Notion is a great note-taking and general purpose record everything tool that lives on the web. It’s free to use for basic needs, and comes with mobile apps for iOS and Android as well.
But if you’ve used the mobile apps before, you’ll quickly find that their functionality is more limited than the desktop app or website.
In particular one really easy thing to do on the desktop is to select multiple blocks of text, which you can do simply by using your mouse to click and drag a selection box.
The Limitations of Mobile
However, this isn’t possible on mobile. When you try to use the regular method of selecting text by tapping and holding or multi tapping to place a selection area and then dragging it to expand, you can’t actually get that selection box to go past the bounds of the current block.
So what can you do? It turns out there is a workaround.
The Solution
Simply turn on Page Lock in the menu for the page, and all the block boundaries will effectively disappear. The content will act like a regular page at that point, so you can then select as much of it as you want.
I’ve tested this out on both iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, as well as Android devices like the Google Pixel 4.
You can easily turn Page Lock off again afterward if desired, so it’s not a terribly difficult thing to do.
Once I discovered this, it’s made Notion much more usable for me on mobile. I can finally copy and paste large chunks of text into other apps.
Now you still can’t use this method to delete multiple blocks at once, since the page is locked which means you can’t edit. As with most technology, there are still limitations.
Thank you! Notion is great on iPhone and iPad but this one issue made it super limiting. This solution works great.
I can’t select multiple pages
100 blessings to you kind person. I was really frustrated that you couldn’t select entire docs on iPhone, but locking the page did the trick!