, divide by a chosen number, and quirks around formula output type and rollups).