Drawings
Drawings is a shared whiteboard. Use it to sketch an architecture, a flow or an idea, alone or with your team at the same time. A drawing lives in a space like a page or a board, so it sits next to the work it explains.
Creating a drawing
There are three ways to start:
- Open Drawings, choose a space and click New drawing.
- In a Drive folder, click New and choose Drawing.
- In a page, type
/, choose Embed and pick an existing drawing to show it in the page. See Pages.
A new drawing is called Untitled drawing. Click Rename in the header to give it a name.
If you leave a new drawing without drawing anything, it is not kept. You will not find empty drawings in the tree.
The Drawings sidebar lists Drawings in this space, Recently opened and Favourites, and has New drawing and Trash. Right-click a drawing for the same menu as in Drive.
Tools
The toolbar at the top of the canvas holds the drawing tools: shapes, arrows and lines, the pen, text, images and the eraser. Select an element to change its color, stroke, fill and font in the panel on the side.
| Key | Tool or action |
|---|---|
| R | Rectangle |
| O | Ellipse |
| A | Arrow |
| T | Text |
| P | Pen |
| Space + drag | Pan the canvas |
| Ctrl + mouse wheel | Zoom |
To add an image, copy it and press Ctrl V on the canvas. Images larger than 8 MB are not added.
The canvas menu also lets you change the background color and clear the canvas.
Library
Click Library in the header to open the shape library. It has three tabs:
- The space tab, named after the space: shapes shared with everyone in the space.
- Personal: your own shapes, available in all your drawings.
- Built-in: ready-made sets. Infrastructure has a server, database, queue, storage, user and phone. Flowchart has start and end, process, decision, document, data and connector shapes.
Click a shape or drag it to the canvas to add it. Use Search shapes to find one.
To save your own shapes, select elements on the canvas and click Add selection to the library (Personal tab) or Add selection to the space library (space tab). You can also import an .excalidrawlib file: drop it on the panel or use Import an .excalidrawlib file.
Drawing together
Everyone who can edit the drawing can draw on it at the same time. Changes appear for everyone as they happen.
- The header shows the people in the drawing, for example "2 people drawing". You also see their pointers on the canvas.
- Click a person's avatar to Follow them. Your view then moves and zooms with theirs. Click again to Stop following.
- The status in the header shows Saved, Saving…, Connecting… or Offline. When you are offline, your changes wait and are sent when you are back online.
People who can only view see the drawing as Read only. They can select and copy shapes, but not change them.
Export
Click Export in the header. The dialog shows a Preview and the size of the image.
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Format | PNG or SVG. |
| Scale | The size of the exported image. |
| Background | When off, a PNG has a transparent background. |
| Dark theme | Exports the colors with the dark palette. |
| Embed scene data | The file can be opened again as an editable drawing. |
| Selected elements only | Exports only what you selected on the canvas. |
| File name | The name of the exported file. |
Then choose what to do with the image:
- Copy to clipboard to paste it somewhere else.
- Save to Drive to store it as a file in the space.
- Download to save it on your computer.
Sharing
The Share button in the header copies the address of the drawing. Members of the space can open it with their own access.
To give access to someone outside the space, or to create a public link, right-click the drawing in the sidebar or in Drive and choose Share…. Sharing works as described in Drive.
Deleting and restoring
Choose Move to trash from the drawing's menu. Deleted drawings wait 30 days in the Drive trash of the space, where you can restore them. See Drive.