The Diagram tour is a guided, interactive introduction to Diagram mode: building a diagram from shapes, arrows and the palette. Rather than showing screenshots, it opens the real panels and menus one at a time, spotlighting each with a highlight ring and a short explanation. It takes about a minute, and you can leave at any point. (It was called the Welcome Tour until October 2026.)
When It's Offered
When you create your first document from the New Document wizard, it offers a centred Getting started with Diagrams? card once you have picked a template or closed Start Diagramming: Yes starts the tour, No dismisses it. (A document opened through Start Blank, a share link or an embed does not offer it, and nor does a view-only document.)
The tour only appears on a Diagram tab. If your first document opens in Draw, Facilitate, Illustrate or Plan, the card waits until you work on a tab in Diagram mode. Those modes have tours of their own: see The Plan Tour, The Facilitate Tour, The Draw Tour and The Illustrate Tour. Switching the tab to another mode partway through ends the tour.
The offer appears once ever. However you answer (decline, skip midway, or finish), it won't come back on its own; the answer is saved with your other settings, so if you're signed in it follows you to every device. You can always replay it from Settings.
What It Covers
The tour walks the diagramming chrome in a natural order:
- The Palette: the strip across the top that every shape, arrow, and icon comes from.
- Selection Modes: the dropdown that changes what your pointer does (Select, Hand, Eraser, and friends). See Selection Modes.
- Palette Categories: the Palette's categories along the strip, with the first one, Shapes, open to show its elements in their groups.
- The Element Menu: the right-click menu (long-press on touch) where styling, links, notes, comments, and actions live. On an empty tab the tour adds a square to show it on, and takes it away again when the tour ends.
- Tabs: one document holds many diagrams, one per tab, plus the + button and the tab menu.
- Theme & Canvas: the button in the bottom-right corner, drawn as a painter's palette, that restyles the whole tab.
A closing You're ready to diagram card then offers Visit Help Centre or Start diagramming.
On a phone the tour is shorter: it skips the Theme & Canvas step. On an Event Storming board it skips Selection Modes and Palette Categories, since the board offers neither.
During the Tour
- Each step shows a step counter ("2 of 6") with progress dots, a title, a sentence or two of copy, and a Next button (with Back from the second step on), with Skip tour always available.
- The highlight ring never blocks your pointer: you're free to poke at whatever is highlighted while the step is up. The tour opens real menus, so what you see is exactly what you'll use afterwards.
- Finishing (or skipping) closes anything the tour opened and returns you to a quiet editor, ready to work.
Replaying the Tour
You can rerun the tour whenever you like:
Close Settings. On a Diagram tab the tour relaunches from the welcome card, exactly like the first run; on a tab in another mode, it waits until you're on a Diagram tab.
Finishing (or skipping) the rerun switches Diagram off again. Plan and Facilitate modes have tours of their own, replayed the same way from Plan and Facilitate: see The Plan Tour and The Facilitate Tour.
Prefer learning by doing? Your First Diagram builds a small connected flow from scratch, and Keyboard Essentials covers the shortcuts that make it fast.
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