Obsidian Tutorial: Notes, Links, AI, Plugins, Sync (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In this video, you'll learn how to use Obsidian step by step. Obsidian is a free note-taking app that stores your notes right on your computer, making it easy to organize information, connect related ideas, and quickly find what you need. We'll start by installing Obsidian and creating your first vault. Then I'll show you how to organize your notes, link related information together, and even connect AI tools like Claude to search, summarize, and build on your notes. I'm Kevin, and let's dive in. To get started, head to the following website to install Obsidian. You'll find a link right here at the bottom of the screen. On the homepage, click Get Obsidian. Here, you'll find downloads for all the major desktop and mobile platforms. I'll be using Windows for this tutorial, but the experience is similar regardless of which platform you choose. Click the Download button and then run the installer. Once the install finishes, launch Obsidian, and here you'll see a few different options. Since we're starting from scratch, let's click on Create New Vault. A vault is simply a folder where Obsidian stores all of your notes, attachments, and settings. We'll take a closer look at vaults in just a moment. First, give your vault a name. I'll call mine the Kevin Cookie Company. Next, choose where you'd like to save your vault. I'll click here. This opens up a file picker, and you can now choose a location on your PC. If you'd like to sync your vault across multiple devices, you can also save it in a cloud storage service like OneDrive or Google Drive. Just choose a folder on your PC that's already syncing. Down below, I'm going to select this folder, and right over here, let's click on Create. And just like that, you've created your first Obsidian vault. Nice work. Before we start creating notes, let's take a quick tour of the interface so you know where everything is. Over on the left is the sidebar. Here, you'll find all of your different notes and the different available tools in Obsidian. In the middle is the editor where you'll create and view your notes. And over on the right-hand side is the graph view. As you create notes and link them together, this provides a visual map of how everything is connected. We'll come back to this later in the video. For now, let's close it out. I'll click here. Now, let's create our first note. At the top of the navigation pane, click on this icon to create a new note. Throughout this tutorial, we'll build a knowledge base for my small business, the Kevin Cookie Company, as we prepare to launch a brand new double chocolate chip cookie. Hopefully, it's a hit. Otherwise, we might have to consider a different business, like, I don't know, making tutorial videos on YouTube. Now, let's give this new note a name. Right up here, I'll call this the Cookie Launch. Now, press Enter. And we're going to organize our note with a few different headings. To create a heading, simply enter two pound signs followed by a space, and then type in the text. For the first one, I'll call this Overview. Press Enter. Two more pound signs, a space. And for this next one, I'll call this Tasks. Enter. Two more pound signs, a space. And for this one, I'll call it Related Notes, and then hit Enter. Obsidian uses a simple formatting language called Markdown. Now, don't worry about memorizing the syntax. As we continue throughout this tutorial, you'll naturally pick it up. Under Overview, I'd like to add a short description. I'll click here, press Enter, and then type in some text. Now, notice that right next to Overview, I get this arrow icon, and I can click on that to collapse or expand that section. This is especially useful as your notes become longer. Right here under Tasks, I'd like to add a checklist. So let's press Enter, and enter in a dash followed by a space, an opening bracket, a space, a closing bracket, and then another space. And just like that, we now have a checklist. I'll type in my first item, finalized recipe, then I'll press Enter. Let's design some packaging, press Enter, and also launch the marketing campaign. Now, notice that every time I press Enter, Obsidian automatically created another checkbox that makes it really easy to build out a task list. If you don't want to have to remember the Markdown syntax, there's also another way. You could simply right-click, and right under Paragraph, you could insert a task list right here. So multiple ways to do it, but I think you'll find that as you use Obsidian more and more, simply learning the Markdown syntax will help you save time and also work more efficiently. This note here gives us a high-level view of the project, but instead of putting everything into one long document, I like to create separate notes for different parts of the project. Let's start with the product itself. So right up on top, let's create another new note. I'll click here, and let's give it the name, Double Chocolate Chip Cookie. This note will contain all the details about our new cookie. Now, let's add a heading called Description, and just like we did before, type in two pound signs, a space, and then I'll enter in Description and press Enter. Below that, I'll type in some text. I'll start with an asterisk, enter my text, and then close with an asterisk and press Enter. Now, notice that I surrounded the text with asterisks to make the text italic. Let's now add another heading called Ingredients. In this section, I'd like to create a bulleted list. To do that, type in a dash followed by a space, and then I could type in my ingredients. So here, I'll type in flour, press Enter, and you'll notice that it automatically creates another bulleted item, and here I could simply type in my list. Obsidian isn't just limited to text. You can also add files directly into your notes. Let's add another heading. I'll call this one Pictures, and I'd like to paste in a picture of our Double Chocolate Chip Cookie. So right here, I'll paste it in. Now, along with images, you could also add files like PDFs, audio, and video directly into your notes. Let's now create another note. In the top left-hand corner, let's click on this icon again, and I'll call this Marketing Campaign. I'll add a heading called Launch Ideas, and then let's create a numbered list. To do that, I'll type the number one followed by a period and a space, and then I'll type in some ideas. We'll announce the cookie on social media. We'll send an email to customers, and we'll also offer a limited time launch discount. Now, notice that when I press Enter, Obsidian automatically continues the numbered list. Finally, let's create one more note, but this time, instead of pressing the icon in the top left-hand corner, let's use a shortcut key. Press the Control key together with N, and that drops us into a new note, and here, I'll call it Product Launch Meeting. Here, I'll add a heading, and let's call this Discussion Topics, and I think for meeting notes, checklists tend to work really well, so let's add a few items. Now, if you remember from earlier to add a checklist, enter in a dash followed by a space, an open bracket, space, close bracket, and then another space, and there we have our task list. Now here, I'll add a few items in like Review Recipe, Finalize Packaging, and Confirm Launch Date. We've now created several notes, each focused on a different part of our project. You can see all the notes listed here in the navigation pane. Now, you could simply click on any one of these notes to jump to that specific note. So far, we've created several notes, but they're all separate from one another. One of the things that makes Obsidian so powerful is the ability to connect related notes together. Back on the Cookie Launch note, this is the first one we created. Let's go down to the Related Notes section, and right here, let's type in two opening square brackets. And as soon as I do that, Obsidian displays a list of all of my existing notes. So right over here, let's select Double Chocolate Chip Cookie. Now, when I do that, Obsidian automatically creates a link to that note. Now, let's do the same. Here, I'll press Enter. Let's enter in two opening square brackets, and right over here, let's go with the Marketing Campaign, press Enter, and let's do it again. And this time, let's go with the Product Launch Meeting. Then let's press Enter. Now, instead of searching through a long document, here, I could click on any one of these links. I'll click on this one, and that brings me to that specific note, and here, I could get the information I need. Up above, I could click on the back icon, and that brings me back to the Cookie Launch note. You can also create links while you're writing. Right down below, let's click into the Marketing Campaign. And here, we say, announce the cookie on social media, but let's actually refer to it by name. So over here, I'll remove the cookie, and let's enter in those two opening square brackets, and here, we see all of the different notes. Let's click on the double chocolate chip cookie, and here, that inserts a link directly in line. These connections are one of the many reasons so many people love Obsidian. Instead of storing isolated notes, you start to build a network of related information that's easy to explore. Now, over on the left-hand side, where we have all of our different tools, let's click on the one that says Open Graph View. This opens up the Graph View. As we connect all of our different notes, each connection appears in the graph. That way, we have a visual overview of how everything is organized. And in fact, one neat thing, I can click on any one of these notes. So let's go back to the cookie launch main page. I'll click here, and that opens up the note. As your vault grows, scrolling through a long list of notes isn't always the fastest way to find what you need. To search across your entire vault, click on the search icon in the left sidebar. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Control, Shift, and F. Now, let's say I want to find everything related to our marketing campaign. Right up here, I'll type in marketing. Now, Obsidian searches across all my notes and shows me every place where that word appears. Now, here's a neat thing. I can click on any one of these, and then I can expand to see the surrounding text. And there, I see more of the details. Now, if I click on this, that'll bring me to that specific point in the note where that word appears. Search also works for more specific information. For example, right up here, I'll search for chocolate chunks. And Obsidian immediately finds the ingredient inside the product notes. Right over here, I'll click on chocolate chunks, and there we see that reference. Now, this becomes especially useful as your vault grows from just a few notes like we have now to hundreds or perhaps even thousands. You don't have to remember exactly where you wrote something. You just need to remember part of what you wrote. Searching is great when you're looking for something specific. But what if you want AI to answer questions across all of your notes, or maybe even create new ones? One of the things I really like about Obsidian is that your notes are stored as standard markdown files on your computer. That means AI tools like Claude or Chachabit can work directly with your vault. Here I am in the Claude desktop app, and I'm currently in the co-work view. Right down here, I'm going to point Claude to my Obsidian vault location on my PC. I'll select this and then click on allow. It'll now have access to all of my notes. Now, I can ask questions about the information I've already collected. So as an example, what cookie are we launching? And then let's send that. Claude searches my vault, and here it tells me that we're launching the double chocolate chip cookie. Now, of course, that's just a simple example, but it shows you how Claude can retrieve information from your notes. Claude can also help me add new information to my knowledge base. For example, right down below, I'll ask it to create a new note in this folder called customer feedback with three suggestions for improving our cookie. Over here, let's start the task. Over on the right-hand side, we can see the markdown file that Claude created, but let's go to Obsidian to make sure the file shows up there too. Back within Obsidian, over on the left-hand side, we now have a new note titled customer feedback. And when I click into that, here we see everything that Claude generated, automatically added to my vault. To make Obsidian even more powerful, you can connect Claude to Zapier, the sponsor of today's video. Zapier lets you securely connect AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to over 9,000 apps so your AI can work with the tools you already use every day. Let's make this real. I'll ask Claude to search my Gmail for the latest feedback about the double chocolate chip cookie, summarize it, and add it to my customer feedback note in Obsidian. Claude searches my Gmail, summarizes the feedback, and updates my Obsidian note, all from a single prompt. Instead of manually copying information into Obsidian, Zapier lets Claude bring it in for you, helping keep your knowledge base up-to-date automatically. If you'd like to connect your favorite AI tools to thousands of apps, check out Zapier using the link in the description right down below. One of the biggest strengths of Obsidian is how customizable it is through plugins. To access plugins, down in the bottom left-hand corner, click on the settings gear. There are two types of plugins. Right up here, we have core plugins, and these are built into Obsidian. Then, over on the left-hand side, you also have community plugins, which are created by developers around the world. Before installing community plugins for the first time, right down here, we'll need to turn them on. I'll click here, and then let's click on browse. There are thousands of plugins available that add new features and customize the way Obsidian works. So, if you're looking for something to do this weekend, here you'll find plugins for things like task management, databases, calendars, AI, diagrams, and much more. I encourage you to browse through the directory and install plugins that best fit your workflow. In the top right, let's close out of this view. By default, Obsidian stores all your notes locally on your computer. If you'd like to access your notes across multiple devices, Obsidian offers a service called Obsidian Sync. Within settings, over on the left-hand side, let's click into sync. Right here, you could sign up for a new account, and once you sign up, you could choose what vaults you'd like to synchronize. Once everything is configured, any changes you make on one device are automatically synced to your other devices. Now, one thing to call out, Obsidian Sync is a paid service, and you can find the latest pricing on the Obsidian website. If you prefer, you can also synchronize your vault using third-party services, like iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox, although those require a little more setup. And that's how to use Obsidian. Of course, there's a lot more to Obsidian, but this gives you everything you need to get started. If there's another Obsidian feature you'd like to see me cover in a future video, let me know in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.