Bases is a brilliant new tool from the Obsidian team. It allows you to create interactive filtered lists of notes. It is user-friendly and extremely powerful, and I think one of the most important additions to Obsidian that we’ve ever seen.

Bases are designed to be easy-to-use and, unlike Dataview, they don’t require any programming knowledge. Getting started with Obsidian Bases takes only five minutes, and allows you to turn your notes from meh to amazing.

What are we waiting for? Let’s jump in and learn how to use Bases!

Note: at the moment Bases are in beta access. You can try them if you’re an Insider, otherwise you’ll have to wait until they are published for everyone (likely in a month or two).

On This Page

• 1 Your First Base
• 2 Searching for Tags with Bases
• 3 Choosing What Your Base Displays
• 4 Adding Views to a Base
• 5 Reusing Bases
• 6 Solutions
• 6.1 Better Backlinks
• 6.2 Tracking My Writing
• 6.3 Create a Bookshelf
• 6.4 Create a Read it Later App
• 6.5 Project Tracker
• 6.6 Workouts
• 7 Conclusion

Your First Base

I want to start by showing you how easy it is to create a Base, using your own notes.

The only prerequisite is that you have to enable the plugin. Go to Settings > Core Plugins, and enable the “Bases” plugin:

You might want to enable “Properties” too, if you haven’t already. Both Bases and Properties make it easier to manage metadata in your vault.

There are a few ways to create a new Base. You can use the command palette and search for “Create new base”. You can click the “New Base” button in the ribbon menu. Or you can right-click on a folder in your vault and click “New base”.

Use the method that works best for you, and Obsidian will create and drop you into your first Base. It will look something like this:

Congratulations! You now have a base. Now what can we do with it?

Searching for Tags with Bases

One of my favorite uses for Bases is simply to aggregate notes that contain a certain tag. If you use tags very much, this alone can unlock all kinds of new features for your vault.

For example, I have a Base that displays the articles I am working on. For rough ideas, I use this tag: writing/idea.

I can now create a Base that displays all of the articles ideas I have in my vault. How do I do that?

Through the power of filters.

In the top right of every Base, there are two links: Filters and Properties. In your own base, click on Filters first. You should see something like this:

Now to filter by a tag, we need to add a file filter. Click where it says “Property” and select “file” (it’s usually at the top of the list, but you can also search for it).

Then click the dropdown menu and select “has tag”:

Now click on the input to the right of that dropdown menu (where it says “Empty”), and Obsidian will show you a list of your tags. Again you can type to search, or just select a tag from the list.

In my case I will select writing/idea, and the Base will instantly update to show me all of my notes with that tag:

Fantastic!

Choosing What Your Base Displays

So that’s the basics on how to filter your Base. But how do we choose what information we want the table to display?

If you’re following along above, you should have an “Untitled” base that is filtered to show notes with a single tag. That’s a good start!

But that alone is not all that useful. Your Base shows you the name of each file and gives you a link, but we often need more context to make a database useful.

We can add context with the help of the Properties menu.

Next to Filters, there’s a link to the “Properties” menu. Click that, and you should see something that looks like this:

This shows you all the properties available in your vault. It’s a “smart” menu, so it tries to guess which property you are looking for, and puts those at the top. If you don’t see one of your properties, then you may have to search for it.

You can check the box next to any property, and it will automatically show up in your Base. For my use-case, I’m going to add my modified date property and the folder for each file. That ends up looking like this:

So far so good!

It’s interesting to note that some properties can be edited inline in a Base, and others cannot. For example you can’t change the file path in a Base, but you can update tags. Something to keep in mind.

Adding Views to a Base

Last but not least, we need to discuss views in Bases.

Views are super helpful, because they allow you to create a Base that gives you multiple perspectives.

Again going to my writing example, writing/idea isn’t my only writing tag. I also have writing/draft, writing/published, and I use all three of these for different purposes.

I could create three separate Bases, one for each of these. But that seems a little redundant: I want to use the same settings for each of these views, and just swap out the tag.

To do that, we can use views. In the top left of your Base, you can see the word “Table” with arrows next to it. Click that, and you will see this:

Welcome to the Views menu! The first view in any Base is always called “Table”, but we can rename it by clicking on the arrow next to the word “Table”.

Then click “Configure view”, and Obsidian will allow you to rename this view. Handy! I call mine “Writing / Ideas”.

Then we can go back a step and create a new View by clicking the “New View” button:

It will ask you to name your new view. I’m calling mine “Writing / Drafts”.

Then it will drop you into a new view! From here you can configure it how you like, using the Filters and Properties menus as we discussed before.

Once you have them configured as you like it, you can then switch between views effortlessly by using that menu in the top left corner. My final Base I call “Content Creation”, and it has SEVEN views currently:

Pro tip: In the Filters menu you can also set up “all views” filters that affect every view. Handy if you have a bunch of views in one Base that you want to update all at once.

Note: The Obsidian team is talking about adding views other than Table views, so eventually we should have a few other options for Bases than just seeing tabular data. No telling what those views will be though, until they release them.

Reusing Bases

Those are the basics of how we create Bases, but did you know that we can also reuse them in many ways?

Unlike most files in Obsidian, Bases are not Markdown files. But they are still plain-text, which means you can transfer them from vault to vault, and they will still work. You can copy or download someone else’s Base, and it will work (as long as you have the appropriate metadata).

You can also embed Bases, both in notes and also in your sidebars. The easiest way to do that is to drag-and-drop a Base from your sidebar to where you want it, but inside notes you can also use the default embed syntax:

![[Content Creation.base]]

You can embed a specific view by adding an octothorpe and the name of the view:

![[Content Creation.base#Newsletter]]

Note though that you do need to have the .base file extension, otherwise Obsidian will look for a Markdown file.

Solutions

You now know the basics of creating and editing views. Now the question is, what can we do with them practically?

Let me show you some of the things I have done, and maybe it will spark some ideas for you.

Better Backlinks

I love the backlinks pane in Obsidian, I use it all the time. But sometimes it does feel a bit limited, and I wish I could see more information.

Well now you can! If you use file.hasLink(this) as an advanced filter, and then drag that Base to your sidebar, it becomes a bit like an upgraded backlinks pane. You can then select the properties you want to see and even edit properties from your new Backlinks pane. Handy!

Tracking My Writing

We’ve already talked about my tag system for writing articles, but it is one of my main Bases, I use it every day. I simply use filters that show me my writing/idea tags, my writing/draft tags, and my writing/published tags. Simple, but effective.

Create a Bookshelf

I have a Simple System Bookshelf available for purchase that sorts, categorizes, and gives you stats for the books you have read in any given year. You can do many of the same things with Bases.

I have a Base that pulls in all of the books that are in my vault, and another that scopes it for certain years. Both are useful (although not as pretty as my Simple System).

I love reading books with Obsidian and I’ve been doing it long enough that it’s very satisfying to see the results reflected in an Obsidian Base.

Create a Read it Later App

I love using Obsidian as a read-it-later app. And Bases makes it even better for that.

How? First I use the Obsidian Web Clipper to clip articles. Then I use Bases to show articles that I have clipped, but not read.

read is a checkbox property, so I can easily create a filter that filters out notes that have already been read.

Project Tracker

I like managing projects in Obsidian, and I do that primarily with tags. Like my writing view, my project tracker follows the progress of projects using tags.

I use project/active, project/ongoing, project/soon, and project/archive. I also sort by priority and deadline, which is another handy part of Bases.

Workouts

I like to track my workouts in my daily notes, and with a little bit of cleverness I can create a Base that shows my workout progress over time.

Conclusion

Getting started with Obsidian Bases is easy, and I hope you’ve learned the basics of how to make them useful for you. I think Bases are one of the most important tools Obsidian has come out with in a long time, and I look forward to using them for many years to come!