> Rally Help Center. Index of every page: https://rallywith.ai/help/llms.txt
> This chapter's pages: https://rallywith.ai/help/canvases/llms.txt

# Canvases

> Everything about a Canvas: the conversation, what Rally makes in it, comments, the people in it and who can see it.

In the last chapter you made your first Canvas and asked Rally for something.
This chapter is about what happens after that, which is most of the time you
will spend in Rally.

## A conversation with a thing beside it

A Canvas is one piece of work. Not a department, and not a place where
announcements go to be ignored. "The March offsite plan" is a good Canvas.
"Marketing" is a filing cabinet.

Every Canvas has two parts. On the left is a conversation, where you, the
people you invite and Rally talk about the work. On the right is the work
itself: whatever Rally made, whether that is a document, a spreadsheet, an
image, a PDF or a small website. You ask in the conversation, Rally publishes a
new version on the right, and you look at it and ask for the next one.

Most chat apps treat their bot like the office printer: you walk over to it,
you collect what it made, you carry it back to your desk. In a Canvas the agent
sits at the table with everyone else and hands the thing round. It reads the
whole conversation, answers the parts meant for it, and leaves the rest of the
chat to the humans.

That has a pleasant side effect. Everything about the piece of work collects
in one place. The questions, the decisions, the files you dropped in, every
version Rally made and the comments people left on it are all in the same
scroll, in the order they happened. When someone new joins next week, you share
the Canvas with them and they can read the whole story instead of asking you
to catch them up.

## Yours until you share it

A new Canvas is private to whoever made it. You decide when to bring other
people in: a few named teammates, a guest from outside your Organization, or
everyone in the Organization at once. People who have the Canvas open show up
at the top of the window and in the sidebar, so you can tell when somebody is
looking at the draft you just asked Rally to rewrite.

## What this chapter covers

The chapter opens with what a Canvas is and how the list of Canvases works.
Then come the parts of the conversation, starting at the bottom of the window
with the message box, then attachments, then the page people ask about most:
what is going on while Rally works, how to steer it, and what to do when a run
fails. Then reading Rally's answers, and leaving comments on what Rally made.

The second half is about people: who is in a Canvas, who can see it, sharing it
with guests from outside your Organization, the dots and badges that tell you
where you are needed, and finding things again with search and links.