Your first Canvas

Time to give Rally a job. A Canvas is one piece of work, so the first thing to decide is what that work is. It can be small. "A packing list for the team offsite" is a Canvas. So is "a one-page budget for the March launch".

Start a Canvas#

There are two ways in, and both end in the same place.

• Start from a prompt. On the Canvases home page, the Start from a prompt card has a box. Type what you want and send it. Rally makes a new Canvas and starts on your request straight away.
• New Canvas. Click New Canvas on the Canvases home page. A new, empty Canvas opens with the message box ready. Type what you want and press Return.

⇧ Shift Return gives you a new line instead of sending.

A new Canvas is yours alone. Nobody else in your Organization can see it until you share it, which you do with the Share button at the top right (see Who can see what). That makes a fresh Canvas a fine place to try out an idea before anyone else has an opinion about it.

You can attach files to your first message, just as you would to any other. Attaching files has the details.

What to ask#

Write to Rally the way you would write to a capable colleague: say what you want and what it is for. If you are stuck for a first request, try something like this:

Find out what the three most popular project management apps charge for a team of ten, and make me a one-page comparison as a document.

That sends Rally to the web, has it read and compare, and ends with a document, which shows off a good deal of what it does in one go. None of it needs a connection to your other tools. Once you have connected some, try asking about your own calendar, issues or files instead.

Watch Rally work#

While Rally works, a row with a small animated orb shows what it is doing and for how long:

• Thinking for 4s while it works out its approach.
• Using Slack for 8s, or the name of whichever tool it is using, with that tool's logo.
• Working for 1m 12s on longer stretches.

When each step finishes, the row switches to the past tense: Thought for 4s, Used Slack for 12s. Once the answer is in, all of that folds into one line, such as Worked for 2m 05s. Click the line, or its arrow, to open it and see each step Rally took.

The answer itself appears as Rally writes it, a few words at a time, with a small pulsing caret at the end. The conversation follows the newest text as it arrives. If you scroll up to read something earlier, it stops following and a round Jump to latest arrow appears above the message box to take you back down.

You do not have to watch. Go and do something else. The Canvas's row in the sidebar, and the count on the Canvases button, will tell you when there is something new. While Rally works covers following along, steering, stopping and what to do if a run fails.

The thing Rally made#

When Rally has made something, a card for it appears in the conversation, and the thing itself opens in the panel on the right of the window. A document reads as a document, a spreadsheet as a table, an image as an image, and a website as a live page you can click through. Above it is its version and who made it, such as version 1 · Rally.

Ask for a change in the conversation ("make the second section shorter", "add a column for annual pricing") and Rally publishes a new version. The panel moves to it, and the earlier ones are kept. What a Canvas is explains versions, and Things Rally makes covers every kind of thing Rally can make.

If you have an opinion about one particular sentence or cell, you do not have to describe where it is. Point at it and leave a comment, as Comments explains.

Names#

You did not give your Canvas a name, and you do not need to. Rally names it for you from your opening request: a short name of a few words, in the language you wrote in. Until it arrives, a shimmering grey bar sits where the name will go. If Rally cannot come up with one, the Canvas keeps the name Untitled Canvas until you give it one.

Renaming a Canvas yourself settles the matter: Rally never overwrites a name a person chose. Click the header pill and choose Rename…, or right-click the Canvas in the sidebar and choose Rename…, then type the new name and press Return.

Where to go from here#

That is the whole loop: say what you need, look at what Rally made, and ask for the next version.

The next chapter, Canvases, is about doing that well: writing messages, attaching files, steering Rally while it works, leaving comments, and bringing your teammates in.