10 Things to Try in Your First Week with OmniCanvas

Your First Week Checklist

OmniCanvas has a lot of features, and it can be hard to know where to start. This checklist gives you one thing to try each day (plus a few bonus items) so that by the end of your first week, you will have explored the most important capabilities.

Treat this as a guided tour. You do not need to master each feature right away — just try it once so you know it exists and can come back to it when you need it.

1. Create a Canvas Note and Draw Something

Start with the basics. Create a new note, draw a few shapes, add some arrows, and type text directly on the canvas. The drawing tools are powered by Excalidraw and feel very natural once you get the hang of them.

Try drawing a simple diagram of something familiar — your team structure, the rooms in your house, or the components of a project. The goal is to get comfortable with the shape tools, selection, and moving things around on the infinite canvas.

2. Add Sticky Notes in Multiple Colors

Place at least three sticky notes on a canvas, each in a different color. Write real content in them — not just test text. Sticky notes support rich text, so try adding some bold text and bullet points.

The six available colors (yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, and orange) are a powerful organizational tool. Start thinking about what each color could mean in your personal system.

3. Create a Folder Structure

Go to the sidebar and create at least three folders. Make at least one of them a nested subfolder. Then move some of your notes into these folders.

A good starting structure might be areas of your life (Work, Personal, Learning) or types of content (Projects, References, Daily Notes). Do not overthink it — you can always reorganize later.

4. Tag Some Notes

Add tags to at least five notes. Use a mix of broad tags like "important" and specific tags like a project name. Tags work alongside folders to give you flexible cross-cutting organization.

After tagging, try clicking on a tag to filter your notes. This is a quick way to surface everything related to a particular topic regardless of which folder it lives in.

5. Try Every View Mode

OmniCanvas offers five different views for your notes. Switch through each one and spend a minute exploring:

• Grid View shows visual card previews — great for visual browsing
• List View is compact and scannable — best for quickly finding a specific note
• Table View gives you sortable columns — useful when you need to sort by date or see metadata at a glance
• Kanban View lets you organize notes into columns — perfect for workflows and project tracking
• Graph View shows your knowledge graph — reveals connections you might not have noticed

Most users settle on one or two favorite views for daily use, but knowing all five exist means you can switch when the situation calls for it.

6. Use Cmd+K Search

Press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type a word you know appears in one of your notes. Watch how the search results update as you type, pulling from titles, tags, folder names, canvas text, and sticky note content.

Search becomes your primary navigation tool as your collection grows. Practicing it early makes it second nature.

7. Explore the Knowledge Graph

Open the Graph View and look at how your notes, folders, and tags are connected. Each node represents a note, folder, or tag, and edges show relationships between them.

Click on a node to highlight its connections. Try adding more tags and folder assignments to your notes, then return to the graph to see how it changes. The graph gets more interesting and more useful as your content grows.

8. Try Smart Shapes

Draw a rough circle, rectangle, or triangle on the canvas using the freehand tool. OmniCanvas includes Smart Shapes — an AI-powered feature that recognizes your hand-drawn shapes and converts them into clean geometric forms.

This is especially useful when you are brainstorming quickly and want to sketch rough diagrams that still look polished. Draw loosely and let Smart Shapes clean up after you.

9. Pin a Note and Use Bulk Actions

Find a note you refer to frequently and pin it. Pinned notes always appear at the top of your notes list, regardless of sort order. This is the fastest way to keep important notes within reach.

Then try bulk actions: select multiple notes at once and perform an action on all of them, like moving them to a folder, adding a tag, or sending them to the trash. Bulk actions save enormous time when you are reorganizing.

10. Export a Note to PDF

Open one of your canvas notes and use the Export to PDF option. This generates a clean PDF of your canvas that you can share with anyone, even if they do not use OmniCanvas.

This is particularly useful for sharing diagrams, meeting notes, or brainstorms with colleagues who prefer static documents.

Bonus: Enable Cloud Sync

If you want your notes available across devices, enable cloud sync in the settings. Create an account (or sign in if you already have one), and your notes will sync to the cloud automatically. This also serves as a backup for all your work.

Bonus: Toggle Dark Mode

Open settings and switch to dark mode. Many users prefer it for extended working sessions, especially in the evening. The entire interface — including the canvas — adapts to a dark color scheme that reduces eye strain.

Wrapping Up

You do not need to master all of these features immediately. The goal of this first week is awareness. Now you know what OmniCanvas can do, and when a need arises, you will remember the feature that fits. Come back to this list anytime you want to explore a feature you skipped or revisit one you want to understand better.