Board
Not every thought belongs on a sheet. A board is a free canvas in your project for the working-out: a sketch of the fix, a sequence diagram for the phasing, a screenshot of the clash with three arrows and a question.
Use case: sketch two options for a mechanical route, drop in crops of both sheets, and let the team argue it out in one place instead of over email.
A board with sketches and drawing crops beside a project
Making one
Open Board from the tools rail. You can create a blank board, or upload one you already have.
Boards are files, which is the thing worth knowing: they live in the project alongside your drawings and documents rather than in a separate system, so they're found, shared and kept the same way everything else is.
Working together
Several people can be in the same board at once and see each other's changes live. Drop images straight in - a crop of a sheet, a photo from site, a screenshot of a schedule.
Templates
A board you'll want again - a review agenda, a coordination matrix, a standard markup key - can be kept on a shelf and started from next time. A template starts on your own shelf, private to you. Sharing it moves it to your organization's shelf, where everyone can start from it right away and organization owners can rename or unshare it.
Ask the chat to draw it
You don't have to draw a board by hand. The chat can make one for you, and change one you already have.
"Draw up our submittal review process as a board."
"Make a board showing how these four documents relate."
"On the coordination board, add a box for the fire-alarm review between the last two steps."
A board is a file like any other, so this is the same move as asking for a spreadsheet or a Word document - the agent writes the drawing and it lands in your project as a real board you can open, edit by hand and collaborate in. There's nothing to import.
Changes are applied in place. A board's content is its live canvas, so when the agent changes an existing board you don't get a second version of the file - the board you already have updates. That's different from every other document type, where an edit creates a new version. If you have the board open while the agent changes it, reopen it to see the change - if you're actively drawing, your next edit reconciles against the agent's.
A drawing it can't build is refused, not saved. If what the agent produced isn't a valid canvas, the board is left exactly as it was rather than being replaced with something broken.
This works best for the things diagrams are good at - a process, a sequence, a set of relationships, an org or phasing chart. It's not a way to redraw a floor plan.
What the chat sees is the board as it stood when the conversation reached it. A thread picks up the live canvas the first time it opens the board, so a change you or a colleague made a moment ago is there. If you then edit by hand while the same thread is still running, say so - it's working from the copy it already has, and a new thread picks the board up again.
A board downloads as a normal .excalidraw file, built from the live canvas at the moment you ask, so it's never a stale snapshot. It opens in Excalidraw like any other.
If a board won't open or a change doesn't save, tell the chat and it will file that as a fault with the conversation attached.
Board is switched on by default for every account, new and existing. If it's not in your tools rail, it's been switched off for your organization - if that's not what you expect, talk to us.