how to create a progress bar in notion with checkboxes

Notion added a nice visualization for formulas recently. That makes it possible to create progress bars like these:

today i’ll show you how to create them for your own notion template, and i’ll share mine with you. If you want to just duplicate the template, scroll to the bottom of this post.

we will:

• Create the database
• Add properties and checkboxes to it
• Create the Formula
• Display the progress bar

creating the database

first we need to start with a new table view database

create a new database. Next you’ll have to create the properties you want to use in your table.
I’ve decided to go for a simple task tracker.

create as many properties as you want. They don’t need to have the type Checkbox, but we’ll use it in this example

time for the magic: creating the formula

Now to the real magic: we are going to create the formula for the progress bar. This is going to look a bit tricky at first, but don’t worry, we will split it up and explain.

Create a new property, this time with the Formula type

Select “Edit property” -> Formula Edit >

Here we will insert our formula:

round(100 * (unaryPlus(prop("Study")) + unaryPlus(prop("Excercise")) + unaryPlus(prop("Gardening")) + unaryPlus(prop("Cleaning")) + unaryPlus(prop("Mails"))) / 5) / 100

This formula does exactly this:

• round() takes the input and rounds it to a whole number.
• inside round we get the prop value of every property with prop(), which in case of a checkbox returns true for checked and false for unchecked
• we wrap our prop with unaryPlus() which converts its argument into a number. In our case true to 1 and false to 0
• now having 5 numbers, we add them all together inside the brackets and divide them by the number of properties. In our case we have 5 properties. If you want to use more or less properties, you need to change this number
• in the end we divide everything by 100 to get our percentage value

what’s left to do now is to display the bar. Notion added the “Show as” section. Here you can select to show it as a plain number, as a bar, or even as a percentage ring

now you can play around checking the boxes. The result should look like this:

Resources

Feel free to duplicate the template i created to use in your notion setup

https://pholst.notion.site/fc304ee5909d4958953c309dd72eb1fc?v=4898b29151124d17b91cc5307c5ea21f