Workshop mode is a way of working on a tab, made for running a session with your team: a retrospective, a town hall, a lean coffee, a planning workshop or a quick icebreaker. It puts the tools that run a room in front of you (timers, dot votes, polls, reveals, quizzes, stickers) and keeps them out of the way when you are drawing a diagram.
Workshop is one of the three editor modes, beside Diagram and Draw, and it is on for everyone: there is nothing to turn on in Settings. It used to be called Facilitate mode.
What Workshop Mode Changes
- The palette offers Shapes, Write (text, notes, tables and checklists), Draw (the pens and arrows) and Layout (frames, lanes, timelines, cards and badges), then the session kit: Ask (votes, polls, quizzes, estimates and the Q&A board) and Session, which holds Tools, Record, React, Selection Mode and Navigate down its side, from the timer and reveal to the agenda, the reactions and the places Avatars walk to. Session's search looks through all of them. After them come Icons, Stickers, Media and Data. Write and Draw keep what a session uses, leaving out Page, Annotation, Shape Pen, Polygon, Mind node, Flowchart and Sankey; search still adds any of them. See Collaborate.
- The bottom-right corner gains the Timer, Vote and Poll buttons, right after Undo and Redo. See Session Tools.
- Everything else works as in Diagram mode: selection, arrows, text, sticky notes, snapping, undo and shortcuts.
What Is Only in Workshop
Diagram mode is for diagrams, so the session kit lives in Workshop:
- The Collaborate elements and Stickers are in Workshop's palette, not Diagram's. Diagram has the Comment panel and the Action card in its Write category, since comments and actions belong to every mode.
- The Timer, Vote and Poll buttons sit in Workshop's bottom-right corner only.
- Session elements work in every mode. On any tab, a session button starts its timer, a reveal zone reveals and a quiz takes answers.
- The element search finds them everywhere. Search for "timer" or a sticker from Diagram mode and it is there, under Elements From Other Modes, and it is placed without switching mode. See Toolbar Layout.
Switching Modes
- Press the mode switch beside the menu button (☰) and choose Workshop, on any tab, or press Shift+D until you reach it. An empty tab's start has the same switch at the top of its list. See Editor Modes.
- One mode for everyone: the mode belongs to the tab, so when someone who can edit switches it, everyone on the tab moves to Workshop together, and Undo switches it back.
- Participants and viewers have no mode switch: they see the tab in its mode. Participants take part in everything that is running (they vote, answer polls and add sticky notes); viewers watch.
Starting a Session
- A new canvas: in the New Canvas wizard, choose Workshop. The empty tab opens on Start a Workshop: the session templates grouped by the same categories as every start, such as Retrospectives, Meetings & Workshops, Virtual Spaces, Quizzes & Games and Strategy, with Recommended first. Blank Workshop (or the ×) leaves one empty tab in Workshop mode.
- Session templates open in Workshop: the retrospectives (Retrospective, Start, Stop, Continue, Mad, Sad, Glad, 4Ls and Sailboat), Town Hall Q&A, Lean Coffee, Crazy Eights, Meeting Agenda, the Workshop Board and the Brainstorm Board, the boards that come with a dot vote (Affinity Map, Prioritization Matrix and Risk Matrix), so the vote is there to run from the Session strip, the boards a team fills in together in a session (Incident Postmortem, Objectives Planner, Roadmap, RACI Matrix, User Story Map, Business Model Canvas, Stakeholder Map, Value Proposition Canvas, Opportunity Solution Tree and User Persona), and the sticky-note boards a group fills in together, such as SWOT, PESTLE Analysis, KWL Chart, Empathy Map and User Journey. So do the quizzes and games: a Pub Quiz of timed quiz rounds with a scoreboard, Icebreaker Questions spun on pickers, Two Truths and a Lie and Would You Rather on live polls, and Find Someone Who Bingo. So do the spaces to walk round together in Avatar mode: the Virtual Office, a Coworking Space, a Team Pod and an All-Hands Hall.
- Any tab: switch it to Workshop when the session starts, and back to Diagram when you are done. Everything on it stays where it is.
Share a Participant pass with everyone in the session, so they can vote, answer polls and add sticky notes, and hand the facilitator baton to whoever is running it, so only they start and end the tools.
Take the Tour
Press Start Workshop Tour in the bar along the bottom of the editor, just left of Search, for a short Workshop tour: the Collaborate categories, the Session strip and Share. It never starts on its own, and you can take it again whenever you like.
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