There are several ways to organize and visualize your notes. Most note-taking solutions use tags, notebooks, backlinks, and smart folders to get the job done. However, Obsidian is a step ahead with a combination of backlinks and Graph views to connect the dots.

It transforms your boring Markdown notes into a dynamic, interactive map, so that in one glance you can identify relationships, explore patterns, and navigate your personal wiki. Here’s how to use the Graph view in Obsidian to turn chaos into clarity.

What is the Graph view in Obsidian?

If you have used Roam Research before, you will find yourself right at home with graph views. It can be a powerful feature to visualize the relationship between your notes, and it significantly enhances your note-taking and knowledge management experience. It’s one of the top reasons why people utilize Obsidian to create a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system.

Obsidian’s Graph view basically mimics how our brain works to connect thoughts. All your Obsidian notes are represented as nodes (circles), and the connection between them is displayed as lines. The idea is to help you understand how your relevant notes are interconnected.

It’s a must-have feature for researchers, professionals, and even students to enable interactive exploration in your Obsidian vault. The possibilities are endless here. It’s entirely up to your preferences and use cases to create different local and global graphs in Obsidian. The software also comes with a bunch of customization options to tweak and analyze them like a pro.

Create Graph views in Obsidian

Now that you have a fair idea about Graph views in Obsidian, let’s check it out in action. In the example below, I will create a travel itinerary for an upcoming European tour, with a detailed breakdown and all the relevant details.

1. Open Obsidian and head to a relevant vault or create a new one.
2. I have created a folder called Travel and added all the relevant notes with a day-to-day itinerary. I have also added a separate note with all the flight and hotel details.
3. In the end, I added a new note called Serene Scandinavia tour and started connecting relevant notes to it.
4. Type [[note name]] and pick a relevant note from the suggestions menu. You can view the final preview in the screenshot below.
5. During the tour, I then created my daily notes in Obsidian and jotted down my experiences with new places. Since Obsidian comes with a Daily Notes plugin, I used it to write notes every day.
6. I opened up each day and connected to a relevant daily note using [[daily note]].
7. Once everything has been documented, I can open the Graph view menu from the sidebar and check out all of my connected notes in action.

This is just a basic overview of how backlinks work in Obsidian to enable detailed Graph views. Obsidian offers a couple of different graph types, so let’s glance over them quickly.

Global Graph view

As the name suggests, it’s the global Graph for your entire vault. Many power users create different vaults for specific topics. If you are among them and use a single vault for all the relevant notes on a topic, use global Graphs to check the relations between them.

As mentioned above, your global Graph is accessible from the sidebar.

Local Graph view

When you use a single vault with dozens of folders and hundreds of notes in Obsidian, your global Graph appears busy (and even messy). It may look fancy at first glance, but it’s not productive and doesn’t serve the purpose. Here is where the concept of local Graph view comes in. You can simply open the main note and follow the steps below.

1. Open a note in Obsidian and click the three-dot menu at the top.
2. Expand Open linked view.
3. Select Open local graph.
4. Obsidian launches a local graph on a split screen. You can glance over the note content as well as the graph side-by-side. It’s a must-have productivity boost for power users.

How to utilize graphs effectively in Obsidian

When you use the busy global Graph view with hundreds of backlinks, you can use the steps below to read them without any confusion.

1. Open the global Graph view in Obsidian.
2. Hover the cursor on the main note (node), and Obsidian focuses on the selected graph only. Here, the system displays the main note in a large circle and the linked note in a small circle.

As expected, you can click on any circle to jump straight to a note.

Customize your Graph view in Obsidian

There are several ways to customize a Graph view in Obsidian. It comes with a powerful filters menu to tweak your Graph view in style. Let’s check the available options. When you open any graph, click the Settings menu in the top-right corner and glance over the options below.

• Tags: If you have added tags in Obsidian notes and want to check them out in the Graph view, enable the Tags toggle. The software shows tags in Green nodes. You can hover the cursor over a tag to check related notes.
• Attachments: It shows your attachments in Yellow nodes in the Graph view.
• Existing files only: You can choose to look at existing files only.
• Orphans: It hides your basic notes that don’t have any backlinks.

Similarly, you can also expand the Display menu to enable arrows, adjust the text fade threshold, node size, and link thickness. You can edit center force, repel force, link force, and link distance from the Forces menu.

You can also start a beautiful graph view animation from the top-right corner.

Graph view themes

Obsidian comes with a dedicated theme store to change the entire look of the app with a single click. You can use it to customize the Graph view's look too.

1. Open Obsidian and head to Settings.
2. Select Appearance and click Manage beside Themes.
3. Download and install your preferred theme.
4. Open the Obsidian Graph view to check out the different styles in action.

See the big picture

Graph view in Obsidian helps you turn your notes into a visually rich and interconnected network. What are you waiting for? Connect your related notes using the steps above and discover hidden connections. Apart from its Graph view, Obsidian is jam-packed with useful features to take notes like a pro. Check out our dedicated guide to learn more about them.