Question

I am a student in college and trying to organize my College pages for this upcoming semester and kind of take my pages to a deeper level of organization and information.

I already have a database that represents "My Course Plan" throughout the term of completing my degree, so what classes I take what semester up until graduation. I've created a tab specifically for courses that have been withdrawn from or that were failed (I only have withdrawn courses!). These are my column headers currently:

 COURSE (title)
 CREDITS (number)
 FINAL GRADE (select)
 SEMESTER (multiselect)
 RESCHEDULED? (formula)

So for instance, I have course COMM-101 that is 3 credits, a final grade of W (withdrawn), in semester "fall 2020". In the "Rescheduled?" column, I would like it to reflect a checked box if I have more than one semester selected under the "Semester" column, such as if I also had "summer 2023" selected for COMM-101 along with the fall 2020, it would show a checked box, and if there's only one option selected, then an empty checkbox. How could I go about doing this?? I feel like I've probably just been looking way too deep into this and it's going to be something so simple, and I'll tell myself to just go take a nap lol any help is greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

This is pretty hacky, but it seems to be working for me. I don't know a way for a formula to directly count the number of options in a multi-select, because as soon as you bring a multi-select into a formula, Notion converts it into a string of text. But formulas can easily check whether a string of text has a comma in it!

Here's the formula:

contains(prop("Semester"), ",")

Of course, this is kind of hacky. If Notion ever decides to change the way it represents multi-selects inside formulas, this might stop working.

If you wanted something more reliable and "by the book", I believe you could do it with rollups, but it would be much more work to set up and I'm not super confident on the details. The basic idea is, first you have a rollup that looks at Semester and counts the values there, and then your formula just checks whether the count property is greater than 1.