Templates

A blank canvas is freeing, but sometimes you would rather start with structure already in place. Templates give you a ready-made document as a starting point, filled with believable example content, so you can begin from something shaped roughly like what you need and adapt it, instead of building every diagram from nothing.

Starting from a Template

When you create a new document, the New Document wizard opens on its template step. Pick a template, press Next, then name the document and choose where it lives, and press Create. From there it is an ordinary document: move, edit, add, and delete elements exactly as you would on any canvas.

The step opens on the Popular shelf. Below it, Explore More Categories opens any other category as a shelf of its own, and Search templates... finds a template by name across the whole catalogue.

Inside a document, Quick Start offers the same catalogue for a tab that is still empty. It opens when you add a tab, and from the Quick Start button on the banner along the bottom of an empty canvas; pick a template and press Apply to fill that tab, or Cancel to keep it blank.

What's in the Catalogue

The templates browse by category, and the picker skips a category that has nothing in it:

Four blanks lead the Popular shelf, one for each way of working, and sit apart from the categories since starting from nothing is not a kind of diagram: Blank Diagram (an empty canvas), Blank Whiteboard (a board in Draw mode for free drawing without distractions), Blank Illustration (an empty page in Illustrate mode, for an infographic, an article, a slide or a logo) and Blank Plan (an empty tab in Plan mode that opens on Start Planning, to pick the board (or Sheet) that fits the work).

Finding Templates for a Mode

Every template opens in one mode: Diagram, Draw, Illustrate or Plan. The small icon before a template's name says which. To see only one mode's templates, choose it in the dropdown to the left of the search box (hover it, or click it, to see the choices, each with how many templates it holds). Popular, the categories, their counts and your search results all narrow to that mode, and if the template you had selected is not of that mode, the selection moves to the mode's blank. Everything shows every template again. The filter starts on Everything each time the wizard opens.

• Draw templates are drawn by hand, ready to draw over: Sketchnote, Rich Picture, Comic Strip, Doodle Warm-Up, Paper Prototype, Journey Doodle, Pre-Mortem and Idea Garden.
• Illustrate templates open on pages of their own: Article, Slide deck, Logo design, Group card, Event Poster, Year in Review, Résumé, Recipe Card, Data Story, How It Works, Versus and Social Carousel.
• Plan templates set up a way of working across several tabs, with no cards yet: Kanban Board, Project Planner, Bug Tracker, Team Retro, Weekly Planner, Content Calendar, Hiring Pipeline, OKRs, Product Launch and Feedback Board; or a spreadsheet ready to use: Budget Planner, Timesheet, Contact List and Task Tracker.
• Every other template is a Diagram template.

Each one arrives as real elements rather than a picture: a Gantt chart's bars are shapes you drag, a wireframe's frames are device frames you can rearrange. Nothing in a template is locked or special.

Changing the Theme

A new document starts on the Default theme, so the wizard only asks for a template and where to save it (Quick Start keeps the tab's current theme). Once you are on the canvas, click the paintbrush button in the bottom-right corner to open the Tab Look & Feel dialog and try a different theme, including any of your custom themes: it recolours the whole template at once.

Making It Your Own

A template is just a head start, not a constraint. Everything in it is fully editable: rename and recolour the elements, restyle the whole thing with a different theme, or strip out the parts you do not need. Because the document works the same as any other, you can also add tabs, invite others, and share it once you have shaped it into what you want.