How To Create a Notion Template from an Existing Page

What is Notion?

Notion is an extremely powerful tool for both business and personal use. If you’re struggling to find a great tool to aggregate many of your workflows, look no further. 

Notion provides an easy to use experience with intuitive controls and the ability to use its simple capabilities with little to no technical background. If you can use a word processor, spreadsheets, powerpoint, etc, you’re more than qualified to dip your toe in the Notion app waters.

Need to scale up to the most complex of workflows? Notion’s ability to connect and synchronize content across the “mini” databases it creates provides amazing power for customizations.

About Notion Templates

One of the less intuitive features of Notion are templates. It’s a bit difficult to find the templates you’re looking for. The search function in Notion’s template page is a bit buried and it’s not obvious how to find the Notion templates sourced by the company vs. those created by 3rd party contributors.

To get to Templates from your Notion instance, click the Templates button in the bottom left of your main window:

Once there, you can look at the most used templates in the Notion portfolio. Or, alternatively, you can browse all the templates available by clicking the non-obvious “Browse more templates” button at the bottom:

Alternatively, you can browse directly to the Notion Templates Page and search their entire library.

Creating a template from an existing Notion page

There are any number of walkthroughs for how to create a Notion template from scratch. But the one thing that is extremely difficult to find is how do you create a Notion template from an already existing page. A quick search on Google reveals Quora questions, Reddit posts, more Reddit posts, and how-to videos at all levels of complexity.

We’re here to show you the simplest way to take your existing page in Notion and create a button that automatically creates new instances of that existing page.

Let’s get started!

Step 1 – Create a new page or import your favorite template into Notion.

For this example, I will be using our Product Requirements Document template that we use at Sage whenever we map out our plans for a new feature deployment. The template itself can be downloaded and added to your Notion instance from here.

Here is what our page looks like:

Step 2 – Find a location for your new Template button and add the “Template Button” to this Page

Most people find it easiest to create a new page to house all their custom templates. For us, we’ve created a “Templates” page where we have all our template buttons.

To create the new Template button, you have two options:

• Click the “+” sign next to a new Notion block, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and select Template button:

• Type “/template” in a text block to add a block and filter by the name “template”

Step 3 – Add Template Title and Properties

• Give the new template button a name – We’re calling ours Create a new Product Requirements Document (PRD)

• Delete the To-do block by clicking next to it and hitting Delete

Step 4 – Drag Your Source Notion page into the Template Block Editor

It should look like this when you’re finished. You can always click the template page to open it and edit any of the content in the template.

And that’s it! You are finished and you now have a simple button like this one that can be used to create a new Notion page with all the content from your template. Click it and give it a shot.

Note: With the most recent update (Dec 2021), you may get an “Importing” window and have Notion get stuck churning. However, if you go back to the page where the button is, you’ll notice that your new page has been created from the source template still.