The Diagram tour is a guided, interactive introduction to Diagram mode: building a diagram from shapes, arrows and the palette. Rather than showing screenshots, it opens the real panels and menus one at a time, spotlighting each with a highlight ring and a short explanation. It takes about a minute, and you can leave at any point. (It was called the Welcome Tour until October 2026.)
Starting the Tour
The tour never starts or pops up on its own. To take it, press Start Diagram Tour in the bar along the bottom of the editor, just left of Search. On a phone the button shows only its play icon.
The button appears on a Diagram tab you can edit, once any Start Diagramming panel is closed or a template picked. It doesn't appear on a view-only canvas or in an embed. Draw and Workshop have tours of their own, on the same button: see The Workshop Tour and The Draw Tour. When you have a complex element selected, such as a Sankey diagram or a flowchart step, the button offers that element's tour instead (Start Sankey Tour, for example). Switching the tab to another mode partway through ends the tour.
The button stays there after you've taken the tour, so you can press it again whenever you want a refresher. Pressing it while another tour is running does nothing.
What It Covers
The tour walks the diagramming chrome in a natural order:
- The Palette: the strip across the top that every shape, arrow, and icon comes from.
- Selection Modes: the dropdown that changes what your pointer does (Select, Hand, Eraser, and friends). See Selection Modes.
- Palette Categories: the Palette's categories along the strip, with the first one, Shapes, open to show its elements in their groups.
- The Element Menu: the right-click menu (long-press on touch) where styling, links, notes, comments, and actions live. On an empty tab the tour adds a square to show it on, and takes it away again when the tour ends.
- Tabs: one canvas holds many tabs, each with its own work in its own mode, plus the + button and the tab menu (rename, duplicate, lock, export, side by side).
- Theme & Canvas: the button in the bottom-right corner, drawn as a painter's palette, that restyles the whole tab.
A closing You're ready to diagram card then offers Help or Start.
On a phone the tour is shorter: it skips the Theme & Canvas step. On an Event Storming board it skips Selection Modes and Palette Categories, since the board offers neither.
During the Tour
- Each step shows a step counter ("2 of 6") with progress dots, a title, a sentence or two of copy, and a Next button (with Back from the second step on), with Skip tour always available.
- The highlight ring never blocks your pointer: you're free to poke at whatever is highlighted while the step is up. The tour opens real menus, so what you see is exactly what you'll use afterwards.
- Opening a dialog partway through (Share, say) hides the tour while the dialog is up. Close it and the tour comes back on the same step. A dialog the tour opens itself to show you something stays part of the tour.
- Finishing (or skipping) closes anything the tour opened and returns you to a quiet editor, ready to work.
Replaying the Tour
The quickest way to rerun the tour is the Start Diagram Tour button. You can also start it from Settings:
Close Settings. On a Diagram tab the tour starts straight away; on a tab in another mode, nothing happens, and the Start Diagram Tour button is there when you get to a Diagram tab.
Finishing (or skipping) the tour switches Diagram Tour off again; the switch only records whether you've taken it. The other modes have tours of their own, replayed the same way from Draw and Workshop: see The Draw Tour and The Workshop Tour.
Prefer learning by doing? Your First Diagram builds a small connected flow from scratch, and Keyboard Essentials covers the shortcuts that make it fast.
Was this article helpful?
Still need help?
Try Troubleshooting, or tell us what you were trying to do.