Limitations of Status property in Notion formulas

The “Status” property is one of the most essential ones in Notion when working with databases. However, this property wasn’t available from the very beginning. Before the introduction of “Status,” the “Select” property was used to fulfill a similar role.

At first, I didn’t really understand why I might need this new property, but now I can say with confidence: the “Status” property should be used, because “Select” can’t always serve as a proper replacement.

2 Key Advantages of the Status Property

Grouping by “Status”

The main advantage of the “Status” property over “Select” becomes clear when you want to group records in a database. Below, I’ve provided examples of how standard grouping looks when using the “Status” property versus the “Select” property.

At first glance, everything looks pretty much the same, and there doesn’t seem to be a real difference. However, when we dive into the grouping settings—specifically when the “Status” property is used—we see a unique setting: Status by.

As you can see, now we can group not only by individual status options but also by status groups or stages. In many cases, this type of grouping is far more informative.

Grouping by “Select” does not offer this flexibility, because it lacks overarching groups. In contrast, the “Status” property includes default stages like To-Do, In Progress, and Completed. You cannot delete or rename these default groups—but you can add your own options to them.

Displaying as a Checkbox

You can also change how the “Status” property is displayed—either as a Select dropdown or as a Checkbox. If you switch it to Checkbox, clicking on it will automatically set the status to Done.

You can’t change this behavior to set a different status upon checking the box, which makes sense—since checking something usually marks it as complete.

With the Select property, you’re limited to using a dropdown menu. The “Status” property with a checkbox can be especially convenient when using Notion on mobile devices.

Limitations of the “Status” Property in Formulas

To help you understand the limitation I’m about to describe, it’s important to recall the earlier point about grouping by status—because that will become relevant here.

In my formulas, I often filter the results I want to display. For example, I have a project database and a task database. I want to create a formula in the project database that shows the number of completed tasks.

To do this, I use a formula like this:

But here’s the issue: in formulas, I can only reference specific options. That means I can specify In Progress, Archive, or Done, etc. However, I cannot reference an entire status group in the formula.

Why is this a problem?

At first glance, it seems easy enough to just list all the relevant options in the formula—and that’s true. For instance, here I’m summing up both Done and Archive tasks.

However, if I later add a new option to the “Completed” group, I’ll have to manually update the formula to include it. And if I forget to do that, the new option won’t be counted—leading to inaccurate results. Now imagine your system includes dozens of databases and formulas with similar lists. Over time, it becomes easy to lose track of which formulas need to be updated.

If we could reference an entire status group in a formula, any new options added to that group would automatically be included in the calculation.

Conclusion

As someone who loves using and analyzing a lot of data in my Notion templates, I’m convinced that the ability to reference status groups in formulas—not just individual options—would significantly reduce manual work and lower the risk of mistakes. In my opinion, this feature would be both logical and highly useful.

If you use formulas like the ones I’ve mentioned in this article, don’t forget to update them whenever you make changes to your “Status” property options (or other similar properties). Also, remember that formulas are case-sensitive, so option names must exactly match how they’re written in the property. For example, if your status option is written as Done with a capital “D,” you must use the same capitalization in your formula.