Obsidian 1.5 came out last week for those on the Insider builds, sporting a fancy new table editor that makes working with Markdown tables a breeze.

But what I’m most excited about are 2 quality-of-life improvements that kinda flew under the radar.

First, you can now rename Properties globally. Just right-click on the property in the All Properties list and then select Rename to change ALL instances of the property throughout your Obsidian vault.

I’ve been wanting this feature since Properties was first introduced, but I didn’t expect it to be baked into Obsidian directly. I figured someone would eventually create a plugin like Tag Wrangler which allows you to do this exact thing with Tags, just for properties instead. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added by the Obsidian team themselves.

In my opinion, this makes it much safer for people to experiment with properties. If you decide you want to change a property after adding it to a bunch of places, you can do it all at once and not have to go back and change on each individual note. Deciding you want to change something down the road is a much less costly decision with this feature added.

Second, you can now change callout types by right-clicking on the callout in Preview Mode. I like to use callouts to make longer notes more visually interesting, but they always required you to remember and manually enter the type of callout you wanted to use.

I always had trouble remembering these, so I created a callout reference note. It's available inside my Obsidian University Starter Vault which you can download here.

But with this new feature added, you can just add the callout and then select the type from a drop-down list.

This makes it MUCH easier to add different types of callouts to your Obsidian notes.

If you aren’t already, I highly recommend becoming a Catalyst supporter so you can get the Insider builds and start playing with these new features. It's only $25, and it supports the development of the Obsidian directly.

A Few Quick Tips for Metadata

Speaking of properties, I've had several Obsidian University members ask about best practices for handling metadata in properties. Here's a couple of tips to help you keep your metadata clean:

1. Add properties everywhere. The more consistently you apply properties, the more valuable your metadata becomes. But you need to make sure that you add it everywhere where it's applicable before you can really get the benefit.
2. Don't add too many properties. When it comes to metadata, less is more. If you have 15 property fields you need to update in every note, you'll likely skip updating them (or leave several of them blank). I've seen this happen with teams that use Notion, and it means that you can't really trust the metadata in your notes because you know it's not completely accurate.
3. Make your properties mean something. The best metadata means something to you personally. If it makes sense to you, there will be less friction when it comes to adding them to your notes.
4. Use the same formatting everywhere. I always use lowercase for my properties and tags, and I always make them singular. That way I avoid duplicates (i.e. author and authors are 2 separate properties).

How are you using properties? If you're willing to share, just reply to this email and I'd love to hear about it.

— Mike