Notebooks

Notebooks help you explain insights to teammates. While dashboards are great for monitoring metrics, notebooks enable you to communicate the important context and takeaways from analysis that help your team make better-informed product decisions! 

Teams use Notebooks to:

• Report how new or changed products, features, offers, campaigns, and experiments have performed
• Explain ad hoc analysis, behavioral insights, or trending patterns about engagement, conversion, retention, stickiness, etc.
• Teach each other how to ask and answer questions with data

What you will learn in this article

This article is an in-depth user manual for the Notebooks feature. Use this document to understand how to create, edit and share Notebooks. 

Prerequisites

• Notebooks are available to all organizations on the Growth, Enterprise, and Scholarship plans
• BMP Image format is not supported in Notebooks
• The Engagement Matrix, Personas, Pathfinder Users charts are currently not supported by Notebooks

Table of Contents

Notebook Features

• Text Blocks
• Charts
• Takeaways
• Metrics
• Videos

Creating & Editing Notebooks

• Create a New Notebook
• Edit a Notebook
• Adding Content
• Markdown
• Images
• Co-ownership

Video Walk-through

Notebook Features 

Notebooks are documents, composed of markdown-enabled text blocks, pictures, videos, charts, chart takeaways, and summary metrics.

Text Blocks

There are two text elements you can create: headers and descriptions. Headers are big, bold text placeholders that are great for sectioning your notebook. Descriptions are versatile blocks of texts that you can use between your charts and headers to explain details of your analysis, as well as important conclusions and context.

Charts

It's easy to add charts to a notebook to visualize the patterns of interest in your users' behavior. When you add a chart, we encourage you to explain it in the notebook so your teammates can better understand the context and key insights. As with dashboards, anytime you save changes to a chart, those same changes will be reflected on that chart in notebooks where it's been added.

Takeaways

One of the best parts of Notebooks is the ability to highlight an insight directly on a chart. Use these to help your teammates understand the conclusion and why it matters, or at least critical context that will help them better interpret the data.

Metrics

Like KPIs on charts on dashboards, metrics on charts in notebooks enable you to provide simple summary stats so it's easy for your team to understand important numbers at-a-glance.

Videos

In order to provide additional content for your team or to better explain your insights, you also have the ability to embed Youtube, Vimeo, or Loom videos in your notebooks.

Creating & Editing Notebooks

Create a New Notebook

There are two ways to create a new notebook. 

From the "New" button in the left-hand sidebar, select "Notebook" and the new notebook will open, automatically pinning itself to your sidebar.

If you are working in a chart, use "Add to..." on the chart menu in the top right corner and select an existing notebook.  Alternatively, you can select "Create a new notebook" to simultaneously create the new notebook and add the given chart to that notebook.

Edit a Notebook

Edit Mode and Saving

Notebooks are a document format with two modes: Editing and Viewing. Viewing displays the notebook's contents in a consumption-friendly format, while Editing has a slightly different state that displays additional controls for how you can change and add content.

By default, when you create a new notebook from the sidebar menu, it will open into Edit mode. Otherwise, you will only be in View mode anytime you open a Notebook. When viewing a notebook that you own, click the "Edit" button in the top right corner to toggle into Edit mode.

Once you've completed your changes, remember to save them! Amplitude does not store your changes until you save the Notebook again, so if you navigate away from the notebook or close Amplitude, you will lose the edits you made unless you save them first. To save your changes, just click the "Save" button in the top right corner while the notebook is in Edit mode.

Archiving

When a Notebook has become irrelevant or obsolete, you can archive it under the "More" option in the notebook menu.

Moving/ Re-arranging Content

While in Edit mode, you can move content up or down the page vertically in order to re-arrange content. Just mouse over the icon to the left of the element to move it up, down, to the bottom or to the top of the notebook.

Adding Content

At the top and bottom of the page, or by hovering over empty space in your notebook, you will be able to add Charts, Text, Headers, Images or Videos.

Markdown

Text blocks in notebooks support rich text formatting via markdown syntax. Markdown is a very simple markup language used in many products to make it easy to render plain text in nicely formatted HTML on web pages. For example, to bold a word in markdown, you just wrap the word with double asterisks to emphasize it, e.g. **this will be boldly formatted text in a notebook** will appear as bolded text. We detail the most commonly used options below, but check out this guide for a complete list of options.

code into a block

Images 

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and many great notebooks contain images of AB test experiment variations, product features, and even charts from data sets in other tools!

You can insert images into a notebook by using markdown syntax. To add an image, add an exclamation mark, following by alt text in brackets, and the direct URL to the image in parentheses.

In other words, 

For example:

, would show the following in your notebook:

For Dropbox links, please add ?raw=1 at the end of the URL to get the embeddable version.


Co-ownership

Users are able to collaborate on notebooks by adding multiple owners. To add additional owners or to modify ownership of a notebook, click on 'Share' at the top of the page and then select 'Modify Ownership'.

You will see a pop-up window where you will be able to enter the email addresses of your co-owners.

Video Walkthrough