Obsidian released bases this week and honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it yet. If you’ve read my previous articles, you know I’m a huge Obsidian fan and use multiple vaults for various journals, posts, etc. I thought I would take this week to talk about bases and my initial thoughts.
The Good
The bases plugin provides native support for filtering and aggregating data on your files. It allows you to filter based on file names, folders, tags, and custom properties (there are more filter options as well). You can view things in a tabular or card view with the click of a button. They are also embeddable in your files. They seem like a good way to quickly view data in different ways, as it supports multiple views in a single base. The bases concept does have me thinking about how I do my daily work journals, I wonder if I can use them to simplify the data I gather on day rating, etc.
The Bad
Many people have touted bases as a replacement to the Dataview plugin, and honestly I don’t see that as the case. It can’t recognize tasks, therefore it can’t give data like number of completed items, etc. The views are limited to table and card, which I think is a bit too limiting. Personally it feels like they released it too early, without the core features that could make it great. I would love to see things like list view, or graph, as well as the ability to view the number of completed tasks in a file. This could make daily note analysis much simpler. I also don’t know if the formulas can use outside filtering (like a date property from the parent file).
Summary
Overall I think bases have a lot of potential. I don’t think this is a full feature release though, this feels more like an alpha preview. I look forward to seeing what they add in the future. Right now, bases seem like they are most valuable to people who use Obsidian for blog posts, and other things that are more file based. Things like task counts, etc. aren’t supported yet, but hopefully they will be soon.