Geiger Notes

Notes works on boards, and there are two kinds. Your personal board is yours alone: go to the Notes home page and choose Continue to Your Board. A project board belongs to a project: open your organization in Dash and launch Notes from one of its projects, and everyone in the project opens the same board.

You need to be signed in to open a board. If a project doesn't exist or you don't have access to it, Notes says so instead of opening the board.

Boards can hold other boards, so a personal or project board can grow into a tree of boards. The Boards guide covers opening and moving around them.

The Notes playground opens a sample project's boards in Notes without an account, so you can try the canvas, documents and sketches before you sign up.

Changes you make in the playground last until you reload the page. Live sessions, meetings and huddles need a Geiger account, so they aren't available there.

Each part of Notes has its own guide. The sections on this page sum them up and link to each one.

A board is a canvas you fill with nodes. To add one, drag a tool from the toolbar down the left side of the board, such as Note, To-do, Table, Image or Board. More tools, like polls, charts, formulas, mind maps and the AI assistant, are in the toolbar's More tools menu. Draw connections between nodes to show how ideas relate, and add a Board node to open a board inside the board.

Notes saves each board on its own, 2 seconds after your last change, so there's no Save button. Deleted nodes can be brought back from Recently deleted while you stay on the board.

• Boards covers moving around, connections, boards inside boards and who can open them.
• Nodes covers each everyday node and the controls every node shares.
• More tools covers embeds, media, code, timers, polls, progress bars, charts, formulas, people, palettes, mind maps, Mermaid diagrams, the AI assistant and mirrors.

Two kinds of node open full editors of their own.

• A document, from the Document tool, is a page of rich text with headings, lists and quotes. Double-click its node to write in the document editor, which saves as you type. See Documents.
• A sketch, from the Draw tool, is a freehand drawing. Double-click its node to draw in the sketch editor. Shapes in a sketch can link to boards, sketches and documents, and Push to board turns shapes into nodes on the board. See Sketches.

Everyone in a project opens the same project board, but boards don't update live: changes show the next time someone opens the board, and when two people change it at once, the later save wins. To work on a board at the same moment, use one of these:

• Live sessions: choose the people icon (Collaborate) in the top bar to put a copy of the board online. Others join with its code, you admit them as editors or viewers, and everyone sees each other's cursors and changes. Afterwards, Merge brings the work back into your board. See Live sessions.
• Meetings: the Meeting tab of the same dialog starts a video call with audio and screen sharing, and a Huddle node starts one from the board itself. See Meetings and huddles.
• Sketches: project members who open the same sketch see each other's cursors and drawing as it happens.

The gear icon (Settings) in the top bar holds your own preferences: how dragging, scrolling and selecting work, the board's grid and minimap, the default style for new connections, the look of every node, which tools your toolbar shows, and your account. They're saved to your account when you choose Save changes, and apply on every board you open.

The Canvas tab also has This board, which changes the open board's background, pattern and theme for everyone, straight away. See Settings.

These work on any board, except while you're typing in a node or field:

• Ctrl C and Ctrl V (⌘ C and ⌘ V on Mac) copy and paste the selected nodes
• Delete or Backspace deletes the selected nodes and connections
• Ctrl and scroll (⌘ and scroll on Mac) zooms, and so does pinching on a trackpad
• Ctrl and click (⌘ and click on Mac) adds a node to the selection or takes it out

The Boards, Documents and More tools guides list the rest.