Toward the end of 2022, I switched from using Bear Notes as my digital note-taking solution to Obsidian. I’m a little over a year in, and I’ve just stumbled on a neat tip for reusing content across files: The concept of an embed block.

Embed an entire file in another file

Let’s say I’m writing a file, but I’ve got some content in another file called Cool Stuff that I want to include. I don’t want to copy/paste the content from Cool Stuff, because then it’s duplicated across two files. I also don’t want to move the content out of the Cool Stuff file, because that’s where I go to look for cool stuff (obviously). Embed blocks to the rescue!

Contents of Cool Stuff file:

# Top most interesting content
1. Interesting thing #1
2. Interesting thing #2
3. Interesting thing #3

# Other misc interesting content
- Interesting thing
- Interesting thing
- Interesting thing

I can include this content in another note using the double square bracket syntax (typically used for wiki-style internal links) as follows.

Contents of my current note:

[...]

So anyway, here's some other cool stuff I've come across:

![[Cool Stuff]]

Now the entire contents of my Cool Stuff file is included in my current file, without needing to duplicate the contents or move it out of the original file!

Embed part of a file in another file

But sometimes you don’t want to include an entire other file, just a part of it. You can use the header-specific link syntax (i.e. the #), just as you would with a regular internal link:

[...]

So anyway, here's the *absolutely most cool stuff* I've come across:

![[Cool Stuff#Top most interesting content]]