Native Progress Bars in Notion? Use Cases And Limitations

6 min readAug 31, 2022

Notion added support for native progress bars (and rings)! Yay! Big news for Notion users! Now you do not need to dive into the world of formulas to configure a progress bar for your system.

What are the use cases? How are native progress bars better than custom ones? When you still need custom progress bars? And some tricks along with use case ideas. This is what you will find in this article.

So, what are they, native progress bars in Notion?

Technically, there is no new property specifically for a progress bar. Native progress bar is a part of display settings for any numeric value in Notion database. It might be either Number column or Formula column which returns numeric value.

How to configure native progress bar

Choose Edit property option in a numeric property menu. In the settings area you will see Show as section. All the magic happens here.

Choose the way to display this property — Number, Bar or Ring,
choose the Color,
and set Divide by value (which is considered as 100%).

Less properties = Less time on system configuration

If earlier you had to create additional Formula property to build a progress bar now you do not need it anymore. You also do not need to spend time on copying your progress bar formula (or writing it from scratch) which is a tremendous advantage of having this precious setting.

And while you can set the numbers to be displayed as progress bars you still can work with them as with numeric values in other formulas, rollups and under-column calculations.

Stylish look

Of course it’s a matter of taste so I am not objective here but I find the minimalistic native progress bars to be stylish and elegant. And they look smoother than bars built in formulas.

On the other hand with formula you have all the freedom to choose emodzi, lines or squares of different colors, you can choose the lengths. Native progress bars are more limited in the way they can look.

Progress Ring

Notion allows to show progress as a ring . Ring occupies very little room and may be especially useful for views configured for mobile screen.

Auto-adjustable length

Native progress bar is flexibly adjusts to the width of the column.

Use cases

The most simple use case for native progress bar could look like this. You track your income every month in a separate Notion database aiming to reach income of 5K. With native progress bar this case could look something like this:

Simple use case for tracking income goal progress, Source

But I assume, the most common use case would be the following. You calculate the progress percent in some Formula column. For instance it could be something like this for your project:

round( prop("Tasks done") / prop("Total tasks amount") * 100 ) / 100

And then you configure this Formula property to be shown as a progress bar (or ring).

Project progress in % of completed tasks. Source

Here I listed 5 ideas of how to use progress bars in Notion

How to show percentage

Choose Edit property option from a numeric property menu. In the settings area you will see Number format settings. Set it to be Percent. Right the same way it is done on the picture above (the one with project progress).

Note, that Notion displays progress bar for the range from 0 to 1, not from 0 to 100. So 0.7 will be shown as 70% while 70 will be shown as 7000%.

How to add note to progress bar on cards

Building progress bars manually lets you add some additional data. Such as short description of what is this progress bar about. It is especially useful on Gallery and Board view where you do not see property names, only values. Native progress bars do not support adding title or anything else to it. So how could you add a note or a title to your progress bars on cards view?

A workaround here is adding an additional Formula property for title or description and enable this property to be shown right above the progress bar.

Why Formula and not Text? Because you would have to always fill the Text property manually while in a Formula you can return a static text value and thus this property will always be filled. And you will easily change the value if needed. Sometimes I use this trick not to only add titles to cards but to also add separators.

How to add title for progress bar on a card. Project Progress and Income By Sources

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Are custom bars still better in any way?

There are some cases where custom bars could work better than native ones. I will list several of them that I found.

Conditional colors

Now there is no possibility to change color depending on the value. But at least Notion allows to choose the progress bar colors from its standard color range. I especially like how it looks in the dark theme.

Stubborn “Divide by” value

Currently there is no possibility to make Divide by take value from a property. You have to input specific number which will serve as the equivalent of 100%.

Probably, it’s not the problem for the majority of cases, especially when you work with percents.

But there might be some specific situations. For instance when I was working on my Notion course I wanted to see how many assets I had to do for each lesson in the way visually reflecting the amount of assets. And native progress bars would not help here:

Bars of custom lengths are not supported natively

Anyway, such cases are rare and this particular case with assets could be visualised in a natively supported way which would also be ok.

How it could look with native progress bar

Histogram-like bars

Native progress bars are about progress which means you know what is your goal or it’s equivalent.

So it is not applicable for the cases where you want to visually reflect your numbers and create kind of histogram in your database.

But you actually can do a small workaround to see kind of histogram for such cases. Just set Divide by value to be deliberately higher or equal to the highest expected value.