How to Use Docs in SmartSuite for Meetings, Agendas, & Note-Taking

So by now you probably have heard of SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video. SmartSuite is the go to tool when you're trying to organize data and tasks. As you guys have been asking in the comments, what about documents, notes, agendas, long form rambles that we want to store inside our work management software? Can we do that in SmartSuite? Well, the answer is yes. In this video I'm going to be going through how you can organize your notes Note taking in three different ways inside of SmartSuite. I'm going to call it like beginner, intermediate, Advanced I guess because they are three different ways to go about it that give you different levels of complexity depending on how intense you want to be about your SmartSuite documents. Now you may not know it yet, but what we are about to embark on is quite the video. So I don't want to waste any time here. I will just say if you are interested in learning more about SmartSuite or about how to build out a work management software that really encompasses your processes and systems, go ahead and like and subscribe. But otherwise let's get inside SmartSuite now in order to make the most of this tutorial we're going through, you're going to want to be signed into your SmartSuite account. Full Disclaimer if you do not have a SmartSuite account, head down into the description below and you can find our affiliate link to sign up for one for yourself. Once you are inside your SmartSuite account, we're ready to go into option number one for tracking your notes or documents inside of SmartSuite. I'm going to call it the Comment method. It's the beginner friendly approach that requires absolutely no changes to your interface in SmartSuite, all you need to do is go into your normal area inside the account. Wherever you are normally tracking the things you want to comment or notetake, just go to them. So for this example, let's imagine I want to go into my documentation area because I've created a lot of SOPs and I want to have some riveting discussions with my team around what those SOPs mean. P.S. if you don't know what I'm talking about with SOPs and all that, go up here and you can find the video where we go over this setup. But what we want to do for this first option to track our notes is to open up any existing record we have inside this area. So inside my documentation one I'm going to head into my app of SOPs go to how to butter Toast and start that riveting discussion. Once you click up here on the friendly little messaging thingy, you're going to see this sidebar appear called the Communication Center. This this is our spot where we can start to use SmartSuite as our communication hub. And yes, you could use this to replace your other communication tools if you really want to go ham. But for now, in order to have our note taking tracked inside of SmartSuite in this basic approach, all we're going to do is utilize this fully powerful commenting tool on the right side to write whatever it is we want to discuss or note for ourselves. For example, I could have a note or discussion or log of an agenda discussion point inside these comments and then then click Send. What this is going to do is add something into this communication center that everyone who sees this record and has access to this area can see and allow me to have this log of activity and communications on this particular sop. The beauty of this very simple note taking system is this feature. This commenting little dude here is available inside every record in SmartSuite by default, so I don't need to do any extra work to take advantage of this. I. I just need to go to wherever the work is already happening, click on this little dude and there I go. I'm ready to start discussing and I can even filter, react and do all sorts of things to make sure these are nice and organized. And while I'm in here, I should also highlight that this Communication center allows us to get a little fancy with our interactions beyond just emoji reactions that we can have 2 comments in here. We can also adjust our settings to make sure we're getting notified on certain features. Right now we're at the alpha release of the email notifications, but I see this coming very soon and there's just some cool stuff baked into to this with again no extra work needed on your part. To make this part of your daily routine in SmartSuite, you literally just need to open the records you already have and start commenting now. As a little pro tip related to this first option, do note that we can choose to make this open comments column visible here from the overview area as well. So in this particular grid view I can go to fields to display and make sure my open comments are added as a visible field. So I'm going to click on it here, make it visible and look at this column that pops up. This allows me to start commenting and having those conversations with one click rather than three. Oh two. I can count. I promise so that's a little bonus in there as well. Now, that is our first option for documenting our notes inside of SmartSuite. Put your notes where the work is actually happening and for most people in most workflows, I would want most of your note taking to happen in this way because this is going to make it the easiest work possible setup for retrieving this information. Later on when I need to go and butter toast again, I'm going to be able to see that comment right alongside my work and I don't have to go to another spot to find it. However, let's go on to option two. And for those of you who want to get a little bit more intense. Now to move on to our second method of tracking our notes in SmartSuite, we're going to go ahead and create a new solution using one of SmartSuite's solution templates. Now, if you are someone who's comfortable editing your smartsuite by yourself, you definitely don't need to create this from scratch. You could just alter the solution you already have. But personally I find the templates a real time saver. So that's what we're going to use for this video. To load this templated solution inside of our account, we're going to go back to the homepage, click, add a new solution, start from template and then in here we're going to locate our team meeting template. Now there are several meeting templates inside the solution library. Feel free to check them out if you search meeting or agenda. But personally I think this team meeting one is going to be the most useful for our typical use case. And it's got a lot of good stuff pre baked in. So we're going to click use template, load this into our account and we end up with something beautiful like this. So what this template allows us to do is track our notes around certain meetings. And because it's a template that has a lot of cool stuff baked in, it also allows us to actually map out our meeting agendas in a more dynamic way. Let me go inside this meeting for the marketing team to show you what this looks like. Here we have our first section which is our general information. This is where we can track who's in charge of the meeting, the duration, the time and date and status. Below that general information section, which we can collapse, we can see the purpose, agenda and location. Normal stuff you'd expect. Love the fact that it includes the meeting id. That's a time saver. Below that we have discussion topics. This is how we're Using a little bit of networking to connect this area here where we're tracking meetings with these topics that we can track later. This is using SmartSuite's relational database features to allow us to connect information housed here and connect it to meetings housed over here. These two things happen to be in the same solution of team meetings, but just know you could connect things from anywhere if you so choose, depending on how your linked record is set up. But once we're inside here, we've got all these fields added in here. How do we actually take notes? Well, that is in the final section we have here, which is the notes, actions and outcomes structure. Right here at the top we have a rating that we can give the meeting. This would be something that would be appropriate if, say, you were operating a level 10 meeting where you wanted everybody to rate the meeting at the end. However, for my example here, I actually don't need this rating piece. I'm going to go ahead and just delete this field because it's not adding value to my workflows. Please keep that in mind. By the way, this whole thing is a template. It's a starting point, but it's not the ending point. We want to customize this to the suit your needs. But finally, the thing you've been waiting for, Meeting Notes, is right below that. This Meeting Notes area is a long form text field that we can actually expand out to cover an entire page pretty much. And this is where we can type long form notes about anything we want to talk about in that meeting. This is like an infinitely, well, probably near infinitely long canvas where we can write out our thoughts. The nice thing about this area, beyond just being nice and spacious, is that we also have full featured editing here. While it's not stuck to the top of the bar like we saw inside the comments area, by highlighting any text, we can choose to have different stylings and layouts to make this data feel nice and formatted. If you're someone that doesn't like to use a lot of mouse activity, you can also type a slash, which is something you're probably familiar with from other tools to also incorporate different elements. So, for example, we can add emojis, videos, images, attachments, divider lines, dates, and of course, more sophisticated things like checklists, table of contents, and so on. All of this fun stuff allows us to format our text and have fancy callouts that allow us to have notes that truly reflect what we're trying to pay attention to and make sure that things don't just come in as a wall of text. Our attention spans are short and so if we're going to create notes to be able to reference later, let's make them really easy to reference later. That's one great feature about this meeting notes area and you know, meeting notes area. I don't think I've ever told you what the name of this field is. This here is a smart document. That's what SmartSuite calls this long form text on steroids thing. This is basically the closest comparison to what you might have in the Freestyle page editor in Notion or in a ClickUp document or in a Google Document. It's all baked into this one field. Now, one thing that can sometimes catch people off guard about what I just showed you inside of SmartSuite of using the smart documents as your note taking system is it's not really a document. You notice that. I mean, this is functionally and actually a field in the SmartSuite universe and that's a lot different than what you might see in other tools. While this is very comparable in features to what you might have on a Notion page or a ClickUp Doc or a Google Document, it is definitely not the same interface that some people are used to. And that can cause some uncomfortable feelings. But hear me out. Having your documents as fields actually have some secret superpowers that I think many of us would actually come to appreciate if we give it a chance. So looking at this here, what's nice about having my Smart doc as just another field inside of SmartSuite is that I get all the normal features you would come to expect when it comes to custom fields or fields in general across other tools. I can take this field and I can duplicate it so I can have multiple note taking documents entirely separate for different users. So I have Layla's meeting notes here, John's meeting notes here. Now why that's extra cool is because these are fields we can now automate and set permissions just like we can on all other fields inside of SmartSuite. We can have certain automations happen when Layla's meeting notes are filled in and different ones when John's are filled in. We can also of course adjust these field permissions. For example, maybe I want to have Layla's notes, the CEOs notes from say this marketing meeting. Maybe I want it to be private so so only certain teams such as the leadership team can see those notes and maybe editing. I only want Layla to be able to edit this because this is her note taking area. This kind of granular permissions and the ability to have Automations based off of these same kinds of fields is the kind of stuff that you do not get when you have all of your stuff just stuffed in to an unstructured and non databasey Google document or Word file. Now just to wrap up this tutorial portion of the second option, we'll once we have gone ahead and reviewed this area and we've started to delete the fields that do not add value to us, such as maybe the duration isn't something I really care about, so I'm going to go ahead and click delete once we've removed the things that do not add value. As with all Solution Templates In SmartSuite, we want to take advantage of that super easy to use delete it button that is found at the overall solution level and just wipe out that demo data. This will give us a nice clean slate so we can start adding our own information. And voila. We are now ready to start tracking our own meeting notes and agendas inside of SmartSuite. For another example of meeting agendas that's a little bit of a different flow, you can check out this video from our level 10 meetings that we covered in the EOS video. But this would be a great kind of middle of the road option I would say for anybody who needs a slightly more stuff like that where you really want a more intense note structure with more either automations or permissions that you can't get by just using that conversation area that we talked about before. Now I promised you Beginner, intermediate and Advanced and so far we've covered two different ways to track your notes and and documents inside a smartsuite. But you know I want to fulfill our promise. So we've got one more to throw at you and this is one I would say for the mega note taking nerds out here. This is for anyone who's looking to build kind of a dedicated second brain or note taking system that is fully Featured inside of SmartSuite. I know what I'm going to be doing in this demonstration here is kind of recreating some of the stuff I track inside of Notion and show you what it looks like in SmartSuite. For anyone who again wants to get a little bit geekier about their personal information management. For our third option of tracking our documents inside a SmartSuite, we are actually going to recreate something similar to our meetings review before, but rather than tracking everything around a meeting or specific objective, we are just going to build a note taking database. Now unlike everything else I've pretty much talked about on this channel. When it comes to SmartSuite, this kind of note taking use case I'm going to walk you through here is actually not one that I have found a go to SmartSuite solution in their library yet. By the time you watch this, maybe it'll be there. But for now I'm just going to show you how to build it from scratch. So in case you are someone like me who geeks out over this stuff, you can still get this in your account just by following a few basic steps. So let's go in here and to create it from scratch, we're going to go to our homepage and click Create from Scratch on the Add a new solution and area. What I would suggest renaming this solution to be is Notebook. And the reason why is because we're going to fill it with notes. I know how original, feel free to call it whatever you want, but I'll be calling it Notebook. Here, choose the color and icon that matches your happy little brain. Set a solution guide if you feel like explaining this or maybe dropping the link to this video so you can reference these instructions later. And as with all new solutions, check your permissions to make sure this is shared with just the people who actually need to see it. Once you're good with all of those things at the solution level, we're ready to customize app number one, which while the default name in SmartSuite is not the most inspiring choice. So let's go ahead and double click this to rename it something a bit more meaningful. We're going to call this My Notes and we're going to use this as our notes database to track notes as we input them. That sounds very basic, but I promise it'll come to life as we build this out. Once we are inside here, we're going to go ahead and create a new record. Now we do not have to do this in order to customize these fields, but I'm a visual person and I think sometimes seeing the empty record helps us know what we do and do not want inside this particular field. So up at the very top we need to give this record a name. Now we are trying to use this as a note taking area. If you are someone that likes to label all of your journal entries, by all means leave this as is and just type in the name of your note as you write it. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of that. I'm very lazy when it comes to note taking. I've just gotten into it and I want to make it as easy as possible. So I'm actually going to modify these fields settings and rather than having it be required and all this other stuff, I'm actually going to auto generate it. What this is going to do is have SmartSuite do some work for me and just automatically give this note a name. One of the easiest ways to name it would be something like created on and created by. So I'm just adding a little space between these two symbols. This will automatically show the date and time it was created and my name every time I create a note. So I'm going to update this field. If I were to just fill in some things and click Save here, you'll actually see the title of this record show up here in the column it does populate once you actually create the record. Okay, so we've got this going here, but I'm not done yet. I'm going to head back inside here and beyond just giving this title a name. I'm going to rename it to be the date of entry because I just. I don't know. That seems descriptive for me. I'm going to update that field and leave it. Moving on, I'm going to start customizing other fields now for me, I want a simple note taking system that replicates what I do in Notion already. So I'm actually going to be deleting a lot of the fields here that do not actually have any meaning to me. I'm going to delete the due date because I do not want SmartSuite's project management features here. I want a clean document focused slate. I basically want to recreate notion in SmartSuite. So that's about it. This is super simple but this would be my note taking flow. The only other thing I think I would do here. Yeah, let's make it like Notion. I'm going to go ahead and modify this field settings and add some default formatting. So this would be something like notes, key takeaways and then I might have a section like to process at the end for the action steps. I'm going to go ahead and add some formatting in here. I know you're supposed to do everything H1, H2, H3 but man, I just hate how big that is. So I'm going with H4 and then we're going to update that field. So that'll be my default text. Every time I create a new record it'll have those elements in it. So just to mock that up, let's click Save. Create a new record and we can see these now. Populate. That's pretty much what I'm going to have as my note taking system, I think at this point. Now I think for most people that would probably be it for the note taking. However, if I want to go one step further as an optional detail for folks who like to review their notes based on tags or other metrics. While yes, I could just tag things inside of inside of SmartSuite by, for example creating.