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Whiteboard

The whiteboard is a shared visual canvas that you can open during any meeting in a meeting channel. It is powered by Excalidraw, giving every participant access to the same set of drawing tools at the same time. Whether you need to sketch a quick diagram, map out a user flow, or brainstorm ideas as a group, the whiteboard turns your meeting into an interactive workshop.

Opening a whiteboard​

Any participant can start a new whiteboard from the meeting control bar. Click the collaboration menu in the control bar and select New whiteboard. A blank canvas appears as a shared tile that all participants can see and interact with simultaneously.

If a whiteboard was created in a previous session of the same meeting channel, you can reopen it instead of starting from scratch. Select Open whiteboard from the collaboration menu and choose a past whiteboard from the list.

Drawing tools​

The whiteboard toolbar provides a full set of drawing primitives:

  • Selection -- click and drag to select, move, and resize existing elements.
  • Shapes -- draw rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, and lines.
  • Free draw -- sketch freehand strokes with adjustable thickness and color.
  • Text -- add text labels anywhere on the canvas.
  • Arrows and connectors -- link shapes with directional arrows to create flowcharts and diagrams.
  • Colors and fills -- change stroke color, background fill, and opacity for any element.
  • Layers -- send elements to front or back to control overlap.

All changes appear in real time for every participant, so there is no need to refresh or sync manually.

Collaborating in real time​

Every person in the meeting sees the same canvas. When two or more people draw at the same time, their changes merge automatically. You can see other participants' cursors moving across the whiteboard as they work, which makes it easy to follow along or coordinate spatial placement of elements.

The whiteboard tile appears in the meeting grid alongside camera and screen-sharing tiles. You can click on it to bring it into focus mode, giving the canvas more screen space.

Saving and accessing later​

Whiteboard content is saved automatically and persisted in the Drive as a whiteboard file. When the whiteboard is closed or the meeting ends, all drawings are preserved. You can access past whiteboards in two ways:

  1. Session history -- open the meeting channel's Sessions tab to find the whiteboard listed under the session in which it was created.
  2. Drive -- the whiteboard file is also available in your workspace Drive, where you can open and continue editing it outside of a meeting.

Closing the whiteboard​

To close the whiteboard during a meeting, click the Stop whiteboard button in the collaboration menu. The whiteboard tile disappears from the meeting grid, but all content remains saved. You can reopen it at any time during the same session or in a future session.