[leanzubrezki]

Thanks for the question!

When you sync a database, by default the connection will be Notion -> Sheets. Then you can make specific columns Sheets -> Notion, but not both ways the same column.

The idea is to enable a much bigger set of formulas and calculations that are not possible or really complicated in Notion so you can make them in Google Sheets and those values will be then sent to Notion, for example you can use GOOGLEFINANCE, IMPORTXML formulas or even mix and match different databases without the need of relations and roll ups.

Similar to how you define a formula property in Notion now but done in Sheets.

If you have a formula in a column in Sheets, you don't want it to get overwritten by a manual change in Notion . I am doing some testing with 2 way sync but with the current Notion API and change mechanisms in Sheets it is not straightforward to have something that just works for all the cases

[jitl]

What changes could Notion make to the API to make two-way syncing easy or even obvious?

[leanzubrezki]

It is a mix between Sheets and Notion.

From Notion side webhooks could help, getting notified when a page in a database changed so we can update Sheets right on time. If that notification tells which properties changed even better. Moreover that will let us offer real time updates.

From Sheets side, I have tried with the different triggers that Apps Script provides and they are not 100% reliable in how they get executed and the parameters you get. There are some bugs opened in Google issue tracker waiting to be fixed that should address some of the problems, but I don't have a lot of hope as they have been opened for years.