Getting started

Sign up and you're in a 7-day trial, no card required. Create a project and you'll choose its hierarchy: how many structural levels your story has and what they're called (Act, Chapter, Scene, Beat is the default). Pick the depth carefully, it's fixed once the project exists; the level names stay editable in Settings.

Your first visit includes a short tutorial checklist. It checks itself off as you hit real milestones (editing a cell from a derived view, snapshotting an article, embedding an entity on a canvas), and you can dismiss it or bring it back from project settings. When the trial ends, your account switches to read-only: editing stops, but viewing and exporting keep working.

The grid

The spreadsheet is the project's source of truth. Rows are your story's structure; columns are what you're tracking; a cell records what that column's element does at that point in the story.

Rows

Right-click a row header to add a child or a sibling above or below; the toolbar's Add Row button does the same with a level picker. Double-click a header to rename it (rows without names show automatic labels like "Act 1" or "Chapter 2"). Drag the handle that appears on hover to reorder. The triangle beside a name collapses its children; Expand All and Collapse All live in the toolbar. Deleting a row cascades: its descendants, their cells, and any links in or out go with it, after a confirmation.

Columns and column types

Every column has a type (character, location, theme, or anything you define) which sets its color and its cell shape. A type either declares structured fields, so each cell is a set of labeled values ("Emotion: cornered. Goal: hide the letter."), or it declares none and cells are freeform rich text. The toolbar's Column Types button (and the Settings page) manages them: name, color, cell fields, and the wiki fields that appear on the column's derived page. Link types have their own toolbar button.

Add columns from the toolbar, rename with a double-click, reorder by dragging, resize by dragging the header's right edge (widths persist). Shift-click headers to select several at once. Right-click for hide and delete; a chip in the toolbar tracks anything hidden so it never gets lost.

Cells

Click a cell to edit. Structured cells show each field as an inline editor, Tab moves between them. Freeform cells open a rich-text editor (bold, italic, highlights, headings, lists, quotes). Changes save on blur or Ctrl+Enter; Esc reverts. Every cell also carries a separate notes document for commentary that doesn't belong in the content itself, marked by a note icon when present. Empty cells aren't stored at all, so a large sparse grid stays fast.

Focus and filtering

Right-click a row and choose "Show only rows with content" to collapse the grid to that row's populated descendants (content means notes or links, not bare cells); the same exists for columns. One content filter is active at a time and an indicator chip clears it. Hiding is separate and sticky: hidden rows and columns stay hidden until you unhide them from the toolbar chip. Column grouping visually clusters columns by type.

Links & attachments

Two systems connect things in a project, and they solve different problems: links relate story elements to each other, and attachments tie your working documents to the grid.

Links connect cells, rows, or columns to each other: a betrayal that pays off three chapters later, two characters bound by a secret. Each link has a type you define (name, color, line style, thickness, endpoint shapes) and three annotation spaces, one on each end and one on the connection itself, each a full rich-text note. Click a link's arc in the grid to open its detail panel; edit or delete from there.

Attachments point your workflow documents at the grid: a draft page, research document, or canvas attached to any cell, row, or column. Right-click the target and choose "Attach to…". Anything with attachments shows a paperclip; click it to open the Attachments popover, see everything attached, and jump straight there. Draft pages and research documents show the reverse view, an "Attached to" strip listing every grid entity they're attached to.

Wiki

Every column is a wiki page, derived, not copied. The page has a meta rail (portrait, type badge, appearance counts, a table of contents), the wiki fields your column type defines, then Appearances: every row where the column has content, in story order. Relations lists every story link the column takes part in.

Wiki fields are editable right on the page and write back to the column, so the wiki and the grid always agree. Click the portrait area to give a character or place an image. Because the page is a view of the column rather than a separate document, there's nothing to keep in sync by hand.

Section Notes

Every row at your chosen level becomes a chapter-notes page: the row plus everything nested inside it, rendered as one readable document with a meta rail (position, ancestor chain, elements present). Which level gets pages is a project setting; the default is the second level, so with Act / Chapter / Scene you get one page per chapter.

Cells are editable inline here, same as in the grid. If a derived view is where you happen to be when you notice the fix, you make the fix there.

Canvas

An infinite board for relationship maps, timelines, and working out ideas spatially. It has the standard drawing tools: rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, lines, freehand drawing, text, and frames, with solid or hand-drawn fill styles. Arrows bind to shapes at connection points and stay attached through moves and rotation.

You can also place your story itself on the board. Insert an entity as a lightweight card (name and type badge) or as a full embed. A row embed shows its cells; a cell embed shows its content. Embeds are live and editable in place, and they expose connection points, so an arrow can run from one specific cell to another across the board.

A minimap sits bottom-right (click to jump, drag to pan). The dot grid appears past 75% zoom, snap-to-grid is a toggle, backgrounds are configurable, and the whole board exports to PNG.

Draft editor

Prose lives in pages, organized into drag-and-drop folders. The editor is clean rich text: headings, lists, quotes, code blocks, highlights. Type / for the block menu and @ to mention any row or cell, which inserts a live reference back into your planning. Selecting text raises a small formatting toolbar.

A word-count bar under the editor tracks the page and the whole manuscript, each with an optional target and progress bar. Focus mode takes the page full-screen: narrow column, typewriter scrolling that keeps the caret centered, and a sprint readout of session time and words written. Esc exits.

Snapshots preserve a page's state before a big revision. Take one at any point (with an optional label); each shows its word-count change against the previous. Restoring an old snapshot first captures your current state automatically, so a restore can always be undone. Pages export to Word (.docx).

Beta readers

When a draft is ready for outside eyes, create a share link. It opens a clean, read-only web view of your manuscript that requires no account, with its own light and dark reading modes. Each link carries a label so you can tell readers apart, and any link can be revoked. Readers select text and leave comments anchored to the passage under their name; those comments arrive in the editor's comments inbox, where you can work through and resolve them.

Research

Three ways in: paste a public URL, upload a PDF (up to 50MB), or snapshot a web page, which extracts the article and renders it as a clean reader-mode PDF you own a copy of, safe from link rot. URL-only documents display read-only; snapshot them later to unlock annotation.

PDFs open in a full annotation viewer: color-coded highlights, sticky notes, free text, pen drawing, shapes. Everything you annotate is searchable. Documents organize into the same folder system as draft pages, and attachments tie a source to the exact scenes and cells it informs. Projects carry a 1 GiB storage allowance for uploads, snapshots, and images.

Search

Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K) opens the palette from anywhere in a project. It searches everything: rows, cell content, cell notes, column names, draft pages, research documents, PDF annotations, canvases, text on canvases, and link annotations. Results group by kind with highlighted snippets and a chip showing which view they live in; arrow keys move, Enter jumps you there.

Everything else

Split screen. Open a second panel beside the first: grid on the left, the chapter's notes or a wiki page on the right, each panel remembering its own view and selection.

Themes. Ten built-in themes, light and dark. The theme follows you across the app and persists per browser.

Export. Draft pages, wiki pages, and section-notes pages export to Word (.docx) from their view's Export menu. Canvases export to PNG.

Project settings. Rename the project and its hierarchy levels, manage column and link types, choose the Section Notes level, switch themes, and re-enable the tutorial.

Billing. The trial runs 7 days without a card. Afterward, subscribing keeps editing on; an expired account drops to read-only with export intact, and never silently deletes anything.