How to Use Obsidian Dataview: A Complete Beginners Guide

A Non-technical Guide

Obsidian dataview is one of the most widely used community plugins in obsidian. It turns your knowledge base into a database that you can query from.

If you are a non-technical person, dataview can scare you. But it doesn’t have to. This non-technical guide will help you to go from scratch to building your own database of personal knowledge in obsidian.

Using the dataview plugin in obsidian is like using obsidian on steroids. Before we begin the guide, let me show you some of the possibilities of obsidian. The setups I’ve used in my obsidian vault:

View the most recent notes

```dataview
List
From ""
Sort file.mtime DESC
Limit 5
```

It searches my entire vault and lists the recently modified 5 notes:

View notes that need to be processed

```dataview
Table file.ctime as created
From #todevelop and -"008 TEMPLATES"
sort ASCE
Limit 20
```