How to Use Markdown in Notion

Writing Markdown in Notion YouTube Video

Markdown is a text structure that allows writers to create written content for the web. Markdown was created by John Gruber as a way to write in plain text (i.e. non-proprietary) format and have that text be convertible to HTML.

Notion has excellent support for Markdown. In this blog post, we will cover the four categories of Markdown support in Notion:

Writing in Markdown on a Notion Page
Pasting Markdown into a Notion Page
Importing Markdown into Notion
Exporting Notion Pages in Markdown

Before we get started, if you are looking to learn even more about Notion or other apps, Skillshare is a great resource to check out. Skillshare has courses on Notion, Evernote, Todoist, Things 3, Trello and more. In fact, there is a great Notion course by Francesco D’Alessio on Notion that you can check out at the link below:

Link to Notion Course on Skillshare

If you are just starting out with Notion and aren’t sure where to get started, you really need to check out my comprehensive beginner’s guide to Notion. It goes through all things you need to know to get started the right way. Enclosed below is the link to the guide:

Link to Beginner’s Guide to Using Notion With Screenshots

Writing in Markdown in Notion

Markdown is supported natively in Notion. It follows that you can write in Markdown and Notion will render it appropriately on the Notion page.

If you want a Heading 1 heading on your page, you can simply type # and a space and Notion will understand you want a heading 1 as shown in the screenshot below:

You can use most of the standard markdown text formatting schema in Notion. Enclosed below is a screenshot of how Notion renders each of the markdown schema that Notion supports:

Supported Markdown Schema in Notion

Enclosed below is a table that contains the pieces of markdown schema you can type into Notion that Notion will render successfully:

Effect	How to Type in Markdown	Markdown Example
Bolding Text	Type ** on both sides of the word or phrase you want to bold	bold
Italicizing Text	Type * on both sides of the word or phrase you want to italicize	italics
Inline Code	Type ` on both sides of the word or phrase you want to render as inline code	‘inline code’
Strikethrough Text	Type ~ on both sides of the word or phrase you want to render as strikethrough text	~strikethrough text~
Bulleted List	Type either *, –, or + followed by a space to create a bulleted list	* item 1 in bulleted list
Checkbox	Type [] to create a checkbox entry	[]Checkbox item
Numbered List	Type 1. followed by a space to start the numbered list	1. First item in list
H1 Heading	Type # followed by a space to create a H1 heading	# Heading 1 Text
H2 Heading	Type ## followed by a space to create a H2 heading	## Heading 2 Text
H3 Heading	Type ### followed by a space to create a H3 heading	### Heading 3 Text
Toggle List	Type > followed by a space to create a toggle list	> Toggle List item
Quote Block	Type ” followed by a space to create a quote block	# Hello Newman

Pasting Markdown into a Notion Page

In addition to being able to compose markdown in Notion, you can also paste markdown-formatted text into Notion and Notion will render it correctly.

Enclosed below is a screenshot of a blog post I wrote in markdown:

As you can see from the image above, I used an H1 headline, bolded text and bullet points in the document. I simply:

Selected the text I wanted to copy into Notion
Pressed Command-C (Ctrl-C on Windows) to copy the text
Opened a Notion page and pressed Command-V (Ctrl-V on Windows) to paste the text into the page

As you can see from the image above, Notion recognizes that the pasted text is formatted in Markdown and renders the text appropriately.

Importing Markdown Files into Notion

There are times when you may want to add a whole markdown file into Notion. Notion supports importing markdown files. To import a markdown file into Notion, do the following:

Create a Notion Page to hold your markdown file.