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Elements & Tools

PDFs, videos & other files

The canvas happily holds the rest of your project too: PDFs, videos, Office documents, plain text, archives — as tidy file cards that open, preview and travel with their folder.

More in Elements & Tools
  1. Notes
  2. Text
  3. Folders
  4. Images
  5. To-do lists
  6. Tables
  7. Documents
  8. Links & rich previews
  9. Shapes
  10. Arrows & connectors
  11. Drawing & Apple Pencil
  12. PDFs, videos & files

Getting files in

Drag & drop them onto the canvas — one or many. Or place them into a board’s folder on disk and adopt them from the New Items pool. Each file becomes a card with an icon, its name and its type.

What each type does

TypeOn double-click
PDFOpens in a new tab (browser) or the built-in viewer (iPhone/iPad/Mac app).
Video (MP4, MOV, WebM…)Plays full-screen; the card shows an auto-generated poster frame with a play button and the duration.
Word (.docx)In-app text preview; “Open in app” hands it to Word & co.
Excel (.xlsx/.xls)In-app sheet preview, tab by tab.
Text (.txt)In-app preview.
ZIP & everything elseDownload / open with the system.
Markdown (.md)Becomes a real, editable document — not just an attachment.

The right-click menu offers Open, Preview and Download for file cards; on iPhone/iPad, files open in the system viewer (QuickLook), so anything iOS can display, visualOS can display.

Page previews on the canvas

A file card doesn’t have to stay an icon. Select a PDF, Word, Excel or text card (or a document) and click the picture icon in the floating bar — the same one that turns a YouTube link into a preview card. The card becomes a white sheet showing the first page, with the file icon, name and type in a label strip underneath. Click the icon again for the page without the label, and a third time to return to the plain icon card — exactly as it was before, same size and position.

Drag any corner to scale the preview; it keeps its page proportions. A double-click on the page or the label opens the file, just like on the icon card. The preview is rendered once, stored with the board and synced to your other devices (in a hidden .doc-thumbs folder next to the file), so iPhone, iPad, Mac and the browser all show the same page. When the file changes on disk, or you edit a document, the page is re-rendered automatically.

What the preview shows

PDFs are rendered faithfully (first page). Word, text and visualOS documents appear as a clean text page — headings, lists and links, without images. Spreadsheets show the first worksheet as a value grid.

Files live with their folder

With a connected folder, each file is stored in the on-disk folder of the board it’s on — move the card into another folder in the app, and the file moves on disk too. Your project folder on disk is genuinely complete: layout, notes, documents and files.

Videos with captions

Videos take captions like images do — select the video and add one via the floating bar. Handy for “final cut v3, client approved”.

Didn’t find what you need?

Tell us what’s missing — feature ideas and bug reports land directly on our roadmap. Or just open the canvas and poke around; you can’t break anything.