Hidden corners

Every good manual used to end with a page of tips and tricks: the things the people who built the program used every day and never got round to putting on a menu. This is Rally's. Nothing here is essential, and most of it is explained properly somewhere earlier in the book. Each tip says where.

Read it in one go, or dip in. If you find you already knew all of them, you may be one of the people who built Rally, and you should be getting back to work.

Writing#

• Your drafts survive almost anything. Switch Channels, close the window or quit halfway through a sentence, and what you typed, the files you attached and the people you mentioned are waiting when you come back. Each Channel and Breakout keeps its own draft, on this Mac, for 12 hours after your last edit. See The message box.
• Type a slash for commands. In an empty message box, type / and a small Commands menu appears: /participants to mention someone, /attach to pick a file, /clear to empty the box, and /stop to stop Rally while it is working. It only works when the slash is the first thing in the box. See The message box.
• Press and hold to dictate. Click the microphone once to start dictating and again to stop. Or press and hold it, talk, and let go: it records only while you hold, like a walkie-talkie. See The message box.
• Lists from the keyboard. ⌘ ⇧ 8 for bullets, ⌘ ⇧ 7 for numbers, Tab to indent. The rest are in Keyboard shortcuts.
• Right-click to fix your spelling. See the spelling menu below.

While Rally works#

• You can steer without stopping. Send a message while Rally is mid-run and it reads it after the step it is on, then carries on with your correction in mind. Your message shows Unseen until it has. No need to stop and start again. See While Rally works.
• Answer questions with letters. When Rally asks you to choose, press A, B, C to pick and ⌘ Return to submit. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Reading answers#

• Fold long answers. Every heading in one of Rally's answers has a small arrow. Click it, or the heading, to fold that section down to a short preview. The double arrow by the answer's header folds or unfolds the lot. See Reading Rally's answers.
• Copy as markdown. Right-click any message for Copy (with formatting), Copy as markdown (plain text with the formatting marks, handy for pasting into a code editor or a wiki), and Speak to hear it read aloud. On a Mac you also get Look Up and Share. See Reading Rally's answers.
• Ask for a diagram. Ask Rally for a flowchart or a sequence diagram and it draws a real one in the Channel, in your colours, once the answer has finished writing. See Reading Rally's answers.
• Hover a time for the exact time. "7 minutes ago" is friendly, but rest your pointer on it for a moment and the exact date and time appear, in your own time zone.
• A live site's data copies as CSV. If Rally built you a site that collects answers, Copy as CSV in its stored data puts a table straight into your spreadsheet. See Live sites.

Keeping the sidebar tidy#

• Drag to pin or move. Drag a Channel onto the Pinned section to pin it, or onto a Space's pill to move it there. See Arranging your Channels.
• One Channel, several Spaces. Add to space in a Channel's right-click menu puts it in a second Space without taking it out of the first. See One Channel, several Spaces.
• Reorder with the keyboard. Select a pinned Channel, hold ⌥ and press ↑ or ↓. For a Space's pill, use ⌥ with ← or →.
• Open a Space's page from its pill. Clicking a pill only filters the list. Right-click it and choose Open space to see the Space's own page.

Making room#

• Resize the sidebar. Drag its right edge to make it wider or narrower. It does not fold away.
• Resize a Breakout. Drag the line between a Channel and the Breakout open beside it. See Breakouts.
• Resize the right-hand panel. Drag the thin line on the left edge of the panel beside the conversation (the browser or an artifact). Rally remembers the width for each Channel. Double-click the line to put it back.
• Pop an artifact out. Open in a new window in an artifact's header gives it a window of its own, ideal for a second screen. Rally reopens it where you left it next time. See Opening, docking and downloading.

Getting things in and out#

• Every Channel has an email address. Forward an email or mail a file straight into the conversation. See Email into Rally.
• Links open the app. The links you copy with Copy link in a title pill's menu, and the ones in invitation emails, are web addresses that begin rallywith.ai/app/. With Rally installed, they open it on your Mac at the right Channel, Breakout or Sidekick, switching Organization first if they need to. Behind the scenes the last hop is a rallywithai:// link, which you will rarely see. Old links that start avalon:// still work: Avalon was Rally's name when it was a prototype. See Search and links.
• Your recent Channels are in the menu bar. Click the Rally mark at the top of the screen to jump back into any of your last ten Channels from whatever app you are in. See Rally on your Mac.

The spelling and edit menu#

Rally checks your spelling as you type, in the message box and in every other text box in the main window, Settings and the Sidekicks window. A misspelled word gets the usual wavy underline.

Right-click it and Rally offers:

• Spelling suggestions at the top. Click one to swap it in.
• Learn Spelling, which adds the word to your dictionary so it stops being underlined. Use it for colleagues' names and your team's jargon.
• Undo and Redo.
• Cut, Copy and Paste.
• Select All.

Right-click anywhere in a text box, not only on a misspelling, for the editing commands on their own. Items that do not apply at that moment, such as Paste with nothing on the clipboard, are greyed out.

That is the last of the tricks. The next chapter is for the people who look after an Organization: roles, invitations and what happens when someone leaves.