Team boards

Teamteam_board.html

Several people on one board at once

A board is meant to be worked on together, so the app checks for other people's changes in the background and refreshes the board when something moves — you will see a short Updated note when it does. It will not refresh while you have a task open, are typing, or are dragging a card.

If somebody saves a task while you have the same one open, your save is refused rather than silently overwriting theirs. Nothing of theirs is lost and nothing of yours is saved; the board reloads to show their version so you can check it and reapply anything still needed.

Teams, boards and who sees what

Three things stack up, and getting them straight makes everything else obvious:

The board, top to bottom. The navigation strip runs My Work · Tasks · Notes · Calendar · Team · OKRs · Messages — My Work opens a menu of your own work (My tasks, Today, Starred, Notes, Calendar, My team board, My OKRs, Messages and Help), and Calendar is one press away from here. Under it is the team context bar, which is where the team switcher lives; then the four views with their counts; then Team at a glance. On a narrower window the navigation drops its words and keeps its icons, so the strip you see may be shorter than the one drawn here.

Search everything

Search everything, in the navigation strip on every page (⌘K or Ctrl+K from anywhere), looks at your tasks and notes, the teams and boards you belong to, the people on your teams, and the objectives and key results you can see — typing at least two characters opens a dropdown grouped by kind. A toggle beside the box switches between Global and searching only the page you are standing on, where that page offers its own narrower search.

An objective or key result also matches on who owns it, not only on its title — titles describe the work, not the person, so typing a colleague's name finds everything they own even when their name appears nowhere in it. A hit found this way shows the owner's name on the result row, so it is clear why it is there.

Choosing a task from the results opens it wherever it actually lives. If that means switching what you are looking at — onto the Watching tab for a task you are only watching, say, rather than one on your own list — the app makes that switch for you and says so at the bottom of the screen with a moment to Undo it, rather than opening the task while leaving the list behind it showing "Nothing matches" with no explanation.

Your first team

If you are not on a team yet, the app offers to create one and you become its administrator.

What a brand-new account sees: the two pickers in the team context bar have nothing to offer and say so, and a line at the foot of the window points at the one place that can fix it. There is no full-screen gate — the answer is given in the control you would have gone to anyway.

1. Open Team settings — Configure team… in the menu under your initials, or More → Board settings… in the team context bar — and name the team on the Team tab — usually your company, department or working group.
2. Create your first board: Team settings → Boards.
3. Invite colleagues at the top of People, then give them the board from their own row.

It opens on the tab that matches where you opened it from. From Tasks, Calendar, Notes or the team board it starts on Teams; from the OKRs page it starts on OKRs, because that is almost always what you went looking for. Every tab is still there and one click away — this changes which one you land on, not what you can reach.

The team switcher sits in the team context bar under the navigation strip, not in the navigation itself. Changing team changes which boards are listed. With only one team there is nothing to choose between, so it simply names the team you are in.

Your teams, and switching between them

The team dropdown in the team context bar, just left of the board dropdown, shows which team you are in and switches between them. Switching changes which boards are listed, so the app moves to the board you were last on in that team — or to its first board, if you have not opened one there yet. A new team is started from Team settings → Team, not from the dropdown.

The Team tab in Team settings is the fuller view: every team you belong to, your role in each, a Switch to button, and what the current team contains.

The board you last opened is remembered, for each team separately, so signing in again opens it rather than making you pick it every time — and looking at another team's board does not change where your usual team opens. There is nothing to set up: choosing a board is what records it, and only choosing one does. Landing somewhere because you have not picked a board in that team yet is not a choice and is not remembered. A link that names a board still wins, so a board somebody sends you opens what it says. And if the remembered board has been deleted, archived, or you have lost access to it, the app opens the first board you can see instead — it never lands you on an error or an empty screen.

The Team tab, with the whole strip beside it. Everyone sees Team, Preferences and View; Groups, Boards, People and Email need a team administrator, and Topics, Swimlanes, Tags and Bulk Import need either an administrator of that specific board or a team administrator — a Super Team Admin and your Organization's owner both count as a team administrator here too — so a team administrator sees these four on every board in the team, not only the ones where they separately hold that board's own admin row. Bulk Import's People half additionally needs a team administrator, which is why that half is hidden rather than refused for anyone else. A tab you cannot use is not shown at all rather than shown and refused. View is the odd one out: it is the only tab here that is about you rather than about the team, and it holds this page's own presentation — the view it opens on, whether the bands above the board are showing, density, and the utility rail.

Team roles

There are three roles in a team.

• Member — works on the boards they have been given.
• Team admin — runs the team: people, groups, topics, swimlanes, tags, and every board the team already has. Creating a new board is not theirs.
• Super Team Admin — everything a team admin does, plus six things that are deliberately rare.

Those six are creating a team, creating a board, configuring the team's email, importing a file of tasks or OKRs into the team, sending the team's invitations, and making somebody else a Super Team Admin. A team is the biggest thing this application has, so making another one should be a decision somebody takes on purpose — administering one team is not by itself a reason to be able to create the next.

“Running an import” is two different jobs, and only one of them is on that list. Importing a file of tasks or OKRs into the team is the Super Team Admin one, and it is refused below that role by the database rather than by the page — so a button you can see is not a job you can finish. Importing people is not on the list at all: it writes roster rows and sends no mail, which makes it the bulk form of adding somebody one at a time, and a team admin who can add one person can import fifty. Telling those people about it is the separate act, and that one is a Super Team Admin's.

A team admin keeps everything else. They can still see the team's email settings, so they can explain why somebody was emailed; they just cannot change them.

A team admin cannot promote anybody to Super Team Admin, themselves included — the role is not in their list, and the database refuses it even if the request is made another way. Only an existing Super Team Admin can hand it out.

Your first team is the exception to all of this. Anyone with no team at all can create one, and becomes its Super Team Admin — otherwise nobody new could ever get started. Once you are in a team, creating another needs the role.

A team’s last Super Team Admin cannot step down or be removed — unless the Organization has an Owner to fall back on. Without one the team would be left with nobody able to change its email, import into it, or appoint a replacement, so the database refuses the change and you promote somebody else first. Where the Organization does have an active Owner, that Owner is the backstop and the removal is allowed: the team is never left with nobody who can administer it, which is the thing the rule is actually protecting. In practice every team is in such an Organization, so expect the removal to go through and expect the Owner to be who picks the team up.

Super Team Admin is not the same as System Admin. System Admin is application-wide and lives in the admin console; Super Team Admin only ever applies to the teams you are in.

Permissions by role: looking the answer up in the app

The three roles above are the shape of the ladder. The exact answer — every capability, against all four roles, in one table — is inside the application, and it is called Permissions by role. Open it while you are deciding what to give somebody. It describes what the system actually enforces rather than what a role’s name suggests: every row names the database rule that actually decides it, and those rules were read from the database to check each one.

Three doors, one table. All three are in People, and all three open exactly the same thing:

• For one person — the … menu on their row → Edit assignments. The button sits on the line naming who you are editing.
• For several at once — tick them, press Assign people, and it is beside the role you are about to hand out.
• Without picking anyone first — a Permissions by role button sits on the People pane itself, beside Invite people…. Use this one when you just want to look the answer up.

Opening it costs you nothing you were in the middle of. It is a reference rather than a control: it reads nothing, saves nothing and grants nothing. The teams, boards and groups you had ticked, the role you had chosen and the notify box are all exactly as you left them when you close it. Esc closes the table and leaves the dialog underneath standing, so the next Esc is the one that closes that.

It also does not know who is reading it. There is no highlighted column and no “you are here” — it is the same table for everybody, which is what makes it something you can look at on somebody else’s behalf.

How to read it

Four columns. Member, Team admin and Super Team Admin are the team ladder and build on each other in that order. Organization Owner is set apart on purpose: it is a role over the whole Organization, not a fourth rung on that ladder, and the two are never merged.

Four answers, and each one is written out in words as well as drawn, so the table still reads with the color taken out of it:

• Allowed — yes, for that role, always.
• Allowed in some cases — yes, but only in a stated one, and the case is written under the capability itself rather than hidden in a footnote. That line is the real answer; read it before you decide anything on the strength of the tick beside it.
• Not allowed — no.
• Not decided by role — the columns cannot answer it, because something other than a role decides. Being added to a task as a collaborator is the example: that is granted per task, and no role here gives it or takes it away.

The rows are grouped the way the decision actually breaks down — their own work, running a team they already have, changing the shape of things, and running the Organization — and a short list at the foot says what the four columns deliberately leave out, including the fact that administering a single board is a separate thing again and needs no team role at all.

Choosing which role to give somebody

Choose the lowest role that gives them what they need, which is the sentence at the top of the table and the whole reason it exists. Each step up adds acts that are hard to undo rather than acts that are merely useful, and the role cards at the foot of the table summarize each one in a line if you want the short version.

Roles are per team, so this is not one decision for the whole person. Somebody can be a Super Team Admin in the team they run and an ordinary Member in the other two, and that is the ordinary arrangement rather than an awkward one.

Four that catch people out

These are the ones worth knowing before you open the table, because each is a place where the role’s name and the enforced rule pull in different directions.

• A team admin already sees everybody in the Organization — the whole roster, not only their own team’s part of it. That is deliberate, and it is not something you grant separately.
• But seeing everybody and assigning them are two different permissions. Moving people between teams, boards and groups across the Organization — and the license count — is the Organization Owner’s, and nobody else’s. This is the one most worth knowing while you are standing in Assign people.
• Owning the Organization does not put you on its boards. An Organization Owner works on a board because they hold a place on it, like anybody else. Ownership is authority over the Organization, not a key to everything inside it.
• Closing the Organization is not a flat yes even for its Owner. An Owner can delete one that is already empty. Closing one that still has people in it needs a System Administrator as well — and the refusal arrives after you have typed the Organization’s name, so it is worth knowing first.

The fifth is the import split described above: importing a file of tasks or OKRs is a Super Team Admin’s and importing people is not.

People, groups and boards

The dialog is called Team settings for now — every reader sees that name today. It has a second name it will grow into: once you belong to a named Organization, the same dialog retitles itself to your Organization's own name and its eyebrow reads ORGANIZATION SETTINGS, because at that point it is administering the Organization, not just the team. Nothing else about it changes — same tabs, same two doors in, same everything below on this page — and this manual keeps saying “Team settings” throughout because that is the name every reader has today. See the Organization mark for the one place this actually matters day to day.

There are two ways in. More → Board settings… in the team context bar opens it on the Boards tab with the board you are reading already picked out, so you are looking at the right board rather than hunting for it. Configure team… in the menu under your initials opens the same dialog on its Team tab; that entry is there for team administrators. The board has no settings button in its toolbar — the two entries above are how you get there. Team administrators get six extra tabs in there, and the first three sit in the order you would set them up: Groups, then Boards, then People — with Email after them. Bringing people in from a spreadsheet is no longer a tab of its own: it is the People half of Bulk Import, near the end of the strip. Do the first three in that order and placing somebody is one choice from a list rather than a dozen ticks. Between Boards and People sits OKRs — a separate, smaller list of who may open the team's objectives and key results; see OKR access below.

People. Inviting is at the top, because it is where the flow starts; each row then says which boards and which groups that person has.

Inviting somebody

Invite people by email address, at the top of the People tab — type one address, or several separated by commas. Semicolons and line breaks work too, so a list pasted straight out of a mail client goes in as it is. Adding one person emails them their invitation as the row is saved, and adding several does the same for every one of them, in that same act — there is no second step to remember and no dialog to go and find. Any address that is not a valid email, or is already on this team, is skipped rather than holding up the rest; the status line names who was skipped and why. For everybody who does go through, that same status line says which of three things happened: they were added and emailed, they were added and email is switched off system-wide, or they were added and the message could not be sent right now. In all three they are genuinely on the team; only the message is ever in doubt, and the third case tells you to try again from Email invitations in this same pane. Changing team or organization clears the box and the status line — an address typed for one team is never carried into another, so a switch always leaves you typing into the team the dialog now names.

Until they create an account they are listed with no account yet. They are still genuinely on the team, and there is nothing more for you to do — when they register with that address the two connect on their own.

Your team's own email switch does not apply to this. That switch is about how much notification mail people with accounts receive, and somebody who has no account has no preference to consult — so a team with notifications turned off still invites people normally. The one switch that does stop it is the application-wide one, and only a system administrator holds that.

If somebody has signed up and still shows as waiting, check the address. People are matched by email, so registering with a personal address after being invited on a work one leaves them looking unregistered. Remove the invitation and re-add the address they actually used.

What the invitation looks like when it arrives. It comes from your team's name, headed by the team's own uploaded picture — not the corner mark you see elsewhere on every page, Team or Organization, rather than by this product's name — so somebody who has never seen the application recognizes who is asking before they have read a word of it. A team that has not uploaded a mark simply gets no picture, and the message reads correctly without one; nothing is left as an empty box. The address it is sent from is unchanged.

There is no code in it, and there is nothing for you to hand out separately. Creating an account is open to anybody, so an invitation is a message rather than a credential: what it carries is a link that already knows the address you invited them at. Following it opens the sign-in page on the create-account tab with that address filled in. That is not a security measure — it is what stops somebody registering with a different address and landing outside the team you just put them on.

Nothing in it expires, so an invitation that sits unread for a fortnight still works. Invitations used to carry a sign-up code with a deadline on it, and chasing a lapsed one was the commonest reason to re-send. That is gone. You can still re-send freely — nothing is spent by it, nobody who has already registered is affected, and there is no state to clean up first.

What does have a deadline is the six-digit code they are emailed after they create the account, to prove the address is theirs. That one lasts an hour and it is entirely between them and their inbox; you cannot see it, send it or reset it, and asking for a new one is a button on their own screen. Somebody stuck at that step shows on your roster exactly like somebody who has not registered at all, so if a person says they signed up and you still see no account yet, that is the step to ask them about. Verifying your email address is what they are looking at.

Emailing the invitation — and telling a board it has a new member

Adding somebody already emails them, one address or several in one go. This button is for the batch — the people added before that behavior existed, the ones whose invitation could not be sent at the time, and everybody on a board who needs telling. It is at the top of People, under the invite row.

Its label tells you what it is offering you, because that depends on your role and on whether anybody is actually stuck:

• Email invitations (3) — the count is how many people on this team were invited and have not created an account, so “is anybody still stuck?” is answered without a click.
• Email invitations — nobody on the team is waiting. The button still works: a board may have people to tell even when the team has nobody left to invite.
• Email board invitations — what you see if your authority is over boards rather than over the whole team.

Emailing the whole team's invitations needs a Super Team Admin. It is the team speaking to people outside it, which is at least as large an act as configuring how the team speaks to the people inside it — and that is already restricted, so this sits at the same level. The database refuses the send regardless of how the request is made, so this is a real permission rather than a hidden control.

Emailing one board's roster only needs authority over that board. Telling the people already on a board that they are on it is an ordinary board courtesy, and putting somebody on a board is a board administrator's job in the first place. So the split you will actually notice is this: a board administrator can always mail the board they administer, and speaking for the whole team stays with a Super Team Admin.

Pressing it opens Email invitations. Four things to know:

• Choose who first. The Invite dropdown at the top is the first control because everything under it answers to it: Everybody on this team, or People on a named board, with the number beside each board so you do not have to choose one to find out. It goes back to the whole team every time the dialog opens — a remembered scope would mean a second press quietly emailing a different set of people from the first.
• Then tick the people — and check what is already ticked, because it differs by scope on purpose. On the whole team, everybody starts ticked: that list is by construction only people who are stuck. On a board, only the people who have never registered start ticked, because twenty colleagues who have had access for months is an email nobody can un-send. Select all and Select none are there for the rest, and the count beside them is what will be sent. At most 50 in one send; a larger selection is refused with the number named rather than quietly trimmed, so you send two batches knowingly. One send per team per minute, and a board counts separately from its team.
• Also send a copy to me gives you exactly the message everybody else receives — not a preview of it. Tick it on its own, with nobody else selected, to see the real thing before you send it to anyone.
• The result is per person, not a total. Each address comes back sent, or skipped with the reason: they have registered since, the same address is listed twice, no usable address on that row, or the mail provider could not be reached. A failure is named against the person it happened to.
• A run that half succeeds says so, in both halves. Sending to a board where some people have accounts and some do not reads back naming both groups. Nothing is refused as a whole because part of it could not go, and the closing line names what went and what did not rather than reporting only the part that worked.

Choosing a board changes who is emailed and what they are told, and this is the part worth reading twice. A board's list is everybody on that board, not only the people who never registered — and the two groups get different messages:

• Somebody who already has an account is told they now have access, with a link straight to the board rather than to the sign-up page. Sending a colleague of five years a “create your account” message would be untrue, and it would send them somewhere they cannot use.
• Somebody who has no account yet is invited to create one, with the board named in its first line and their own address already in the link, because they have to have an account before a board means anything to them.

The sentence at the top of the dialog tells you which of those you are about to do, and in what proportions, before you press anything. Nobody who is not ticked is emailed.

You cannot invite an outside address straight onto a board, and nothing here changes that. The only way onto a board is the Boards dropdown on somebody's row in People, and People lists people who are already on the team. So this button reaches the same people it always could — from a shorter list, and with the right message for each of them.

If it says application email is switched off, nothing was sent and nothing changed — a system administrator turns it back on in the admin console's Application email switch, and the button then works. It is a refusal you can see, deliberately, rather than a batch of colleagues quietly receiving nothing.

Adding several people from a spreadsheet

Bulk Import → People takes a spreadsheet or CSV and adds everybody in it at once. It used to be a tab of its own called Import people; on 2026-09-24 it joined board-task importing under one Bulk Import tab, where a two-way switch at the top chooses which you are doing. The board selector on the Board tasks side belongs to that side only — people join the team, not a board. Say which column is the email address — nothing can be imported without one — check the preview, and press Import. Everyone arrives as a member: roles are not imported, and who may administer the team is still a decision you make afterwards, one row at a time.

Read the result carefully, because a run can half-succeed. The report counts four different things and they have four different fixes:

• Imported — on the team now.
• Skipped as duplicates — already on the team. Nothing to do.
• Not imported — rows this page never attempted, because something in the row was wrong. Fix them in the spreadsheet and import again.
• Refused by the database — rows that were attempted and the database turned down. That is a permission or a constraint, and it is not your file that is wrong. The reason it gives is shown with the row, in the database's own words rather than a tidied-up version of them.

A run with any refusals is reported as a failure, not a success — even when some rows went in. The closing line names both halves: how many were added, and how many were refused and why. This matters because the two counts pull in opposite directions. “3 added to this team” in the success color, after the database refused thirty-seven, would leave you believing the job was done and reaching for the file again — and re-importing is exactly the wrong move. The people who were added really were added; only the refused rows are still outstanding.

Giving somebody access

Each person's row carries two dropdowns: Boards and Groups. Open one, tick what applies, and close it — the changes save as you tick, and the list refreshes once when you close rather than jumping about underneath you. Closed, each one names what is chosen, so you can read everybody's access straight down the list.

• Boards gives one person access to one board. The star beside a board makes them an administrator of it, and only appears once they are actually on it.
• Groups is usually the better answer. Give the group access to a board and everyone in it gets in; add somebody to the group later and they reach every board that group can open. It is also the grant that stays right when a new board is added later.
• A board reached through a group is ticked but locked, with a note saying so. It is real access and it is not that person's row to take away — remove them from the group, or the group from the board.

Being on the team on its own grants nothing. Access comes from a board, or from a group that has one.

OKR access — a separate list from boards

A team has boards, plural, so board access is a person-by-person and group-by-group choice. A team has one OKR space, so who may open it is a single list, kept on its own OKRs tab between Boards and People in Team settings — not another dropdown on the People row.

The tab itself only explains the feature and holds the button that opens the list; pressing Manage OKR access… opens the picker. It works like the board and group pickers beside it: a search box, Select all and Deselect all (both act only on whatever the search is currently showing, exactly like the board picker), and Select new members, which ticks everyone eligible on the team who does not have OKR access yet without touching who is already ticked. A running count of how many are selected sits above Save.

Unlike the board and group pickers, this list is reconciling, not only adding. It opens with everyone who currently has access already ticked, so unticking somebody and pressing Save removes their access — there is no separate "remove" control elsewhere, because this tab is the only place OKR access is granted at all. Save only ever changes the rows that actually changed, and re-reads the list afterward so what you see is what was actually saved — never a tick that looked like it worked but did not.

Team Admins are shown, ticked, and labeled Access via Team Admin role — a team admin already administers every OKR in the team the same way they administer every board, so their row cannot be unticked. It is there to tell you that plainly rather than to leave you wondering why they are missing from a list you have never added them to.

You can select somebody who has not signed in yet — their row is ordinary and tickable, tagged has not signed in yet so you know it will not take effect immediately. The grant is recorded against their place on the team, not against the email address they were invited on, so there is nothing to redo: the moment they sign in, it activates on its own. There is nothing extra for you to do either way.

Anyone not selected does not see OKRs in their navigation for this team and cannot open the page, even if OKRs are switched on for the team as a whole — the team switch and this list answer two different questions. OKR access is managed separately for each team. See the OKRs page's own explanation of the two together.

Finding the right people

The Show filter at the top narrows the list to one or more groups. It opens on All groups every time, which shows everyone — including people who are in no group at all, who are usually exactly who you came to find. Ticking several groups shows anybody in any of them, and the count beside it says what you narrowed from.

• People — invite, promote to team admin, give board and group access, remove. A team admin manages the team's people and boards, and administers every board in it. Deciding which role to hand somebody is a question with an exact answer in the app: see Permissions by role, which opens from a person's own row here.
• Groups — create a group, then fill it. Find someone at the top of the editor: click it to browse, or start typing a name or an email address and the list narrows as you type; it offers only people who are not in the group yet, so picking a name always does something. Select all puts everyone with an account in at once — and if they are all in already it says so rather than offering a button that would do nothing. Remove everyone asks first, names the board access that goes with it, and leaves an Undo removal button beside the list until you close the editor. The ticks are still there for one person at a time. Far less bookkeeping than adding people one by one.
• Boards — rename and delete boards, and grant group access to them. Creating one needs a Super Team Admin; everything else about running a board is an ordinary team admin's.

Four tabs configure the board you are looking at rather than the team: Topics, Swimlanes, Tags and Import. Each starts with a Board selector saying which board it is editing.

There is no separate Roster tab. Who can open a board is granted from People — a person's own row, or a group that has the board — and read back from Who is on this board in the team context bar, which also says who administers it. Preferences is available to everyone — it holds your own display choices and affects nobody else: the Links section on tasks, and what an exported report includes. View is yours too, and holds how this page presents the board to you.

Where the board's controls are

Under the navigation strip is the team context bar, and it answers the questions in the order you ask them: which view (Board, Owned, Completed, Archived — with Focused at the right-hand end of that same row), which team, who is on this board, which board, how it is grouped, Mine, then a cluster of buttons at the row's end — the filters, Clear all, and a More menu.

The team switcher is in that bar, not in the navigation above it. It says whose boards you are looking at, which is the question you answer before any of the others — so it sits with them rather than with your account controls.

Below the context bar are two bands of figures — the board at a glance, then the work by assignee — and then the board's own toolbar: + Topic, the fold-all button, the density pair, and + Add Task. The figures are filters: pressing one narrows the board.

One button folds every topic band, and it says what the next press will do. While every band is open the button is lit and reads Collapse all topics. Press it and it turns off and reads Expand all topics. Fold a single band by hand and it turns off as well, because not everything is open any more — so the next press opens the rest rather than shutting the ones you left. On the Owned, Completed and Archived tabs the same button reads sections instead of topics, because that is what a group is on those lists. It is not drawn at all when there is nothing to fold: with Group by Topic off, the board is one row of lanes and has no bands.

Tasks by tag shows a single row, however many tags the board has in play. +NN more at the end of that row opens the rest in place, and the same control closes them again.

The board's own toolbar, directly above the first topic. Adjustments on the left, the controls that reshape the whole view in the middle, then the one thing this screen is for. The fold-all button is drawn here as a fresh board draws it — off, offering Expand all topics, because a new board keeps its empty No topic band folded. Group by and Mine are here and in the context bar on purpose — two doorways to one preference, never two answers.

The people list: who still has work, and how far along

The people icon beside the Board selector opens the board's people list. On the Board tab it answers one question — who still has work to finish?

• People with work that is not complete, or whose only remaining work is on hold, are listed. Finish everything you are carrying — with nothing left on hold — and you drop off the list; someone whose sole remainder is on hold stays, with their row saying so, since a card that vanished would look like their work had disappeared rather than paused. That is the point: it is a list of what is outstanding, not a list of who is on the team.
• Least complete first. Somebody at 0% is at the top and somebody at 67% is near the bottom. Where two people are at the same percentage, the one with more still to do comes first.
• Each name carries its figures — 3/5 for cards done out of cards held, then the percent. They sit in columns so you can read down them.
• Picking a name filters the board to that person, exactly as it always did. Anyone you have picked stays on the list even at 100%, so you can always let them go again.

The other tabs still list everybody. On Owned, Completed and Archived the list is the full board membership — a Completed tab that hid everyone who had finished would hide exactly the people that tab is about.

Unassigned is not on this list. It is a pile rather than a person, and the By assignee band above the board is where it is shown.

Work that is On Hold does not count toward anyone’s total or percent. A task sitting in the On Hold lane is neither open nor done, so it is left out of the arithmetic behind the people list and the By assignee cards — and out of the matching per-person figures in the board’s export. If somebody reads 3 of 5 done · 60%, none of those five is on hold.

Somebody whose only remaining work is on hold still has a card — it is not the same as having nothing. Instead of a percent it reads N on hold, so it is clear at a glance that the reason nothing is “open” is that everything is paused, not finished. Somebody with a mix keeps their normal N of M done · P% figures with · Q on hold added beside them — the on-hold count never changes the percent itself. Only somebody carrying genuinely nothing — no open, done or on-hold work at all — has no card.

The On Hold lane’s own count, plus the Tasks by status breakdown, are unchanged — those answer “what is in each status”, which is a different question, and hiding a status from a breakdown of statuses would simply be wrong. Blocked and Monitor still count as open.

Sort: putting the cards in the order you want

Sort sits between Group by Topic and Mine, and it orders the cards in every lane, under every topic, at once — it is one decision about the whole board, not a setting you make topic by topic.

It offers the same four orders the task list does, because it is the same control:

• Smart — starred cards first, then by due date, with undated cards at the end. This is the default, and it is the one that answers "what should I look at".
• Due date — the calendar order, ignoring the star. Undated cards still come last: a card with no date is not urgent, and putting it in the middle would imply a date nobody set.
• Title — alphabetical, for finding a card you already know the name of.
• Newest — most recently created first.

Comfy and Compact are in the same menu, under a rule, exactly as they are on Tasks — so one control answers both "in what order" and "how much of each card".

The order is yours and it is remembered, on every board you open and in every session. It is also separate from the task list's own sort: changing the board's order does not touch how My Tasks is sorted, and changing the task list's order does not touch the board. They are two lists, and you may well want them ordered differently.

On a narrower window the word Sort drops away and the control keeps its symbol and the order in force — the same thing it does on the Tasks page, and hovering it still says which order that is.

Comfy and Compact

Comfy and Compact in the toolbar are two ways of drawing the same board. Nothing is added or taken away by switching — every card is still there, in the same lane, in the same order, and the choice follows you to Tasks, Notes and the calendar, because it is one preference for the whole suite rather than a setting on this screen.

Comfy draws each task as a card: the title, a line of what it says, its tags, who it is for and when it is due. It is the one to use when you are reading a board rather than working down it.

Compact draws the same facts in less room, stacked instead of stretched: the title across the top — up to two lines — then who it is for on its own line, then a last line with when it is due, its OKR flag, its comment count and the control that moves it between lanes. Each line starts at the same place on every card, so you can still run your eye down a lane and read whose work it is without reading anything else.

Three things a compact card will not shorten. The person’s name is shown in full. The due date is shown in full, including the year, and it is the one thing on that last line that never gives up room — if the line runs out of space the OKR flag and the comment count are clipped first, deliberately. Only the title is shortened, with an ellipsis, and only once it has used both its lines; the whole title is always in the task itself.

Two things a compact row does not draw, and it is worth knowing which: a task's tags, and the eye that marks a task you are watching. A row is one line of fixed columns, and a tag list is neither — it is a different length on every task, so giving it room means taking room from the title on every row that has no tags. Nothing is lost: both are on the comfortable card, both are in the task itself, and a screen reader is told about them at either density. Switch to Comfy when tags are what you are scanning for.

A compact lane is the same width as a comfortable one, so switching density changes how much of a lane you see down the page, never how many lanes you see across it. It used to be wider, and for a while it was even wider on a tablet than on a desktop — that was a mistake, and it was corrected on 14 September 2026. Compact buys its room by stacking, not by taking width from the board.

Neither density changes how many cards a lane shows before it offers View all: that is the board's own setting, and both draw the same number.

Pinning the bands, or letting the page scroll

Above the board sit the team and board row, Team at a glance and By assignee. Normally they stay put while the board scrolls underneath them, so you can always see which team, which board and whose work you are looking at. On a laptop that is most of the window before a single card is drawn.

Pin turns that off and on, and it lives at the far end of the context bar's own cluster of buttons (see where the board's controls are) — behind its own divider, after Filters, Clear all and More. That divider is deliberate: those three narrow or reveal what the board shows, and Pin changes how the page scrolls instead, which is a different kind of thing.

Unpinned, the bands scroll away with everything else and the lanes get the whole page; pinned, they stay where they are. The button shows which way it is set, and the choice is saved to your account, so the board opens the way you left it on every device you sign in from.

Nothing is hidden either way — unpinning does not remove the bands, it just stops holding them on screen. Scroll back to the top and they are there.

Adding work to a lane

+ Add task at the foot of any lane opens a line right there. Type a title and press Enter — the task lands in that lane, under that topic, owned by you — and the line stays open for the next one. Esc closes it.

Everything else a task can carry is still there: More… opens the full form with what you have typed already in it, and the card you just made opens the same form on a click. It is the same task in your own list too — it has not been copied anywhere.

Moving a task without dragging

Every card you can edit carries its lane as a chip at the bottom of the card — it says which lane the task is in, and pressing it opens a short Move to lane menu. Pick a lane and the task moves exactly as dragging it does: useful on a touch screen, and the way to do it without a mouse. Pressing the chip again closes the menu rather than reopening it.

From the keyboard, press m on a focused card. That opens the same menu at the same chip, so the drag has a keyboard equivalent in one key rather than two. Escape closes it and puts you back on the card you were on.

The lane the task is already in is ticked and cannot be chosen — it would do nothing — so the first thing the keyboard lands on is a real destination.

The lane that finishes work is marked · completes in that list, whatever it is called on your board: move a task there and it is complete, in your own list as well, with today's date on it. That mark comes from how the lane is configured, not from its name, so a lane called “Shipped” is marked and a lane merely named “Complete” that has not been set up that way is not.

On a card you can only read, the lane is shown as plain text rather than as a chip — the card still tells you where the task is, it just is not the control that moves it. And if a task is sitting in a lane that has since been renamed away, the chip says so and still offers every live lane, so it is also the way out.

Finding your own work on a board

Mine, in the context bar and again in the board's toolbar, shows only the work whose next action is yours — tasks assigned to you, plus tasks you own that nobody is assigned to. Press it again to see everybody's. It is the same filter you get by clicking your own card in By assignee — there is no separate switch behind it, which is why the two always agree — and it combines with a topic or a date range if you have one set.

That is different from the Owned tasks tab, which is narrower: board tasks you own that you have taken off your own task list.

Working the board

A topic band with its swimlanes, under the four views and their counts. The band header folds the topic, and at its right-hand end one small button folds every lane in that band and no other — lit while they are all open, and named for the band it belongs to, so a screen reader hears Collapse all lanes in “Roadmap” rather than eight identical buttons. Every lane ends with + Add task, and every card you can edit carries its lane as a chip you can press to move it.

• Columns are swimlanes and can be named anything. Drag a card between them to change its status, or use the lane chip on the card.
• Topics group cards into bands. Collapse a band by clicking its header; the app remembers which were closed.
• Any single swimlane can be folded away too, per topic — see Folding a swimlane away.
• Owned, Completed and Archived are separate views, so finished work leaves the board without being lost. Each tab carries its own count, and the counts follow whatever you have filtered to.
• Search and Group by sit in the team context bar, and Group by is offered again in the board's toolbar, with + Topic beside them: it opens Team settings on the Topics tab with the cursor already in the name box.

Putting topics and swimlanes in order

Drag a row by the grip on its left. In Team settings → Topics and → Swimlanes, each row has a handle at its front; pick it up and drop it where you want it, and the board follows. This replaced the pair of up/down arrows on every row, which took eight clicks to move the last item to the top.

It works from the keyboard too. Tab to the grip and press ↑ or ↓ — the row moves one place per press and the focus goes with it, so you can keep pressing. Active and inactive topics are ordered separately, because the board never mixes the two.

Only a board administrator sees the grips. Without one, the rows simply have no handle rather than a handle that refuses.

Team configuration: Boards, Groups, Topics, Tags and Swimlanes

These five tabs in Team settings are where the board's shape is configured, as opposed to worked in day to day. Boards and Groups are covered above — creating and naming boards, and granting a group of people access to them, in People, groups and boards. Topics and Swimlanes are the board's two axes — a topic groups cards into a band, a swimlane is a column within it — and their shared reordering is covered just above. Every tab's own settings open folded to a title and remember what you opened only for this sign-in — see Every section starts folded in the Tasks manual, which covers both this dialog and My settings the same way. What follows fills in what those tabs also do beyond reordering: retiring instead of deleting, and the one Swimlanes setting that changes what a drag actually does.

Tags, and the vocabulary they draw from

Team settings → Tags is where a board's own tags are created, renamed and retired — a separate list from the personal tags you make for yourself in the Studio, and from the quick way to add one from inside a task. Type a name into New tag name to add one. Renaming waits for you to leave the field or press Enter before saving, because a rename rewrites every task carrying that tag — saving on every keystroke would mean a flurry of writes for a name you have not finished typing.

Only a board administrator sees this tab's controls.

Retire, don't delete — the same rule for tags and topics

Inactivate is the button you want almost every time. It hides a tag or topic from the pickers a task editor offers, so nobody starts using it for new work, while leaving it exactly as it is on every task that already carries it — closing out a workstream does not strip the label off a year of history, and the same restraint applies to Topics. Retired tags and topics sit in their own Retired card, folded separately from the active list, and Reactivate puts one back in front of everyone in one click.

Delete is the separate, deliberately harder action underneath it. Deleting a tag or topic removes it from every task that had it — a topic's tasks fall back to No topic rather than disappearing. You can select several rows and act on them together with Select all and the bulk toolbar's own Inactivate selected, but there is no bulk delete: removing several at once is rare enough, and destructive enough, that it stays a one-row-at-a-time decision.

Topics carry one more, more destructive button again below Delete: it deletes every task filed under that topic, not just the label. That is not the same click as retiring or deleting the topic itself, on purpose — “stop using this topic” and “throw away everything in it” must never be one button pressed by accident.

The completion lane: which swimlane finishes a task

In Team settings → Swimlanes, one column in the list is headed Completes tasks: a checkbox per row, and only one may be checked at a time. Whichever swimlane carries it is the one where dropping a card marks the task complete — not a swimlane merely named “Complete” or “Done”. A lane's display name is just a name; checking this box is what gives one lane real meaning to the board, and renaming the lane afterwards does not move that meaning to a different one.

A board can also have no completion lane at all — clearing the checkbox is allowed, and a board in that state simply has no drag-to-finish; tasks are still completed the ordinary way, from the task editor. Checking a new lane automatically clears whichever one had it before, because only one can be flagged at a time; the database itself enforces that limit, so two people racing to set it on different lanes cannot both win.

A brand-new board starts with five swimlanes already in place — To-do, Active, Blocked, Monitor and Complete — and Complete is already checked as the completion lane, so dragging a card into it finishes the task from the moment the board exists. The Swimlanes tab shows all five as soon as you open it, with nothing more to set up first.

Owner, assignee, and leaving a task unassigned

Owner is who is accountable for the task. Assignee is who is doing it. They are often different people and neither implies the other.

A task can be left unassigned. Owner → Unassigned is a real state, not a gap: work arrives on a board before anybody picks it up. An unassigned task stays on the board and appears in nobody's personal task list — not the creator's, not every board member's.

Assigning somebody who is not on the board

The Assignee list offers your whole team, not only the people already on this board. Anyone who cannot open the board is marked not on this board.

Picking one of them asks you first. To be assigned a task, a person has to be able to open the board it is on — otherwise the task carries their name and they never see it. So the app says so and offers to fix it in place:

• Yes — they are added to the board and the task becomes theirs, without leaving the task you are editing.
• No — nothing happens. They are not added, the task is not assigned to them, and the assignee goes back to whoever it was. A line under the field says so, so it is never a silent refusal.

Only a board or team administrator can add somebody to a board. If you are not one, you are told which and asked to have an admin add them — and the task is not assigned either way. That is enforced by the database, not by the message.

Contributors

Contributors is a picker now, not a box you type into. It shows None or a short summary of who is already on it, and a Choose… button opens a search-and-tick list — the same dialog Notes and the OKR editor already use to choose several people at once.

The list offered is this board's own roster of registered accounts, not the wider team the Assignee field offers. Naming somebody as a contributor records that they are helping and lets the app email them about the task; it does not grant them anything else, so there is no access question to ask and no prompt to add them to the board.

Show in my tasks

Under Owner, the person who owns a task sees Show in my tasks. It decides whether the task also appears in their own individual task list, and it is ticked by default when they become the owner.

• Ticked — the owner sees it in Tasks as well as on the board.
• Unticked — it stays on the board and leaves their personal list.
• Unassigned — nobody gets it in their personal list this way.

Opening the same task in Tasks

A task that is in your own list shows My Task under its title. It opens the same task in Tasks — the same task, not a copy. The button is absent when the task is not in your list.

Folding a swimlane away

Press a swimlane's heading to fold it. It becomes a narrow strip with its name and its count still on it, and the lanes either side get the room — useful for a lane with forty cards in it, or an empty one you are not working in today. Press the strip again to open it.

It is folded for that topic only. The same lane appears under every topic, and they hold different work: folding In Progress under Customer Work leaves In Progress under Internal Work exactly as it was. Each topic header also carries one button that folds every lane in that band and nothing else. It is lit while they are all open and reads Collapse all lanes; once any of them is folded it turns off and offers to Expand all lanes instead.

An empty lane can be folded like any other — it is not removed for you, and when it is open it says No tasks rather than showing an empty box.

Email notifications for the team

Team settings › Email decides what leaves the app as an email. The Message Center is unaffected by everything on that tab — turning email off does not turn notifications off, it turns off the copy that arrives in an inbox.

Email is off for every team until a team admin turns it on. Nothing leaves the app before that, so you can try it on one team without anybody else noticing.

Once it is on, five events can send an email. Four of them are on from the start, and they are the same shape — somebody has made something your business:

• Direct @mentions — somebody names you in a comment.
• Task assigned — only when the assignee actually changes. Saving a task again sends nothing.
• Note shared — only to the person added, and only when they are added.
• Objective or key result ownership — being made accountable for something.

A direct @mention can also carry a short summary of what changed, underneath the usual reason you got the email. It is written once, by whoever wrote the comment, using their own AI Assistant and their own key, at the moment they post it. If they have not set one up, or nothing usable comes back, nobody who was mentioned gets a summary — everybody gets exactly the email they always have. Your own AI Assistant makes no difference either way: you do not need one to receive a summary somebody else’s browser wrote, and having one does not add a summary that theirs never produced. Either way, it never tells you anything you could not already open yourself.

The fifth is different, which is why it is not in that list: a task you watch is updated — something you asked to follow rather than something somebody handed you. It is off until it is switched on, and it needs both halves: this team’s tick here, and your own A task I watch is updated. See watching a task that is not yours.

Changes to a task you are not watching are off, and stay off.

Ordinary comments and OKR progress are not on this tab at all, and that is a correction rather than a change. They used to appear here as ticks a team admin could switch on — and switching them on never sent anything, because nothing in the product has ever emailed about them. A tick that can be set and does nothing is worse than no tick, because you stop looking for the real answer. They have been withheld rather than deleted: if your team had one switched on, the tab says so and keeps the setting, so nothing of yours was thrown away. Comments reach you by @mention, and OKR progress is on the board.

Only a team admin can change these. You are never emailed about something you did yourself, and one event never emails you twice. You choose which of your own addresses receives them in Account › Notification email.

Task reminders are a sixth thing, and they start on

Switching a team's email on also makes task reminders available on that team's boards — a schedule somebody sets on one task, rather than an event the team chooses. A reminder is a sixth thing that can send email and it is not one of the five above: nobody switches it on, because a reminder is already somebody asking to be reminded. See email reminders on a board task.

The Email tab carries a tick for reminders all the same, and it is the only one on the tab that starts ticked — every other event here is off until somebody asks for it, and this one sends until somebody stops it.

Unticking it does not silence reminders on its own, and it is the one thing on this tab that behaves that way. People are on more than one team, and a reminder to somebody stops only when every team of theirs that sends email has unticked it. One team cannot switch off mail another team is willing to send — the same shape as the five above, where one team saying yes is enough. A reminder on a task that is on no board at all is nobody's team business and passes no team tick whatsoever. Read this tick as your team saying it would rather not, not as a way of stopping a colleague being reminded.

The switch that reliably works for one person is that person's own. Anybody can stop every task reminder addressed to them from Settings → Email in Tasks, whatever their teams have chosen — no team setting overrides it, and they do not have to take over the rest of their email to do it. If somebody asks you as a team admin to make reminders stop, that is where to send them.

Working from an email on a board task

The board’s task editor carries the same email action Tasks does, on one row directly under the title. Draft follow-up… writes a short chasing email to whoever the task is assigned to, from the task’s status, next step and due date.

Everything the draft produces is editable before you send it, and you copy it into Outlook yourself — nothing is sent on your behalf. It appears only when an AI assistant is set up in Tasks’ settings, because drafting is the whole of what it does. The full description is in the task manual under Working from an email.

“Update from email” used to sit beside it and has been removed from both editors. If a task arrived by email, the message itself is saved on it and a card under the description opens it — see Reading the email a task came from. Tasks created by email are always personal, so that card is not something you will see on a board task unless the task was shared onto the board afterwards.

The task editor saves as you type

There is no Save button on a task that already exists. Change a field and it is stored a moment later — the same way Tasks has always worked. Close the editor with the ✕ at the top when you are done; anything you typed a second earlier goes with it.

That is also why Cancel is gone: there is nothing left to cancel once each change is already saved. If you change something by mistake, change it back — or use the undo offered when you complete or delete.

The line at the bottom of the editor says where your change has got to, so you never have to guess whether it landed. It reads Changes save as you type when nothing is pending, Saving… with three moving dots while the change is on its way, and All changes saved in green with the time once it is stored. The time is there so you can tell the save you just made from the one before it. If a save is refused you get a message in red saying your last change was not saved — the words are still on screen and nothing has been lost.

It stays until it is no longer true. The confirmation does not fade after a couple of seconds, so you cannot miss it by looking away; it changes when you next edit something. Tasks says the same thing the same way — see there is no Save button.

Opening a task and just reading it changes nothing. Nothing is written until you actually alter a field, so a task does not show up as edited to everyone else simply because you looked at it.

A new task still has a button. Create task at the bottom is what brings it into being — nothing is stored while you are still typing it out. From then on it saves itself like every other task.

If somebody else saves the same task while you have it open, you are told plainly and nothing of theirs is overwritten — the board reloads to show their version so you can decide what to reapply.

Complete, archive, and never delete

The top of the editor carries a tick to mark the task complete — press it again on a finished task to reactivate it — and a second icon that archives the task. That second icon used to delete; a team task is never removed outright now, so archiving stands in its place and there is always a record of where the work went. The icon itself changed too, from a bin to a lidded box, so it no longer looks like something destructive — because it isn't.

The Completed tab still has its own Archive row action for a task you finish first, and the Archived tab still has Restore for putting one back — the editor's archive icon is simply a second door to the same place, open at any stage.

Archiving is open to any board member, the same as completing always was — it is an ordinary edit, not a delete. On a task you can only read, neither icon is offered. A personal task — one on no board — is unaffected by any of this and stays fully deletable by its owner in Tasks.

The task editor. The tick and the bin sit on the left beside the title; on the right, in order, are Share, the eye that watches the task, the envelope that decides whether a watched update also emails you, and the ✕ that closes it. Two tabs: Details and Comments, whose heading carries the number of them. There is no Save button and no Cancel — each field is stored a moment after you change it.

Watching a task that is not yours

At the top right of the task editor are three controls, in order: Share, the eye and the envelope. None of them sit beside the tick and the bin — those two are on the left of the title row. The ✕ that closes the editor comes last, after all three. This is the same editor wherever you meet it — the task drawer and the pop-out window on Tasks, and the task window on a team board — so all three controls behave identically on every one of them.

Share copies a link straight to this task — nothing more than pressing it and pasting the link wherever you were going to describe the task instead. Anyone who opens the link and already has access to the task lands on it directly, with the rest of the application around it exactly as if they had opened it themselves. A link is not a grant. It does not give anybody access they did not already have — if the person you send it to cannot otherwise see the task, opening the link tells them so plainly rather than showing them a blank page or quietly letting them in. The same access rule that governs opening the task normally governs opening it from a link.

Press the eye to start watching the task; press it again to stop. A filled pupil means you are watching it, a hollow one means you are not, and hovering it says which it is in words.

You do not have to own the task or be assigned it. That is the whole point: it is for the work that is not yours and that you still need to know about — the thing neither “assigned to me” nor being mentioned covers. Anything you are allowed to open, you are allowed to watch.

Watching changes nothing about the task. It does not reassign it, does not put it on your list, and nobody is told you are watching. It is a private note to yourself.

From then on, a change to that task — a comment, a new status, a moved due date, a reassignment, a completion — reaches you in Messages under Watching, and the tasks themselves are gathered on the Watching tab in Tasks. See tasks you are watching for what arrives and how to clear it. An update opens where it happened — a comment takes you to that comment, anything else to the editor's main page — and Reply on the row opens the task's own conversation with the cursor in the box.

It reports what other people do, never what you do. Watch a task and then change it yourself and nothing arrives, because you already know: the update goes to the other watchers. An empty Watching tab after you have edited your own watched task is the rule working, not the feature failing.

It can email you as well, and it is off until you switch it on. A watched update always reaches Messages; it reaches your inbox only if A task I watch is updated is switched on. The envelope beside the eye is that switch, so you can turn it on without leaving the task — it is the same setting as Settings → Email, not a second one.

It belongs to your account, not to this task. Switching it on here decides watched-task email everywhere, for every task you watch. The first time you use it, it also creates your own email preferences for the other events, starting from the application's defaults — the panel says so before you press anything.

Nobody is emailed by a team whose own email is switched off, and the panel says that too — so a switch here that appears to do nothing is telling you the answer is one level up. A comment on a watched task is not a task update: it is covered by Somebody comments without mentioning me, which is its own switch.

The eye is not offered on a task you are still creating: there is nothing to watch until the task exists. Create it, and the eye is there the next time you open it.

Email reminders on a board task

The board's Reminders section. The difference from Tasks' is the line in the middle: on a board you choose who is reminded.

The board's task editor carries the same Reminders section Tasks does — between OKR and Attachments — with one difference that matters: on a board you choose who is reminded. The full description of what a reminder is, and of when one actually sends, is in the task manual under email reminders on a task.

Unfold Reminders and press + Email reminder. It starts as a working reminder rather than an empty form — daily, at 09:00, from today, to you — and you change it from there.

• How often, Time of day and Starting are the schedule. On an hourly reminder the time is the minute past the hour.
• Who is reminded offers the people on this board, and nobody else. You are in that list yourself, marked (you) — a reminder you set for other people is usually one you want too.
• There is no Save button. Like the rest of this editor, every change is saved as you make it, and the sentence under the fields reads the whole thing back: Daily at 9:00 AM, from Sep 8, 2026, to 3 people.

The time is held in the time zone it was set in. If you are reading a reminder somebody set somewhere else, the sentence names that zone, so 09:00 never quietly means something three hours away.

The reminder is yours, not the task's. Two people can each keep their own reminder on the same card, with their own schedule and their own list of people, and neither can overwrite the other's. Remove reminder removes yours: everybody it named stops being emailed about this task, the task itself and everything on it is kept, and a reminder somebody else set on the same card is untouched. It asks first, and names who stops being emailed.

A reminder needs at least one person. Unticking the last name is refused — it would be a schedule that sends nothing — and the section says so. Remove reminder is how you stop it altogether.

That is a rule about saving a reminder, and it is not the same as the one below: somebody you named can take themselves off, and if they were the last one left, the reminder stays where it is with nobody on it. Then the sentence under your fields reads Nobody is selected, so nothing is sent and you can tick somebody on again.

Completing the task stops it, and so does archiving it — an archived task has left the board, so nothing is sent about it until it comes back. Reopening the one, or restoring the other, starts it again on the schedule that was already there; the schedule is never thrown away. On a task that is already complete or archived the section says which it is, and offers nothing to set up until you bring the task back. Nothing else stops the schedule itself.

If somebody names you, you can see it and take yourself off it. A reminder you did not create but are named in appears in this same section, in a block of its own below your own reminder, headed Somebody else set this reminder and named you on it. It is there whether or not you keep a reminder of your own — a reader with nothing of their own on a task is exactly the one most likely to be on somebody else's and least likely to go looking.

Each line gives you the schedule and who set it — Daily at 9:00 AM, from Sep 5, 2026 — set by Ashley Smith, with the time zone named when it is not your own — and beside it one button: Stop reminding me. That is not the same control as Remove reminder above it: Remove reminder takes away a reminder you created yourself, and Stop reminding me takes you off one somebody else created. It asks first.

• You do not have to ask the person who created it, and no administrator is involved. This is enforced by the database, not hidden in the interface: your place on somebody else's reminder is yours to give up.
• Their reminder carries on for the rest of the people on it, on the schedule they set, so you come off without disturbing anybody else it names.
• You cannot change it and you cannot delete it. No schedule fields and no Who is reminded list are offered here, because the reminder is not yours. See it and leave it is the whole of it.
• Only the person who created it can put you back on — leaving is not something you can undo yourself.
• The person who set it is not told. Nothing is emailed to them and nothing lands in their Message Center; you are simply no longer on the list next time they look.
• If you were the only person it named, the schedule stays on the task and nothing further is sent by it. Its creator sees it reading Nobody is selected, so nothing is sent, and can put somebody on it again or remove it.

Shut, the Reminders heading counts them after your own line — 1 set by somebody else, or 3 set by other people — so a reminder somebody else is sending you is not hidden behind a folded section.

That is different from stopping reminders altogether, and the two read like turning reminders off while doing different things. Stop reminding me is about one reminder: you come off it and every other reminder on every other task still reaches you. To stop the lot, switch task reminders off in Settings → Email in Tasks: one switch, every reminder addressed to you, on every task and every board, and no team setting overrides it. That switch is about your inbox and it changes no schedule anywhere — you stay named on everything, and switching it back on starts them arriving again. The fuller version of all of this is in a reminder somebody else set, that names you.

The section is not shown at all until the task exists, or if this team has not switched email on — see email notifications for the team.

Making a new tag without leaving the task

Beside the tag chips in the task editor, + New tag… opens a color swatch and a name box. Type a name, press Add or Enter, and the tag is created on this board and put straight on this task — you do not then have to go and find it in the picker. Escape backs out of the name box without closing the task.

It is offered to team and board administrators only, and only on a task you can edit. That is not the screen being cautious: the database is what refuses a tag from anybody else, and the button is hidden to match rather than to decide. If a name is already taken on this board you are told so, and nothing is created.

Everything else about tags — renaming, recoloring, deleting — still lives in Team settings, because those affect every task the tag is on.

Formatting a task's description

The description box is a good deal taller than it used to be, and it is now the same height as the one in your own task editor. It was about four lines here while the same field elsewhere gave eleven or more, which made the board the wrong place to write anything of length. It grows with the window, so a larger screen gives you more of it, and on a short window the dialog scrolls as it always did.

The box has the same formatting bar the Notes editor has: bold, italic and underline, bulleted and numbered lists, headings and quotes, text size, Color and highlight, the typeface, and alignment. It is one bar, so anything you have learned in a note works here. On a narrow window the groups fold into a more menu at the end rather than wrapping onto a second row.

The color control is labeled Color wherever the bar appears, so it reads the same on every page.

Formatting is kept with the task, so it reads the same on the card, in the editor and in an exported report.

Tidy formatting with AI beside the bar hands the description to your assistant and asks it to lay the same words out better — headings, lists, spacing. It is structure only: every fact, date, number and table is preserved exactly as written. The button appears only when you have an AI assistant configured; with none, it is not there rather than there and failing.

Undo works inside the description as you would expect, and the history belongs to the task you are on — opening another task starts a fresh one, so undo can never pull one task's words into another.

Work nobody has scheduled: the No date switch

Under the due-date field in a board task is a switch marked No date — the same control, in the same place, as in Tasks. Turn it on and the due date is cleared and the field itself reads No date; the card on the board reads No date too, and drops out of any due-date window you filter by.

Turning it off sets the due date to today and puts the cursor in the field, so you can change it with one keystroke. The switch is only telling you whether the task has a due date, so it moves on its own: type a date and it turns itself off.

It does not wait to be saved. It is stored a moment after you move it, like every other field on the task — see The task editor saves as you type. On a task you are only able to read, the switch is grayed out along with everything else.

Comments, mentions and attachments

Every task has a Comments tab. It is where the state of the work actually lives — “waiting on legal”, “moved to next sprint” — and anyone who can see the task can add to it.

Mentioning someone

Type @ in the comment box. A short list of the people in your teams appears — keep typing to narrow it, arrow keys move, Enter or Tab picks, Escape closes it. The name is inserted where your cursor was and you carry on typing; picking somebody does not post the comment, you still press Post. It is the same in every comment box in the application: a task, a note, an objective, a key result, and the note on a check-in.

It searches on either name — @jo, @doe and @john doe all find John Doe.

You can also just write the name. @First Last anywhere in a comment is a mention of whoever in your teams has that name, whether you picked them from the list or typed it out. Replying to somebody does this for you.

Three things worth knowing:

• The list is the people on THIS piece of work. A task belongs to one or more teams — whichever teams its boards belong to — and the list is everyone on those teams, listed once even if they are on two of them. An objective or key result belongs to exactly one team, so its list is that team. If you are in two teams and you are commenting on something owned by one of them, the other team's people are not offered: they have nothing to do with this work.
  
  Somebody in a team you are not part of never appears, and typing their name out in full does not mention them either. That boundary is enforced by the database, not by the list. Mentioning somebody who is not on this board is fine and often the point — it gives them the message, not the board.
• A first name on its own is not a mention. “@John” is just text; it takes a first and last name to identify somebody.
• The mention follows the person, not the name. If they change their display name later, old comments show the new one.

Editing a comment that mentions someone

Mentions follow the text. Take a name out and that person no longer has the message; put a different one in and they get it. Anyone still named keeps the message they already had, read or unread. Deleting the comment removes its messages with it.

A mention reads as the person’s name while you write and while you edit — the same way it reads once the comment is posted. It behaves as one piece rather than as ordinary letters: a single Backspace takes the whole name out, and you cannot type into the middle of one. Changing a comment’s wording never disturbs who was mentioned in it.

The message center

It covers every team you are on, not just the one on screen. One personal inbox: a mention written on any board of any of your teams is in it, and each message names the team as well as the board — two teams can both have a board called Roadmap. The unread count is the total across all of them, so it does not change when you switch teams.

View task takes you there whatever team you are in: it switches to the message's team, opens its board and opens the task. You are never asked to find it yourself. It only ever opens teams, boards and tasks you already have access to.

Being mentioned puts the comment in your Messages window, with a count on the button. It is the same window in Tasks and on the board — the same list, the same read state — so clearing something in one clears it in both. It is personal rather than team-based: it shows every mention you can see, whichever board it came from, and switching team does not change what is in it.

Each message shows who mentioned you, what they said, which task, and which board. Unread shows what is waiting; All shows everything; Threads and Watching answer the other two questions the panel is for, and are described in the task manual under tasks you are watching. Whichever you were last on is where it opens next time.

When something is waiting, the Messages button lights up and carries the count. At zero it goes back to normal and the count disappears rather than showing a nought.

Nothing is marked read just because you opened it. A message clears when you press Mark read, or when you open the task it points at — which also scrolls to the comment and highlights it, so you are not hunting for it. There is also Mark all as read.

Closing that task brings you back to Messages, not to the board, so you can work down the list without reopening it between each one. A task you opened from the board still closes onto the board.

Tidying a comment up

Under the comment box, Format and Bullets rewrite rough notes into something a colleague can read. Your original is kept until you accept: the suggestion appears in the box with a Use this / Cancel row, and Cancel puts back exactly what you typed. It uses whichever AI provider you have configured, and the buttons are hidden if you have not set a key.

A rewrite that would drop an @mention is discarded rather than offered — losing one would quietly unsubscribe somebody from the conversation.

Tidy formatting with AI sits beside them and is a different thing — which is worth knowing before you press either. Format and Bullets rewrite: they change the words, and hold your original behind Use this. Tidy changes no word at all. It lays the words you already wrote into paragraphs, a list or a heading, and any formatting you had applied yourself survives rather than being flattened to plain text on the way through. It counts as a single step, so one Ctrl+Z — or the Undo tidy button that appears next to it — puts your draft back exactly as you had it, formatting included. Like the other two it is offered wherever an AI assistant is configured, and where none is it is absent rather than grayed out. The fuller description is in the task manual under tidying a comment's formatting.

Writing a comment from an email

Press From email… under the comment box, paste the email (or drop a .eml file on it) and press Draft the comment. The assistant writes a compact summary — one sentence saying what changed or is being asked for, and at most three short bullets if the email really covers separate points. It is meant to be read at a glance in a thread, so it leaves out background and pleasantries; add anything else you want said yourself. Above it the app puts one line giving the date and time the email was sent, who sent it and the subject.

Nothing is posted. The draft lands in the comment box for you to edit, and you still press Post comment. If you had already started writing, what you typed is kept above the draft — Cancel puts it back exactly as it was.

Comments waiting to be read

When somebody else comments on a task, its card shows a highlighted comment count — the same treatment the Messages button uses. The Comments tab itself stays plain; the number in its label (Comments (3)) is what tells you there are comments, whether or not any are unread. Your own comments never light up your own task's card.

Above the comment list are Mark read and Mark unread. Opening a task does not mark anything read, on purpose: that is the same rule the Messages window follows, so nothing is cleared because you glanced at it. Mark unread puts it back for later.

Read state is yours alone and follows you between Tasks and the team board — mark a thread read here and it is read there too. Nobody else can see it.

Turning a comment into a task

After you post a comment that clearly contains something somebody has agreed to do, a small Possible action item card appears with a suggested title, and an owner and a date where the comment actually named them. Press Create task to open the normal new-task form with those filled in, or Ignore.

It never creates anything on its own, it does not appear for status updates or questions, and it does not invent an owner or a deadline — if the comment did not say, the field is left empty for you.

Attachments

Drag a file onto the task, or press Choose files…. Anyone on the task's board can open its attachments, and so can the task's owner and whoever it is assigned to, even a file they did not upload themselves; only the person who uploaded a file can remove it. Attachments appear once the task exists, so save a brand-new task first.

The size limit is written under the dropzone, so you know before you choose a file. It is set by a system administrator and can change, which is why that line is the figure to trust and why this page does not repeat a number of its own — a number printed here would go quietly out of date the day somebody changed the setting, and you would be told one thing and refused another. A file of exactly the limit is fine; anything larger is refused by the server as well as by the page, and the message says how big the file actually was. A handful of file types cannot be attached at all — anything that a browser would run or render as a web page, because a link to one of those would be a convincing fake of a real page.

For something large, link to it rather than attach it. Put the shared-drive or SharePoint address in the description; that is what the link formatting is for.

Owned — board tasks you keep off your own list

Beside Board, Completed and Archived there is Owned. It holds the board tasks you own that you have turned Show in my tasks off for — so taking a task off your personal list files it somewhere rather than losing it.

• Only your own tasks appear. Nobody else's, ever.
• A task already in your task list is not here — including one that is there because it is assigned to you, which your own visibility setting has no say over.
• Completed and archived work stays in its own tabs.
• Show in my tasks on a row puts it straight back.

It looks and behaves like Completed: the same grouping (by topic, or by date when Group by topic is off), the same section headers, the same fold-all button — reading Collapse all sections here rather than topics — and the same search box. Which sections you leave folded is remembered per board, for you.

Which board a setting is for

Topics, Swimlanes, Tags and Import all belong to one board. Each of those tabs now starts with a Board selector saying which, and you can change it there rather than closing settings, switching board and coming back.

It opens on the board you pressed Settings from. Picking another one switches the board behind the dialog too — deliberately, so the tab you are editing and the board you are looking at can never be two different things. Tabs that belong to the whole team — People, Groups, Email — have no selector, because those settings are not per board.

The team and board dropdowns

Both sit in the team context bar and both are sorted alphabetically. A long board name is shortened to fit the control and hovering it gives you the whole of it back.

Creating a team or a board is done in Team settings — on the Team tab and the Boards tab. Making one is only offered to a Super Team Admin — with one exception: anyone with no team at all can create their first one, or there would be no way to get started.

Creating a board is a Super Team Admin action; running one is not. A team admin still renames boards, deactivates them and manages who can see them — everything on the Boards tab except making another one.

Where the tabs are

The board's tabs read Board, Owned, Completed, Archived, at the left of the team context bar. Owned sits beside Board because it is live work like the board itself — Completed and Archived are both places work goes once it is done with.

Recently completed, and how far back it looks

On the Completed view the board's toolbar grows a picker reading All completed or Recently completed · last N days, which shows the work finished inside a window the team sets. It starts at 7 days, and the picker names the number so you never have to remember it. It is only there on that view — a range control over the board or the archive would be a control that does nothing.

It is a team setting, not a personal one, and that is deliberate: everybody looking at the same board should mean the same thing by "recently". A team administrator changes it in Settings → Team, choosing 3, 7, 14 or 30 days, and it changes for everyone at once. If you are not an administrator the control is not shown — there is nothing you can do with it.

How long a swimlane gets, and the rest behind View all

A busy lane used to run off the bottom of the screen and take the lanes beside it with it. It no longer does: a lane shows the first 5 tasks and then ends with a button spanning the foot of the column reading View all 8 tasks · +3 more. Press it and the rest of that lane appears; the button becomes Show less and puts it back.

Five is exact. If the number is 5 you will count 5 cards, never 6 — a lane holding exactly 5 simply shows them all and offers no button, because there is nothing behind it.

It is a team setting, not a personal one, and it covers every board the team owns rather than the one you are looking at. A Team admin changes it in Settings → Team, under Swimlane length, and it changes for everyone at once. A Super Team Admin can too — this is ordinary team administration, not one of the six things reserved to that role. A Member is not shown the control at all, because there is nothing they can do with it. The board follows the moment it is saved; nobody has to reload.

Expanding a lane is yours, and it is temporary. Opening one lane leaves every other lane as it was, and opening Blocked under one topic does not open Blocked under another — they are different piles of work that share a word. Nothing about it is remembered: reload the page and every lane is back to the team's number. That is deliberate. "Show me the rest of this one, now" is a question you are asking, not an arrangement you want back tomorrow.

Widening a lane to two columns

Each lane's header carries a small columns button, beside the lane's name and its count. Press it and that one lane widens to hold two card columns instead of one, so more of its cards are visible without scrolling sideways as far to reach the next lane. Press it again to put the lane back to a single column.

More than one lane can be widened at once. Widening one lane does not narrow, fold or otherwise change any other — each lane's width is its own.

It is a temporary view only, and it is not remembered. Reload the page and every lane is back to one column, the same way an opened View all lane closes again on reload. Nothing is saved: not to your account, not to the team, not to the page's address. Widening a lane is you asking "let me see more of this one right now," not an arrangement you want waiting for you tomorrow.

The figures above the board, and filtering by them

Two bands sit between the team context bar and the board, and everything in both of them is a control rather than a readout.

Team at a glance is five figures for the board as you have narrowed it — Total tasks, Complete, Open tasks, Overdue, Due this week — with Tasks by status and Tasks by tag under them. By assignee is the same work divided between people, one card each.

Pressing a figure narrows the board to it. Overdue shows only work due before today, Due this week only work due between today and Saturday, Complete opens the Completed view and Open tasks comes back to the board. Total tasks is the way out: it clears every filter at once. Only one of them is ever lit, and it is the one describing the cut you are looking at.

Topics are filtered from the Filters menu in the team context bar, along with the due-date window; people are filtered from the By assignee cards, from Mine, or by searching for a name. That is why the Filters button's count can be higher than the number of things the menu shows — it counts the people filter too, and its tooltip says where those were set.

They fold separately, and each remembers how you left it. The Hide control on either header collapses it; the arrangement is saved to your account, so it comes back the same way on your next visit and on another device. The same two switches are in More, and again on the View tab of Team settings, under The bands above the board.

Hiding Team at a glance keeps the five figures. It folds to a single row — the band’s name, then the five figures still lit and still clickable, then Filters and Show at the right-hand end. Only Tasks by status and Tasks by tag go away, which is the part that takes the room. So folding it does not cost you the totals or the ability to filter by them; it costs you the two breakdowns. By assignee folds differently, to its header alone, because every one of its cards is a person and there is no summary row underneath to keep.

Focused: fold both bands at once

Focused sits at the right-hand end of the context bar, immediately after the More menu and just before the pin (see where the board's controls are), carrying a small focus-reticle icon. Narrower than 640px it shows only that icon, with no Focused word beside it. Press it and Team at a glance and By assignee disappear entirely, not down to their own collapsed headers — there is nothing left of either band on screen, and the board moves up to meet the context bar. The button holds blue and stays pressed while it is on — the label does not change, so the pressed color and the missing bands themselves are how you can tell it is active.

Leaving Focused puts back exactly what you had, not a default arrangement. If you had already hidden By assignee with its own Hide before pressing Focused, it is still hidden when you leave — what you had is captured the moment you press the button, so leaving Focused never reopens a band you had deliberately shut.

The choice is saved with your account, and comes back the same way next time you sign in, on this device or another.

The utility rail

Down the right of the board is the utility rail, the same one Tasks, Notes and the Calendar carry. It holds four cards — Time, Weather, This month and Quick links — each with its own … menu, its own fold, and a grip for the three that can be made taller.

The rail is per page. Shutting it here shuts it here: Tasks, Notes and the Calendar each keep their own answer, and so does the order the cards come in. Drag a card by its handle to reorder it, or focus one and press Alt with the up or down arrow. Its width is shared across the four pages, because it is one rail — drag the divider, or set it on the View tab of Team settings under The utility rail. Which cards a page shows is answered in Settings → Widgets.

The rail, top to bottom. A card's … menu is where its own settings are — time zones, weather locations, the months to show, and managing the links.

Quick links

A team can publish as many links as it needs to everybody on it — the runbook, the sprint board, the on-call rota, whatever the team opens every day. There used to be a limit of five; there is no limit now. They appear in the Quick links card on the utility rail, alongside any of your own, and each one opens in a new tab so you never lose the board. A link somebody published for the team says so when you hover it.

You see the description, not the address. A link reads “On-call rota”, not a forty-character URL — hover it and the address appears as a tooltip. Only http and https addresses can be opened; anything else is refused rather than shown.

Which of them you see is yours to decide. A link your team publishes arrives switched on, and you can switch it off for yourself — it leaves your Quick links card and stays in the list, so you can switch it back on whenever you like. You are never editing or removing the team's copy, and nobody else's card changes. The choice is saved to your account rather than to this browser, so it holds from one session to the next and on every device you sign in from. Open the card's … menu and choose Manage links… to get there, or go to Settings → Time, weather & links, where your team's links and your own are listed together and you can drag them into the order you want.

With none published and none of your own, the card says so and offers Add a link rather than sitting empty.

A team administrator defines them in Settings → Team. There is one row per link plus an Add a link button, so the list grows as you need it. Each row has a switch, a description and an address, and a row is only shown to the team once it has both a description and a workable address and its switch is on. Whichever of those is missing is said underneath the row, so a link that is not appearing tells you why instead of leaving you to guess. Clearing a row leaves it where it is rather than shuffling everything below it up, so the link you were not looking at does not move under your cursor. They are a team setting like the recently-completed window — one set of links for everybody on the team, and if you are not an administrator the section is not shown.

By assignee. Each card carries the person's initials, their percentage and how much of their work is done; the due-date window lives on this band's header. Press a card to narrow the board to that person — the selected card is highlighted, a banner states everything that is applied and how many tasks are left, and Clear all removes the lot.

• Picking a topic from the Filters menu adds that topic to the filter.
• Clicking a person card adds that person — including their Completed and Archived work, so the filter follows you across the tabs.
• Where a task has no assignee, the person rollup falls back to its owner, so nobody's work disappears into an "unassigned" pile it does not belong in.
• By assignee narrows to the topic you have selected, so “who is carrying Q1?” is answered by picking that topic and reading the band. The topic bars themselves stay unfiltered — they are the selector, and filtering them would leave one bar with no way back.
• Both bands fold on their own, and remember it.
• Which tab you are on is not a filter, so clearing everything leaves you where you were reading rather than sending you back to the board.

Filtering by due date

Due from and to on the By assignee band's header narrow the whole board to tasks due in that window. Both dates are included, and you can set just one — a start with no end means “anything from here on”, an end with no start means “anything up to here”.

4w, 8w and 12w beside the fields are shortcuts for typing two dates. Each is a window around today, half back and half ahead — 4w is the fortnight either side, 8w is four weeks either side, 12w is six. Hover one to see the exact dates it will set. The button for the window currently applied is highlighted; pressing it again just sets the same window, and Clear dates is the way off.

It starts on Any due date, and that means everything. The tick above the fields is on by default, so nothing is hidden until you choose to narrow it — a board that quietly hid undated work before anyone asked would be the wrong first impression. Untick it to use a range; Clear filter puts it back. The range applies to the board, the Completed and Archived tabs, the analytics figures and the exported report, so all of them agree about what you are looking at.

Clear dates beside the fields drops the range and leaves your other filters alone; Clear filter in the blue banner drops everything at once. The banner always spells out the range that is applied — which matters, because the fields live in a panel you can fold away.

Picking more than one

Selections add up. Click two topics and you see both. Click two people as well and you see those two people's work within those two topics. Click any highlighted card again to drop it from the filter, and Clear in the blue banner removes everything at once.

The banner spells out exactly what is applied, and it is worth reading, because the two kinds of selection behave differently on purpose:

Everything downstream follows the same selection: the assignee rollup narrows to the topics you picked, the tab counts agree with what is on screen, and a board export covers exactly the filtered set and says so on the report.

Team Insights — how your team is actually using it

The figures above the board describe one board. Team Insights describes the team: who is using the application, how much work is moving, which capabilities people actually reach for, and who may not be engaging. Open it from Team settings → Team, where a card sits just above Objectives and key results, and press Open Team Insights.

It opens on top of the settings window rather than replacing it, and closing it with the × puts you straight back where you were — same tab, same place on the page, same team. Nothing you had half-finished in the settings window is lost. The board behind it never reloads.

Only a team administrator sees the card. If you are not one it is not there, which is the same rule the rest of that pane follows.

Three views, and one date range across all of them

Overview opens first: active users, tasks created, tasks completed and team adoption, then a chart of team activity over time and a panel showing which capabilities are being used. User Engagement lists every member of the team with what each of them did, and a search box for finding one. Activity & Audit Trail is the chronological record — what happened, to what, and who did it — with its own filters for action and item. (Filtering by person moved to the bar described below, so one choice narrows all three views rather than just this one.)

The date range in the top-right starts at Last 30 days and also offers 7 days, 90 days, this quarter and a range you choose. It applies to all three views and stays put when you move between them, so you are always comparing like with like.

Narrowing what you are looking at

The bar under the heading filters every view at once — by board, by user group, by person, or by OKR area — and your choice stays put while you move between Overview, User Engagement and the audit trail, exactly as the date range does. Clear filters puts all four back, and it does not change the date range.

A control you cannot see is one this team has nothing to filter by. With the OKR module switched off there is no list of OKR areas, so there is no OKR area control — an empty dropdown would be a promise the team cannot keep.

What "active" means here

An active member is one who did something real in the period you are looking at — created or changed a task, wrote a comment, set a reminder, linked work to an OKR. Team adoption is simply how many of your members that is, as a percentage. It is not a score and there is nothing clever behind it.

Opening a page is not activity and is not counted. Neither is scrolling, clicking about, or looking at Team Insights itself — the application does not record that anybody looked at anything. This is not a presence indicator either: nothing here tells you who is online.

The team mark, and the Organization mark it is moving to

The small picture in the top-left corner of every page, beside the team name, is one capability with two homes, and which one is live depends on whether your Organization has been set up yet.

The mark on a team's invitations is a separate, older picture and does not follow either of these. An invitation to join the team is headed by whatever mark that team itself had uploaded — through the Team mark card, before or after an Organization mark exists — and arrives from the team's name; see inviting somebody. A team with no mark of its own gets no picture there either, which is a plainer message rather than a broken one. Changing the Team mark or, later, the Organization mark does not change what an invitation shows.

When the board area says you have no access

If the board area says No board access, the team has boards but none of them has been shared with you yet — it is not that the team is empty, and nothing is missing. An organization owner or a team admin can add you. The page stands down while that notice is showing: the team picker, the board controls and the utility rail all disappear, because every one of them acts on a board you cannot open. If you belong to more than one team you can still switch — press your team’s name at the top left, then Teams, and choose another.

That is a different message from “No board open”, which means you have boards and simply have not chosen one, and from “Could not read the boards”, which means the server did not answer and is worth trying again.

Leaving an Organization

Also at the bottom of Organization settings → Organization, Leave this Organization ends your own membership. You lose every team, board and group the Organization gives you; work assigned to you there is unassigned, and objectives you own are left unowned. Your own Tasks, Notes and Calendar stay with your account — they are yours, not the Organization’s.

If you are the only Organization Owner and other people are still here, you cannot leave yet. Promote somebody else to Organization Owner first and the card will let you go; it tells you so in those words rather than refusing silently, and offers to take you to the People tab to do it. If you are the only person left, leaving closes the Organization — use Close this Organization below, which asks you to type its name.

Closing an Organization

At the bottom of Organization settings → Organization is a Close this Organization card, in the same red danger-zone styling as every other permanent action in this product. It only appears when there is nobody left to protect — you are the sole active Organization Owner and no other membership exists — the same condition that lets a sole owner leave and close it that way instead. If anyone else still belongs to the Organization, this card is not shown at all, not shown disabled; there is nothing here for it to refuse.

Pressing Close this Organization… explains exactly what goes: its Teams, Boards, Topics, Tags, Swimlanes and Groups, permanently. Your own Tasks, Notes and Calendar are unaffected — they are yours, not the Organization's, and stay with your account. To confirm, you type a phrase the product shows you, naming the Organization by its real name; the phrase comes from the server, never something you have to remember or guess the wording of, and the button stays refused until what you typed matches it exactly. This is the same one operation the sole-owner Leave above uses underneath — closing an Organization only ever happens one way, however you reach it.

Customize email — what your team's messages say

Directly under the team mark in Team settings is Customize email. This is where a team decides what its invitation actually says, and how every message from it looks. It matters more than it sounds: the invitation is the only message this product sends to somebody who has never seen it, on a colleague's behalf, so it should read as coming from your team rather than from a piece of software.

Only a Super Team Admin can change it. A team admin sees the whole section and can read every word of it, but the controls are inert and a line says so. That is deliberate: being unable to explain why a colleague got a particular email is worse than being unable to edit it.

Empty means the standard message

Every wording field starts empty, and empty is a real answer — it means “send the standard wording”, not “send nothing”. Leave the whole section alone and your team's messages go out exactly as they always have. Reset to default puts every field back to empty, which is the same thing as never having touched it. There is no separate switch to turn customization on or off, because clearing a field is turning it off — the team mark works the same way. The preview shows a marked stand-in where the standard wording will go, rather than a copy of it, so what you are looking at is never a second version of words that live somewhere else.

What you can set

• Messages come from — the name that shows in the recipient's inbox. The sending address does not change and cannot; this is the name beside it.
• Invitation subject and Invitation message — the subject line, and the body. The body has the same formatting bar as the rest of the app, so bold, lists, headings and links all work the way you already know.
• Above every notification — a short line that rides on top of the mention, assignment and share messages people already get. Optional, and short is better; it is an introduction, not a second message.
• An accent color for the rule under the team's name, the Font, and Show our logo — the look. These are read by every message from the team, not only the invitation, so one message from your team looks like the next whatever prompted it.

Tokens: writing one message that fits everybody

You are writing one message that goes to many people, so the parts that differ are written as tokens and filled in when the mail is actually sent:

• [Team] — your team's name
• [Name] — the person it is going to
• [Inviter] — whoever is sending it
• [Link] — the sign-in address they follow
• [App] — the product's name

The buttons insert one at the caret in whichever field you last had open, and a line under them names that field so you are never guessing where it landed. Type them by hand if you prefer — they are just text in square brackets.

Images

Up to three, each added in its own row and placed at the top or the bottom. Each is either an https:// address or an embedded data:image. Images are added in these rows rather than pasted into the message — the message editor does not accept them, by design, and one pasted in would be dropped by the save that stored it. Insecure http:// addresses and SVG files are refused here and again on the server. The team mark is separate: it rides on every message on its own whenever Show our logo is on.

The preview, and two things that are not faults

The panel beside the editor shows the composed message with your real team name, mark and accent, and example values in the tokens. Two things about it surprise people, and both are deliberate:

• The preview stays light even when you are in dark mode. Email is light in every mail client, so a dark preview would be a preview of something nobody receives.
• An https:// image shows as a labeled placeholder rather than the picture. This page does not load images from other sites, on purpose. The picture does arrive in the real email.

Fonts are worth one more sentence. The choices are the same faces the application offers, but a mail client cannot download a font — so each choice falls back to the nearest face the reader already has, which is why the standing answer is the system one rather than the app's own.

If somebody else changed the template while you had it open, your save is refused rather than allowed to overwrite them, with a message saying so, and what you wrote stays in the boxes so you can put it back. Nothing you typed is thrown away.

The team's colors, and your own

A team can publish one color of its own, and so can you. Where either exists you get a third theme option — Custom — beside Light and Dark, in the theme control on every page and in Settings → Workspace.

There are two colors and they stack: your own color wins, and your team's applies when you have set none. Saving one of your own changes nothing for anybody else, and it is not a way of proposing a color to the team. A line under the picker says which of the two is in force for you at the moment, so you never have to work it out from the screen.

Your own color is under Your theme color in Settings → Workspace. Save my color stores it; Use my team's default gives it back, and appears once you have a color of your own to hand back; Look at it now switches you on to Custom without leaving the page, and is offered only when there is a palette to look at and you are not already looking at it.

Only a team administrator can set the team's default, in Settings → Workspace under Team default theme. Choose a color and the application works the whole palette out from it, holding every contrast ratio it has to hold, so the result stays readable whatever you pick — and the status colors keep their hues, so a team color can never make “behind” and “on track” the same shade or turn a warning purple. The preview beside the picker is the derived palette rather than the color you chose, so what you approve there is what the team gets.

Which of the three you look at is still yours. Nobody is moved on to Custom — whether you look at Custom, Light or Dark is your choice, and it is remembered in your browser like any other theme choice. Clearing the team's default puts the team back to the standard palette, and the third option goes with it for everybody who was relying on it rather than on a color of their own.

If you are not an administrator the team's row is not shown — and the database refuses that change even if the control is reached some other way. Your own color is the other way round: it is yours because the database says so, and nobody else can set it for you, administrator or not.

Importing a spreadsheet someone else made

Team settings → Import takes a CSV. If its headers are the ones this app knows — title, due date, status — they are matched automatically and marked matched by name.

For anything else, press Map with AI. It reads your headers and a few real rows and proposes which column is which, so a file with “Assigned To”, “Deadline” and “Project” maps without you touching a thing.

1. Choose the file. A preview appears straight away — name, row and column counts, and the first few rows — so a wrong file is obvious immediately.
2. Press Map with AI.
3. Check the mapping. Each field shows where its answer came from: green for a name match, blue for a confident AI guess, amber for an unsure one.
4. Change anything wrong — every field is a dropdown of your file's columns.
5. Read the plan underneath, then press Import.

What is in an exported report

A report is a printable page that opens in a new tab and prints through your browser's own Save-as-PDF. There is one export, and it is Export this board in the team context bar's More menu — it asks what to cover before it builds anything, so a report about one topic is that export with the topic filter on.

The report: a written summary, the figures, a completion bar, the rollup by topic and then by assignee, then every outstanding task with its latest comment. Completed tasks are listed at the bottom, and the scope you chose is stated under the title and again in the footer.

What the report contains:

• A summary paragraph — see the note below.
• Figures and a completion bar, segmented by status.
• A card per person, ordered by who has the most outstanding.
• Every outstanding task grouped by column, with its assignee, due date, tags, description and last comment. A task with no comments says so plainly, which makes a stalled item easy to spot.
• Completed tasks at the bottom, with who finished them and when.

Choosing what goes in the report

Open Team settings → Preferences. Under What an exported report includes there are two switches.

• Latest update — one line under each task: the most recent comment. The current state, for somebody scanning in a meeting. On by default.
• Comments — the whole thread under each task. The history, for somebody catching up. Off by default, because a large board with every thread printed is a very long document.

They are independent, they are remembered for next time, and they are yours alone — changing them does not change anybody else's export. A task with a very long thread prints its most recent twenty comments and says how many it left out.

Exporting the board as a PDF

More → Export this board… in the team context bar is where an export starts, and it is in the context bar rather than on a panel so that it stays reachable whatever you have folded away.

It asks what to cover before it builds anything, and each choice says how many tasks it holds, counted the same way the report will count them:

• What is on screen now — exactly what the filters, the search and the date range are showing, across the Board, Completed and Archived views together rather than just the tab you happen to be on. This is where it opens.
• On screen, without archived work — the same selection with archived tasks left out, for a report about work that is still live.
• Every task on this board — the whole board, ignoring every filter above it.

So filtering to one person and exporting still gives you that person's board; you are now asked to confirm that is what you meant, and the answer is not remembered between exports — each report says what it covers because each one was chosen.

The scope picker. Each option carries the number of tasks it would cover, and the note under them says what no report contains.

The report has these two sections beyond the figures:

• A "By topic" table — one row per topic with its own completion bar, which is the Analytics rollup in printed form.
• Outstanding tasks grouped by topic, then by column within each topic, matching the order you see on the board. If you have turned topic grouping off, the report is a flat list of columns, the same as the screen.

Importing tasks from a file — More → Task import…

What it is for. You run a working session on site, you come back with a list of action items in a Word document or a spreadsheet, and you want to burn that work down with the team on a board. This turns that file into tasks on a board and a topic, reading it with the AI assistant so the columns do not have to be labeled the way this app would label them.

It is in the team context bar under More → Task import…, directly below Export this board. You will only see it if you administer the board — a board admin or a team admin. Members of a board do not get it, because the import can create a topic, and topics are a board's configuration.

It reads Word (.docx and .doc), Excel (.xlsx and .xls), CSV and plain text. A table works best — the columns are read as columns — and a plain list of lines works too.

The older .doc and .xls now work as well, including the ones that are not really Word or Excel files at all: a page saved out of a wiki, Confluence, Google Docs or a web app very often arrives with a .doc name while actually being a web page inside, and those read fine. If a file genuinely cannot be read, the import says so in a sentence and tells you what to do about it, rather than failing without explaining why.

1. Choose the file.
2. Say where it goes. Pick the board — only boards you administer are offered — and then a topic. Or choose Create a new topic and name it; the topic is not created until you actually import, so backing out costs nothing. If you administer a board you have never joined, the step says so, and pressing Import adds you to that board so the tasks can be attached there. That is recorded in the audit trail, as any administrator letting themselves into a board is.
3. The assistant reads the file. A very large file is read in several passes rather than one, so this step can take a little longer — that is normal, and the step says which pass it is on while it works. You can cancel while it is working and nothing will have been written.
4. Review the preview, and choose what to bring in. One row per task it found, with the task name, owner, assignee and due date it worked out — each with a checkbox, plus Select all and Deselect all. The count above the list says how many of how many will be imported, and only the checked rows are. Nothing has been written yet.
5. Press Import. It tells you how many tasks landed and in which topic.